Team Topologies

I concluded recently Team Topologies – Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, 2019, 240 pages), and I think this is an impressive book for those thinking about how to organize teams in a software company.

I’ve actually started noticing this book as a reference in several other good books about technology, products and teams that I read in the last couple of years. So, I knew this would be good. But it actually surpassed my expectations.

What is so interesting here is that this book builds on top of solid traditions of Agile, Lean, DevOps, etc., and focuses on the problem of organizing teams. To start with, teams are the unit we all should have adopted for getting complex work done. That’s because of the sheer brain bandwidth required to deal with hard problems or complex systems.

Then, one of the ideas I like the most here is that stream-aligned teams are key to keeping the flow from the tech side to the final users. Stream-aligned just means aligned with value streams in the company, which ties it back perfectly with the overall business goal in the organization. The book brings lots of ideas about how to organize such teams.

In addition, complex sub-system teams, platform teams and enabling teams are the remaining team types that all other teams can be mapped to. With only 4 team types, and some pattern of expectation on how these teams will work and interact with others, the whole structure can be much easier to understand and implement.

If those ideas sound interesting, this book is definitely a great reading for you too.