Here's how you can achieve project goals in Systems Design through setting realistic deadlines.

Requirement Analysis: Clearly define project goals and deliverables to understand the scope. Break Down Tasks: Divide the project into manageable tasks and milestones. Resource Assessment: Evaluate available resources, including team skills and tools. Historical Data: Use data from similar past projects to estimate realistic timelines. Buffer Time: Include buffer time for unexpected delays and challenges. Prioritize Tasks: Focus on high-priority tasks that align with project goals. Stakeholder Input: Involve stakeholders in setting deadlines to ensure feasibility. Regular Reviews: Conduct regular progress reviews and adjust timelines as needed. Transparent Communication: Keep all stakeholders informed about deadlines and progress.

It is important when you sit with the business for requirement discussion, to discuss things such as user flow, exceptions, edge cases etc. Also have candid discussions regarding non-functional attributes such as performance, scalability, maintainability etc. Ask, questions to the business which will help you determine answers to questions such as user base, peak volume, size of data, network latency etc. This will help you define a concrete scope before you get to designing the solution/application.

It is also critical to understand your team's capabilities and take that into account when you are designing a solution for the business requirement. For example, you may have a team full of skilled angular developers, but ReactJS is something more suitable to your project needs. Consider aspects such as project timeline, learning curve, can a trade off be made where your team can still implement the solution in angular but business is okay with some of the requirements being altered. But at the same time, be open to introduce newer technologies to help your team stay current to the latest trends.

This is quiet useful for large projects. Try to break down the project into milestones with each milestone having a deliverable at the end of it. Teams implementing Agile generally have sprints as their milestones with each sprint delivering at least one Production ready feature or functionality. Try to break the stories in a way where dependent stories are delivered appropriately. This will help your team be more efficient with their deliveries.

Have a review meeting preferably at the end of each milestone. This meeting should include all the necessary stake holders and decision makers from different teams such as business, development, infrastructure, security etc. Meetings such as these will help you track your team's progress across deliverables and at the same time help business realign priorities if needed. It also helps to have a demo at the end of each milestone, which will make it easier for you to adapt to changing business needs without affecting the timeline too much.