Book Notes: Team Topologies

1.0 Four Different Types of Teams

  1. Stream aligned teams: organised around value streams, delivering value to a customer. As Jeff Bezos says, this kind of team should have “line of sight to a customer”

These other teams make the stream aligned teams go faster

  1. Enabling team: these help manage scarcity. Eg there aren’t a lot of security engineers, user researchers, super good infrastructure okes going around. Enabling teams then act as consultants to the other teams
  2. Complicated subsystem team - think PhD math people working on a complex bit of the product
  3. Platform Team - platform & platform 2.0 from ING bank pretty interesting

Team first thinking

  • The team is the means of delivery
  • design team for cognitive load. Team has a maximum size, of about 8 people. This will also naturally limit the size of the software that the team has to be responsible for, while still understanding their domain pretty well
  • Choosing boundaries for team ownership is a skill. Definitely not something that should be done by a manager with no technical awareness, as it impacts the architecture of your software - Conway’s law
  • On Conway’s Law: The way your teams are structured, dictates how your software architecture turns out.
    • Reverse Conway to mitigate worst effects

Team interactions

  • 2 teams working together
  • X-as-a-service: 1 provides, 1 consumes. works best when the provider really takes into consideration the developer experience.
  • Facilitating: 1 team helps another

Thinnest Viable Platform

  • What’s the thinnest platform that could work?
  • If your org decides “we use AWS”, your thinnest viable platform can be something as small as a wiki page saying “these are the 5 AWS services that we use for ABCD”

Beyond the spotify model

Its limitations

  • From the original blog post about Spotify Model “this article is only a snapshot of our current way of working - a journey in progress, not a journey completed. By the time you read this, things have already changed” - Kniberg & Ivarsson
  • no heuristics for Conway’s law
  • no patterns for team interactions
  • no triggers for change and evolution

its strengths

  • Encourages flow of change, as each team has all the capabilities it needs to deliver value
  • establishes and clarifies team responsibilities. no ambiguity in who owns what
  • promotes good kind of collaboration between teams
  • plans and budgets for cross-team enablers - think guilds; bringing people together from all over the organisation

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