From Strategy to Practice: Insights on How Team Topologies Drive Organizational Success

Since the book Team Topologies was published 5 years ago, organizations around the world strategically adopted Team Topologies principles and patterns like stream-aligned teams, platform as a product, well-defined team interactions, and team cognitive load as key drivers for a fast(er) flow of value to customers and the organization. It might be fair to say that most people in our industry are at least aware of the 4 team types and the 3 team interaction modes described in the book by now (but we’ll test it during the talk anyhow!). However, those patterns are easy to misunderstand unless we’ve understood the principles behind them. Therefore, we will look at several Team Topologies industry examples – from successful digital-first 21st century companies to large corporations to, perhaps surprisingly, governmental agencies – and “reverse engineer” the underlying principles at play in each case such as: decoupling of responsibilities, “eventual consistency”, rapid feedback loops, “dependency inversion”, and minimizing complexity. Except we won’t be talking about code or software systems but rather teams and organizational systems!