I've recently become a big believer in Python notebooks to plan out these sorts of designs. It allows you to quickly mock up and iterate on a few prototypes to build your expertise, and then actually document a proposed design alongside working code that demonstrates the functionality.

The bonus is, being a Python notebook, you usually avoid the common pitfall of shipping crappy prototype code to production; you are forced to rewrite it because putting a Python notebook into prod would make any software engineer shudder.