Patrick Berry
Ferguson, Principal Product Owner
Chico, California, United States
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Patrick is a recovering developer and focuses on helping platform engineering teams with all of their what and why problems. He enjoys value-based roadmaps and frequent deployments of small change sets. He also likes taking his dogs for hikes in the hills.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Using AI with Intent
In our latest developer survey, code review friction jumped from the middle of the pack to near the top of team concerns. Too many pull requests were conversations that should have happened in design review or asking for corrections for things people didn’t know were wrong. Design intent and standards were clear to some, invisible to others.
Meanwhile…the pressure to adopt AI was already everywhere. But “use AI” isn’t a strategy. It’s a solution looking for a problem. We had a problem and we wanted to find out if this was a solution with value.
We grounded our AI tooling in existing design documentation: DDD principles, architectural patterns for our modular monolith, and concrete code examples. This created a feedback loop. Custom instructions generated enforceable standards. PR analysis surfaced friction. Friction revealed documentation gaps. Better documentation meant better instructions. Eventually, more issues were caught before pull requests.
The result wasn’t replacing human judgment. It was being able to quickly encode the judgment we’d already made and amplifying it across the organization.
Topics covered:
* How to connect AI tooling to existing design intent rather than generating code in a vacuum
* A practical feedback loop for improving documentation, standards, and AI instructions together
* Where AI helps maintain bounded contexts
The job isn’t writing code. It’s solving problems that deliver outcomes. AI should serve that purpose, not the other way around.
From Strategy to Flow: A Journey Using DDD to Achieve Flow
Our teams were struggling with cognitive load and delivery friction in our Big Ball of Mud. We found our path forward through strategic thinking and domain-driven design. This talk shares our story of using good strategy principles—honest diagnosis, clear guiding policies, and coherent actions—to give purpose and direction to our domain-driven design efforts. We'll walk through our initial struggles, key turning points, and hard-learned lessons about how strategic thinking helped us move from "we have to refactor everything" to actually improving team flow. You'll hear about what worked, what didn't, and how we’re measuring progress along the way. Through our ongoing experience, you'll see one possible path to using strategic thinking and domain-driven design to enhance team flow in complex socio-technical environments.
Key moments we'll explore:
- How we diagnosed our real challenges (not just the symptoms)
- When we realized our architectural decisions needed strategic grounding
- The specific ways we used DDD patterns to support our guiding policies
- Unexpected benefits and challenges in team flow
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