Unlock Your Team's Potential: Leverage Team Topologies to Streamline Business and Technology Workflows

Steve Berczuk: Collaboration is good for innovation but increases cognitive load. And not all work is innovative. Managing this tradeoff between collaboration and focus is central to the theme of Team Topologies. Team Topologies presents some core patterns of team organization and communication that can help your team deliver effectively while minimizing (excess) communication overhead and maximizing necessary interactions. The authors emphasize that structuring your team isn’t simply something that you do once; you need to be alert to signs that your team (and architecture) need to be realigned.

At first glance, this seems to be about “Conway’s Law,” and Conway’s observation that “organizations which design systems... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” is a central and recurring theme in the book. Team Topologies goes a bit deeper and presents some principles for defining and organizing your teams so that the teams and their communication structures support an architecture that makes sense (rather than the reverse).

The book builds on various work around teams, teamwork, communication, and...

United States on Mar 08, 2024

launchy: Un livre plein d'exemples et d'analyses très pertinentes qui donne des conseils pour diagnostiquer et faire évoluer une organisation rapidement et durablement

France on Dec 08, 2023

Kunal Gupta: This book is explaining things in an actionable way. My orgs CTO is applying the concepts taught in this book in the company at the moment. It was great to see work by other leaders referenced at the relevant points throughout the book and excerpts of those reproduced as well, which was a great refresher for me for those materials.

United Kingdom on Dec 06, 2023

Nilendu MisraNilendu Misra: You ship your org chart. Therefore, to fix shipping, fix your org first. This is often called the "Inverse Conway maneuver". Or, more verbosely, something like - "developing software is a socio-technical complex problem. We often naively focus on the technical part and only reactively look into the org part much later in the process. This should be turned around. Start with building the right org. In fact, the right org should be the very FIRST deliverable of a system architecture." All good, except there is no existing framework, empirical literature or large-scale study of "technical org design". That results in biased, reactive and unnecessarily nested, if not random, engineering orgs. To try to produce what we ought to, we lean into what we had in the past. That primarily results in huge communication overhead.

This book methodically shows how to think and act on org design. It lays out four primary org types - value stream- (say, feature teams), enabling-, 'Complicated Subsystem- (say, databases or network), and Platform teams. It also shares three interaction modes these teams could work with each other - Collaboration, X-as-a-service and Facilitating. The 4x3...

United States on Oct 31, 2023

Rafael Montilha: Livro referência no setor de tecnologia para pensar a organização de equipes com base em estratégias de plataforma. Ajuda a pensarmos porque continuamos desenvolvendo sistemas baseado em silos e como podemos quebrar esse paradigma atraés de uma abordagem inovadora.

Brazil on Nov 30, 2022

Miguel Mendez: I liked how the information was simple to digest and the many examples helped to understand how to put the concepts into practice. I like the whole idea of using communication patterns first instead of architecture. I'll be taking that away for sure

Canada on Nov 13, 2022

Carlo: This book marks somehow a cornerstone in the subject of team management for it projects.
Really good theory. New concepts and ideas are expressed clearly. Lot of examples, notes and explanations.
Really suggested for it managers and enterprise architects.

Italy on May 03, 2022

Aimee D. Bechtle: Finally a resource that looks past the agile teams and supporting business facing only products by introducing Enabling and Platform teams. I read this book twice. The first time I read it I was working at another company and many of the teams were stream-aligned and there were platform teams, so the book was more validation rather than giving me new knowledge. I am now reading it through the lens of my new company and how they are organized and I am riveted. The business unit I am in is Conway’s law amplified and the book is giving me the words to be able to communicate the problems and why. I’m looking at the communications and dependency overhead and inside I am screaming “look at the software architecture!” And “break up the DB and Ops silo!” I myself am forming a platform X-as-a-Service team for Cloud-Native apps that includes CICD, containers, microservices architecture, data analytics services, observability services and using the book to help me design the teams. It is a well written and actionable book.

United States on Sep 06, 2020