How do you structure your time in an LLD interview?

I treat the forty-five minutes as a budget and keep a rough clock in my head. I spend the first five minutes clarifying — scope, constraints, what's explicitly in and out. The next five identifying the core entities and their relationships using noun-verb analysis. Then about ten minutes sketching the class diagram, with boxes, the key fields and methods, and the relationship arrows. The biggest chunk, around fifteen minutes, goes to writing key Java skeletons — turning the diagram boxes into actual classes with real method signatures. And I save the last ten minutes for discussing design patterns, trade-offs, extensibility, and answering follow-ups.

The single most common way people mismanage this is overspending on the diagram. It's tempting to make it perfect, but if you burn twenty minutes drawing boxes you've got nothing left to show you can actually translate that into code, and that's exactly what interviewers want to see. So I cap the diagram deliberately and move to skeletons. Under time pressure, signatures and relationships matter more than complete method bodies — I'll stub a method with a comment rather than implement every line.

The other thing I do throughout is narrate. I think out loud so the interviewer can follow my reasoning, because in a design interview the process is the product. And I never skip clarification to save time, because designing the wrong thing faster doesn't help anyone.