Cohort 1A · Tier 1
Enterprise AI
Architecture
How to make architectural decisions that survive production, hold up under a compliance audit, and carry the economic argument that gets them built.
The Problem
Technical knowledge is not architectural judgement.
Most technical programmes train architects in what systems can do. They teach the stack, the patterns, the tooling. They do not teach what the job actually demands: the ability to make a consequential architectural decision — under economic constraint, under organisational pressure, with regulatory obligations in the room — and then get that decision built.
The failure mode is specific. A technically capable architect presents a sound design at the architecture review board and leaves without approval, because they argued the technology and not the economics. They specify a correct solution, then watch it stall in sprint planning because they could not frame the constraint it was removing. They build a system that is technically defensible and organisationally fragile, because no one taught them that production-readiness has three dimensions — technical, organisational, and compliance — and that failing on any one of them is the same as failing on all three.
This is not a knowledge gap. It is a capability gap. The practitioner who cannot make the economic argument for a design decision loses rooms that the practitioner who can make it wins. The practitioner who cannot navigate an ARB, read the organisational terrain, or structure a handoff is not a junior architect. They are an architect operating without the instruments the role actually requires.
Cohort 1A is built for that gap. It does not add to what architects know. It changes what they can do with what they know.
Who This Is For
Three situations. One programme.
You are technically credible. Your designs are sound. But somewhere between the whiteboard and the approval — at the ARB, in sprint planning, at the compliance review — decisions are getting sent back, deferred, or diluted. You know the problem is not the architecture. You are beginning to suspect the problem is how you are presenting it, defending it, and navigating the rooms where it needs to land.
You are responsible for design standards that other practitioners have to follow and compliance teams have to audit. The gap you are trying to close is not technical — it is the gap between an architecture that looks correct on paper and one that actually governs production. You need a framework that defines production-readiness precisely enough to hold up under scrutiny, and the economic language to justify the standards you are trying to establish.
You have built things that have reached production and stayed there. You understand the system from the inside. What you have not yet had to do is walk into a room with a business stakeholder, a compliance officer, and a budget holder, and produce a decision that satisfies all three. The technical credibility is there. What is missing is the decision-making framework — the economic discipline, the behavioural layer, and the artefact discipline — that turns a technically correct view into an architecturally defensible one.
The Programme
Three weekends.
One artefact, built end to end.
The first weekend establishes the standard everything else is measured against. Participants define what production-ready means — not in the abstract, but for the specific context, the specific constraints, and the specific regulatory environment they are working in. This is where the economic lens is introduced: the argument that architectural decisions are economic decisions wearing a technical coat, and that the practitioner who cannot make the economic case is fighting with one instrument missing. The human layer is introduced here as well — the organisational terrain, the approval dynamics, the decision-making actors who are not in the room but whose positions determine whether a correct design gets implemented.
The second weekend is where the architecture is built. The four-layer contract, the ADR methodology, the system boundaries for agentic AI, the governance of human-in-the-loop as a structural constraint rather than an afterthought. RAG versus fine-tuning is not a technology discussion here — it is a constraint satisfaction problem with an economic answer. Compliance is designed in structurally. Memory and context are costed. Every chapter produces an artefact that joins the growing spine project document. By the end of the weekend, participants have a design that is defensible technically, economically, and under regulatory scrutiny.
The third weekend is where the work is tested. Agile value flow: how to frame architectural decisions in sprint planning language so they unlock capacity rather than consume it. The failure modes taxonomy: naming the specific failure modes of the specific system, in the specific context, before they occur. The restraint layer: making the case that the right answer is not a technical solution at all. The handoff discipline: what clean transfer of ownership actually requires. The capstone is the defence of the complete artefact before a simulated review panel, with the facilitator in the role of the ARB chair. Participants leave with a portfolio piece, not a certificate.
18 chapters · 6 per weekend
- Weekend 1 Foundation and Judgment
- 01 What Production Ready Actually Means
- 02 Reading The Terrain: The Three Contexts
- 03 The Data Behind The Decision
- 04 Economic Decisions First
- 05 The Human Transactions
- 06 The Turtles: Who They Are and What They Need
- Weekend 2 Design and Decision
- 07 The Four Layer Contract
- 08 ADRs: Decisions That Survive Scrutiny
- 09 Agentic System Design: Boundaries and Autonomy
- 10 HITL: Oversight as a Structural Constraint
- 11 RAG, Fine-Tuning, and the Constraint Decision
- 12 Compliance by Design
- 13 Memory, Context, and Cost
- Weekend 3 Defence and Handoff
- 14 Agile Value Flow
- 15 The Failure Modes Taxonomy
- 16 The Unbuilt Thing
- 17 The Handoff: Giving and Receiving
- 18 The Capstone: Design, Defend, and Hand Off
What You Leave With
Not a certificate.
An artefact.
A portfolio piece you can place in front of an architecture review board, a compliance team, or a hiring manager on the day you leave.
Every chapter in Cohort 1A produces a tangible output. Those outputs are not exercises — they are components of a single, evolving architecture artefact built against a real-world spine project. By the capstone session, participants have a complete document: a coherent, defensible, production-ready architecture package that represents eighteen chapters of applied work, not eighteen chapters of watched content.
The artefact is the point. The capstone is the defence of that artefact before a simulated review panel, with the facilitator playing the ARB chair and sign-off authority. What participants leave with is something they can use immediately — not eventually.
- Architecture Decision Record log Every significant decision, with the constraint map and economic justification that defends it
- Compliance mapping Regulatory obligations satisfied structurally, not documentarily
- Economic justification The cost structure and build-versus-buy reasoning, in language that holds up in a budget review
- Failure modes register Named failure modes specific to the system context, with detection instrumentation defined
- Handoff checklist The conditions that must be satisfied before ownership transfers — and the evidence that they have been
- Capstone defence transcript A record of the design, the challenge, and the response — the closest thing to an actual ARB that a training environment can produce
The Spine Project
One problem. Eighteen chapters. One artefact.
Every Cohort 1A participant works on the same pre-designed spine project throughout all three weekends. The facilitator presents the problem — and plays the role of the customer, the budget holder, and the sign-off authority throughout. This is not a teaching technique. It is a structural choice that produces a different quality of output.
When participants work on personal projects, they bring their own context, their own assumptions, and their own escape routes. When every participant is working on the same problem, with the same facilitator in the room acting as the decision-maker they need to convince, the work is genuinely live. The challenge is real. The disagreements between participants are real. The pressure to produce an artefact that can actually survive a review is real.
By the time the capstone arrives, participants have spent eighteen chapters building a design against a problem they did not author, for a decision-maker who is not going to make it easy for them. That is as close to production conditions as a training environment can get — and it is the condition that produces the capability shift that Cohort 1A is built to deliver.
What is discovered is owned. What is told is forgotten. The spine project exists to ensure that every insight in this programme is discovered under conditions that make it stick.
Pricing and Enrolment
Founder pricing.
Limited places.
Available for the first cohort only. Self-funded or employer-sponsored. No difference in price at this tier.
Standard rate for individual participants funding their own enrolment after the founder cohort closes.
Standard rate for participants whose enrolment is organized by an employer or practice team. Includes a post-cohort briefing note for the sponsoring organisation.
Maximum 12 participants per cohort. Places are confirmed by email following an introductory conversation. DataDomine reserves the right to decline enrolment where the programme is not the right fit for the participant's current context.