Introduction

Every team builds models.

• 📝 Some are scribbled on whiteboards.
• 📊 Some are drawn as architecture diagrams.
• 🧠 Some live only in the heads of a few key people.

We build models because reality is too complex to hold all at once. A model helps us simplify, communicate, and navigate.

But not all models are equal:

• ⚙️ Too close to the code.
• 📦 Too tied to today’s implementation.
• 🗺️ Too detailed to actually use as a guide.

And when models fail, misalignment creeps in:

• 🔀 People use the same words to mean different things.
• 💬 Meetings feel clear but lead to confusion later.
• 📉 Business and technology drift apart.

✨ DDD is about a different way to model:

• Focusing on the language of the domain.
• Making the language of the business explicit.
• Creating maps that omit noise and highlight what matters.
• Helping everyone — technical or not — speak the same words.

This is the heart of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and the reason the Open Domain Specification (ODS) exists.