2 Days: Thinking Together with Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

Domain-Driven Design is known for being powerful — and hard to learn. Engineers value the DDD vocabulary, yet often struggle to turn it into a living language shared with product and business partners. Business and product people may experience DDD as a developer buzzword. Agile practitioners often wonder where DDD fits once the sprint starts.

As Kent Beck puts it, software design is an exercise in human relationships. This masterclass reframes DDD around the essential skills for thinking, learning, and deciding together in the face of complexity. Rather than covering DDD patterns for their own sake, we focus on the subset of catalytic patterns and heuristics that amplify impact — the strategic foundations that make other patterns more meaningful and effective.

You’ll work with DDD through its Thinking Together practices, using Ubiquitous Language, Core Domain Strategy, Bounded Contexts, Context Mapping and Collaborative Modeling (CoMo) to decouple software and reconnect humans.

Over two days, you’ll learn how to use Domain-Driven Design to improve alignment, decision clarity, and learning speed — without turning it into a heavyweight discipline.

Who This Masterclass Is For

For people who want to make a bigger impact on how strategic software gets designed, built, and understood:

• Software engineers and architects
• Product managers, product owners, and business analysts
• Domain experts and technical leaders
• Agile coaches and change agents
• UX Professionals

Especially useful if you often experience misalignment, misunderstandings, or unclear boundaries.

What You’ll Learn

After the masterclass, you will be able to:

• See DDD as a sociotechnical design practice, intentionally engaging with language and models
• Practice Ubiquitous Language to surface assumptions and build shared understanding
• Apply collaborative modeling to explore user, domain, and systemic complexity
• Identify Bounded Contexts as practical containers for complexity and ownership
• Connect systems and teams with Context Mapping to make dependencies and trade-offs visible
• Apply DDD in your own context to increase impact with your craft and collaborate more effectively

Curriculum Overview

Day 1 — Thinking Together with DDD

• DDD philosophy, principles, and practices
• Languaging: using domain abstractions to reach and encode shared understanding
• Modeling: Bounded Contexts as complexity and understandability boundaries
• Connecting: participatory design and collaborative modeling as human-centered practices

Hands-on:

• Big Picture EventStorming
• Language extraction and domain modeling (Ubiquitous Language)
• Identifying Bounded Context candidates using heuristics

Day 2 — Designing for Impact with DDD

• Strategic languaging: core domain language and domain vs. bounded contexts
• Event-first modeling of behavior and integration complexity
• Connecting contexts with Context Mapping
• Modeling as a learning practice — the domain expert made plural
• DDD as a companion to Agile ways of working

Hands-on:

• Core Domain strategy discovery
• Design-level EventStorming
• Context Mapping in action
• Integration exercise: making DDD work in your context

Prerequisites

Curiosity about complexity and experience working with software in teams.