Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

By: Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Narrated by: Edward Bauer

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?

Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.

In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.

Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (P)2019 IT Revolution Press

Inspired

My takeaway was the need for team apis and the different collaboration modes needed.

Chapter numbering does not match book

Chapter numbering does not match the actual book chapters. It makes it a challenge to find out where you are in the book if you are reading the actual book simultanously

Very good view of product reflecting org/comms structure

While the audio book included a PDF download from Audible, the book is quite ‘dense’ in content, requiring a lot of concentration. Fro me, this would be better as a physical book than audio.
Good team structure and communication strategies, as well as a good description of Conway’s Law.

Must read for Agile Coaches and Product Leaders

Don't miss out on this incredible integration of key concepts of Agile, Lean Product Flow, and DevOps. If you're scaled Agile isn't working- read this book and find out how to make it work with scientific principles and research-based approaches proven in the real world.

Must read

Must read for devops practitioners and leads.
Gives a fair idea to how to approach a monolith and find ways to decompose it.

Novel ideas for working in large orgs

There are great, novel ideas in this book for working more effectively in large orgs with many two-pizza teams that have high separation of duties among them. It gives practical advice for how these teams should interact founded on two fundamental theories: Conway's Law and Dunbar's number. I'd be careful about taking the actual Dunbar numbers put forward too literally but the basic premise about trust levels diminishing as more people are involved is solid.

The one thing that I would beg Audible to do is redo this with a different narrator. The pretentious performance is grating and borderline unlistenable. It's like he's wearing a tuxedo and bobbing his head from side-to-side the entire time. I'm sorry Edward but you need to dial it back and be more genuine.

How to build functional teams.

This book covers multiple methodologies for team organization. It should be required reading for any organization working to improve workflow and providing value to the business

Technical yet persuasive

I usually listen at a fast speed, but this one I listened to at .85x. I don't blame the reader, more the high level of technical information at play. I have a problem with restricting communication, but there are some case studies that support this practice at times.

Incredibly Salient Advice

If you're suffering from Conway's Law, you really need to digest what the authors lay down in this book. Please remember that even though it's simple, it will probably not be easy.

If you are coaching software teams this is a must have

I have more than 5 years of experience in working w Software teams and helping them build team first processes, but I learned so much from this book that is missing in my own implementations.

This is one of few books that, I have ordered both audio and kindle version, as it will be a guiding study material rather than a book.

Highly recommend to Agile coaches, TPMs , Product Managers, and of course Engineers and Eng leaders