Functional requirements (FR)

• Create, view, change, and cancel bookings or allocations for the resources described in the prompt.
• Search availability by the relevant time, location, capacity, or participant constraints.
• Notify affected users when a booking, assignment, or availability state changes.
• Provide history and current status for users, operators, and resource owners.

Non-functional requirements (NFR)

• Prevent double booking and define how conflicting requests are serialized or rejected.
• Keep availability queries responsive during peak demand and define freshness expectations.
• Handle retries, time-zone boundaries, cancellation races, and partial notification failures safely.
• Protect personal and location data and make allocation decisions observable and auditable.

Principal-level discussion

• Define the scale, success measures, and operational ownership before committing to an architecture.
• Compare at least two viable approaches and explain the trade-offs, migration path, and failure behavior.
• Identify the riskiest assumptions and how you would validate them with data or a staged rollout.