Autonomy is the promise of Domain-Driven Design — yet at scale, many organizations end up trading centralized control for fragmented chaos. At the same time, Enterprise Architecture is often dismissed as too slow, too abstract, or fundamentally incompatible with empowered teams. This talk argues that both views are incomplete — and both break down at scale. Drawing from multiple large-scale transformations, we explore how the useful parts of Enterprise Architecture — when combined with DDD principles — can enable true autonomous landscapes: systems where teams move independently, boundaries remain explicit, and governance scales without re-centralization. Rather than positioning DDD and EA as opposing forces, the talk shows how a productive tension between them leads to a different architectural posture: one that shifts focus from designing systems to designing the conditions under which systems can evolve autonomously. You’ll leave with a new mental model for architecture at scale, practical structuring principles, and a clear understanding of where autonomy needs guidance — and where it absolutely doesn’t. What attendees will walk away with After this talk, attendees will: • have a clear mental model for autonomy beyond the team level • understand architecture as boundary and constraint design, not centralized control • be able to distinguish enabling governance from hidden re-centralization • gain language to reason about autonomy, coherence, and scale without dogma • recognize which architectural decisions must be shared — and which should never be This is not a new framework or methodology, but a reframing of how architecture at scale actually works. Flow of the talk 1. Why autonomy breaks down at scale How organizations drift from central control into fragmented autonomy — and why neither DDD nor traditional EA fully explains this failure. 2. The false dichotomy: DDD vs Enterprise Architecture How DDD and EA evolved to solve different problems — and why treating them as mutually exclusive creates architectural blind spots. 3. Architecting autonomous landscapes Introducing autonomy as a landscape-level concern, where architecture shifts from designing systems to shaping boundaries, constraints, and evolutionary conditions. 4. What must change in architectural practice What architects and teams need to stop doing, what they need to rethink, and how autonomy can scale without re-centralizing control.