A 2-day hands-on intensive for technical leaders and practitioners who need aligned systems, not just aligned opinions.
“I don’t want an exclusive design process, but when you open it up it takes 10 times longer. It’s impossible to get buy-in for that.”
Sound familiar? You know collaboration matters, but every time you open up the design process, it grinds to a halt. And so you default to solo work, or back-room decisions, and the knowledge silos grow.
Right now, organisations are navigating higher uncertainty than ever: unclear goals, shifting team structures, and evolving roles for engineers and technical leaders. In this landscape, the ability to share deep context and design together – efficiently – is a competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have.
Collaborative Software Modelling and Design with Bytesize Sessions is a two-day workshop that gives you that ability. You’ll learn with Andrea Magnorsky how to use Bytesize Architecture Sessions in combination with structural and strategic DDD tools to model effectively (collaboratively and alone) and, crucially, to know when to do which.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
- Apply Bytesize Architecture Sessions to structure collaborative modelling within your team and across teams
- Use C4 for clear, structured architectural communication
- Work through most steps of the DDD Starter Modelling Process in practice
- Make informed decisions about when to work collaboratively and when solo work delivers better results.
The Trainer
Andrea Magnorsky is the creator of Bytesize Architecture Sessions.
She is based in New Zealand and is well-known in the programming community for her contributions to functional programming and software architecture.
Target Audience
This workshop is designed for people who work across team boundaries in technical or cross-functional roles:
- Staff Engineers & Architects coordinating design decisions across multiple teams
- Technical Project Managers (TPMs) managing complexity and alignment at system level
- Product Managers bridging business intent and technical reality
- Individual contributors who work across teams and need to share context effectively.
If your daily challenge is making sure the right people have the right information to design systems that are self-consistent, this workshop is built for you.
Topics
- Bytesize Architecture Sessions: the method, the format, and the facilitation mindset
- Structural modelling with the C4 model
- Strategic DDD: EventStorming and Context Maps
- The DDD Starter Modelling Process as an integrating framework
- Combining structural and strategic modelling in practice
- Collaborative vs. solo work: a decision-making framework.
Agenda
The workshop covers most steps of the DDD Starter Modelling Process. Code-level design is intentionally out of scope.
Day 1
Foundations of Collaborative Modelling
- Introduction to Bytesize Architecture Sessions — the format, the purpose, the facilitation principles.
- Structural modelling with C4.
- First hands-on sessions alternating between individual and group work.
- Introduction to the DDD Starter Modelling Process as the workshop’s navigating framework.
Day 2
Strategic Design in Practice
- Strategic DDD tools in a Bytesize format: EventStorming and Context Maps.
- Integrating structural and strategic modelling.
- Building a personal decision framework for when to collaborate and when to work alone.
- Reflection, debrief, and action planning for what to bring back to your organisation.
How it works
Each session follows the Bytesize Architecture Sessions format: time-boxed, structured, and focused on generating real insight, fast. You’ll experience directly what collaboration enables that solo work doesn’t, and vice versa. That lived experience is what makes the decision framework you’ll develop stick.
