I've been practicing system design but most sessions are approx 45 minutes. I've been mocking myself and it takes at least 20 minutes to go back and forth to ask basic clarifying questions around scale, existing infra, latency requirements. Even with narrowing it down to 8 load bearing questions its around 20 minutes
Assuming the first 5 - 7 minutes will be eaten up by intros and receiving the brief. That leaves little time to literally draw all key components including alerting, data quality, orchestration, governance layer etc i think at best I can get the main sources, transformation and presentation layers.
There's not much time to go into detail really beyond "why did you choose X tool and not Y"
The general advice is to do all the clarifying and only then start drawing. But it feels like I should be drawing the diagram as I ask questions who knows?
I'm curious what to your experiences have been? it all seems very tight on time to get a fair assessment of your depth