From North Star to Working App: Designing a Vacation-Sharing App End-to-End

From North Star to Working App: Designing a Vacation-Sharing App End-to-End
We all come home from a trip wanting to share the experience — and somehow every app that promises to help turns it into homework. So let's design a better one. Together. In one room. In one evening.
This is a fully hands-on session. We're starting from a blank page and a single question — what value are we actually trying to create? — and we won't stop at sticky notes. We'll push the whole way from a North Star Metric to a working mobile app you can open on a phone before you leave.
The journey we'll take together:

• Why before what — agree on a North Star Metric that captures the value a vacation-sharing app should create, and pressure-test it.
• Impact Mapping — connect that metric to the actors we need to reach and the behaviors we want to change.
• Explore the domain — use Domain Storytelling and Visual Glossary to discover how "sharing a vacation" actually works, mess and all.
• Strategic design — carve out bounded contexts and find the core domain worth investing in (Core Domain Chart).
• Model the core — aggregates, commands, and events for the part that actually matters.
• From model to app — sketch the contracts and turn the model into a running mobile prototype.
• Reflect — what does going end-to-end in a single evening teach us about the distance between a metric and a shipped feature?

Who should come: anyone curious about collaborative modeling and DDD — product people, designers, developers, architects, and the merely nosy. No deep DDD background required; we'll introduce each technique as we reach it. Bring a laptop, strong opinions, and at least one good travel story.

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