"Data Oriented Design" is more than just for performant code.

You can and perhaps should also use it to reason about and design software in general. All software is just the transformation of data structures. Even when generating side-effects is the goal, those side-effects consume data structures.

I generally always start a project by sketching out data structures all the way from the input to the output. May get much harder to do when the input and output become series of different size and temporal order and with other complexities in what the software is supposed to be doing.