Process-First Design derives a backend’s structure from what the business does, not from a data model. The unit of design is the process, not the entity: each process is knowledge gathering — inputs collected, decisions made, an answer produced — and that shape, not an entity-relationship diagram, is what the design follows.
The book carries one ticketing platform from a single use case to a multi-tenant system with one vocabulary, derives architecture from explicit inputs instead of picking it from a catalog, and finishes by applying the method in reverse to a system it never designed — proving the derivation also works as an audit, on software someone else built.
The condensed edition — the whole argument in about 25 minutes — is free. The full book is on Leanpub.
The free course edition walks the whole method lesson by lesson, each paired with an exercise you run on a system you own.