High-speed serial link design has become an industry spotlight due to the wide use of data-driven applications. To avoid possible over-estimated transceivers designs, the IEEE 802.3bj standard introduced the channel operating margin (COM) as a system-level metric approach. Instead of evaluating traditional individual metrics, COM validates a serial link performance based on the global system operation. Although COM metric advantages are already highlighted in the literature, reported works only utilize this metric to characterize existing channels. This work explores the COM metric as a potential transceiver design methodology, reviewing COM performance with different equalizer architectures.