Embedded Team Engagements
A senior practitioner working alongside your team on real deliverables
Discuss an Engagement A senior practitioner working alongside your team on real deliverables
Discuss an EngagementMost consultants advise from the outside. In an embedded engagement, Paul joins your team part-time and works on real code, real features, and real deadlines. The knowledge transfer happens through doing the work together, not through slide decks or recommendations documents.
Typical engagements run 3-6 months at 20-30 hours per week. Long enough to understand your domain deeply, build trust with the team, and leave lasting improvements in how you design and build software.
Paul takes on one embedded engagement at a time, so your team gets his full attention. In-person for teams in the Denver metro area, remote everywhere else.
Working side-by-side with your developers on production code. Tackling the hardest problems together, sharing techniques and design thinking in real time.
Reviewing architecture decisions, domain models, and bounded context boundaries as part of the team's regular workflow. Catching design issues early, when they're cheap to fix.
Building your team's capabilities in DDD, EventStorming, and software design. The goal is for the team to be self-sufficient after the engagement ends.
Running focused EventStorming sessions when the team encounters a new subdomain or needs to rethink an existing model. Lightweight, just-in-time exploration.
Paul has done this work across industries, team sizes, and technology stacks. Here are two examples.
Embedded with a product engineering team at a Fortune 500 manufacturer, working on a large Ruby on Rails IoT platform. Led deep refactoring of the domain model across multiple bounded contexts, improving performance and aligning the code with the business language.
The design insights from this engagement became the basis for two conference talks at Explore DDD and DDD Europe.
Joined a financial services team for nearly a year, working on production systems handling sensitive financial data. Paired with developers daily, ran EventStorming sessions to map complex business processes, and helped the team adopt DDD practices that outlasted the engagement.
This is what embedded means: long enough to understand the domain deeply, build real trust, and leave the team stronger than you found them.
Learning Domain-Driven Design from books only goes so far. An experienced practitioner working alongside you accelerates adoption and helps avoid common pitfalls.
When the business logic is genuinely hard, an extra senior perspective on modeling and design decisions makes a real difference in the quality of the solution.
Strangler fig patterns, bounded context extraction, and incremental migration are easier with someone who has done it before working in the codebase with you.
When AI generates most code, the work that matters is understanding what to build and why. Design skills become more valuable, not less.
We talk about your team's situation, the domain you're working in, and what you're trying to accomplish. No pitch, just a real conversation about fit.
We define the weekly commitment, focus areas, and how Paul integrates with the team's existing workflow. Every engagement is different.
Paul joins the team and starts contributing from day one. No long ramp-up period, no observation phase. Real work, right away.
Every engagement is tailored to the team's situation, domain, and goals. Let's talk about whether this model is a good fit for your team.
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