Figures & Tables
Case Studies & Industry Examples
Foreword by Ruth Malan
Preface
PART I TEAMS AS THE MEANS OF DELIVERY
Chapter 1: The Problem with Org Charts
Communication Structures of an Organization
Team Topologies: A New Way of Thinking about Teams
The Revival of Conway's Law
Cognitive Load and Bottlenecks
Summary: Rethink Team Structures, Purpose, and Interactions
Chapter 2: Conway's Law and Why It Matters
Understanding and Using Conway's Law
The Reverse Conway Maneuver
Software Architectures that Encourage Team-Scoped Flow
Organization Design Requires Technical Expertise
Restrict Unnecessary Communication
Beware: Naive Uses of Conway's Law
Summary: Conway's Law Is Critical for Efficient Team Design in
Tech
Chapter 3: Team-First Thinking
Use Small, Long-Lived Teams as the Standard
Good Boundaries Minimize Cognitive Load
Design “Team APIs” and Facilitate Team Interactions
Warning: Engineering Practices Are Foundational
Summary: Limit Teams' Cognitive Load and Facilitate Team
Interactions to Go Faster
PART II TEAM TOPOLOGIES THAT WORK FOR FLOW
Chapter 4: Static Team Topologies
Team Anti-Patterns
Design for Flow of Change
DevOps and the DevOps Topologies
Successful Team Patterns
Considerations When Choosing a Topology
Use DevOps Topologies to Evolve the Organization
Summary: Adopt and Evolve Team Topologies that Match Your Current
Context
Chapter 5: The Four Fundamental Team Topologies
Stream-Aligned Teams
Enabling Teams
Complicated-Subsystem Teams
Platform Teams
Avoid Team Silos in the Flow of Change
A Good Platform Is “Just Big Enough”
Convert Common Team Types to the Fundamental Team Topologies
Summary: Use Loosely Coupled, Modular Groups of Four Specific Team
Types
Chapter 6: Choose Team-First Boundaries
A Team-First Approach to Software Responsibilities and
Boundaries
Hidden Monoliths and Coupling
Software Boundaries or “Fracture Planes”
Real-World Example: Manufacturing
Summary: Choose Software Boundaries to Match Team Cognitive
Load
PART III EVOLVING TEAM INTERACTIONS FOR INNOVATION AND
RAPID DELIVERY
Chapter 7: Team Interaction Modes
Well-Defined Interactions Are Key to Effective Teams
The Three Essential Team Interaction Modes
Team Behaviors for Each Interaction Mode
Choosing Suitable Team Interaction Modes
Choosing Basic Team Organization
Choose Team Interaction Modes to Reduce Uncertainty and Enhance
Flow
Summary: Three Well-Defined Team Interaction Modes
Chapter 8: Evolve Team Structures with Organizational Sensing
How Much Collaboration Is Right for Each Team Interaction?
Accelerate Learning and Adoption of New Practices
Constant Evolution of Team Topologies
Combining Teams Topologies for Greater Effectiveness
Triggers for Evolution of Team Topologies
Self Steer Design and Development
Summary: Evolving Team Topologies
Conclusion: The Next-Generation Digital Operating Model
Four Team Types and Three Interaction Modes
Team-First Thinking: Cognitive Load, Team API, Team-Sized
Architecture
Strategic Application of Conway's Law
Evolve Organization Design for Adaptability and Sensing
Team Topologies Alone Are Not Sufficient for IT Effectiveness
Next Steps: How to Get Started with Team Topologies
Glossary
Recommended Reading
References
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
MATTHEW SKELTON has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specializes in Continuous Delivery, operability and organization design for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software.
MANUEL PAIS is an organizational IT consultant and trainer focused on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. Recognized by TechBeacon in 2019 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, he is also coauthor of the book Team Topologies. He helps organizations rethink their approach to software delivery, operations, and support via strategic assessments, practical workshops, and coaching.
“Teams are the fundamental building block of organizations, how
those teams work and the system they operate in are the difference
between average and high performance. I believe this book is a deep
well of information for how you can optimize your organization's
system for your current context.”
*Jeremy Brown, Director, Red Hap Open Innovation Labs EMEA*
"The high performing team is the core generator of value in the
modern digital economy. But cultivating and scaling an adaptive
ecosystem of such teams is a too-often elusive goal. In this book,
Skelton and Pais provide innovative tools and concepts for
structuring the next generation digital operating model.
Recommended for CIOs, enterprise architects, and digital product
strategists worldwide."
*Charles Betz, Principal Analyst and Global DevOps Lead, Forrester
Research*
“The Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is
unique. It is going to have a big influence across tech companies.
We need a structured and methodical approach to shaping teams for
continuous delivery instead of copying a few Spotify rituals. This
is the book.”
*Nick Tune, API Platform Lead, Navico*
Team Topologies informs and enriches our understanding of
organizational architecture...it serves as a pragmatic guide
whether forming teams and enabling them to meet their challenges or
helping existing teams become more effective at responsive value
delivery.
*Ruth Malan, Architecture Consultant at Bredemeyer Consulting*
“Team Topologies provides fresh insights on how to anticipate and
adapt to market and technology changes. To survive, enterprises
need to unlearn existing command and control structures and instead
move authority to leaders with the best information to take action
and respond. This book will help executives and business leaders
focus on the key strategies of high performance teams to
effectively address the needs of today and the evolving landscape
of tomorrow.”
*Barry O'Reilly, Co-Founder Nobody Studios, author of Unlearn and
Lean Enterprise*
“When your teams encounter friction and bottlenecks it can be
tempting to throw more people, tooling, and process at the problem.
Your solution likely lies in a new team topology. But what should
that look like? Team Topologies provides a much-needed framework
for evaluating and optimizing team organization for increased flow.
Teams that have the right size, the right boundaries, and the right
level of communication are poised to deliver value to the company
and satisfaction to the team members. Team Topologies combines a
methodical approach with real-world case studies to unlock the full
potential of your tech teams.”
*Greg Burrell, Senior Reliability Engineer at Netflix*
“There is nothing more fundamental to management than how you
structure your organization and what behaviors you encourage.
Despite this, few have attempted to catalog and analyze the
organizational design patterns of IT organizations going through
Digital, DevOps, and SRE transformations. Skelton and Pais have not
only accepted this bold challenge, but they've also hit the mark by
creating an indispensable and unique resource.”
*Damon Edwards, Co-Founder of Rundeck*
“DevOps Topologies is an outstanding resource for all technical
leaders pushing for modern approaches to effective partnerships
between Development and Operations. It goes beyond high level
explanations of DevOps offering that there are many flavors that a
company may choose to adopt based on a few factors including
maturity, size and product landscape. At Condé Nast International,
this resource was crucial in understanding our current DevOps state
and in defining the vision for our aspirational DevOps operating
model. We were able to navigate around the pitfalls and
organizational anti-patterns as excellently described in the
models. The models themselves proved extremely useful artifacts in
aligning both stakeholders and teams directly involved. Lastly, I
introduced a new function to the business which hadn't existed
before: Site Reliability Engineering. The DevOps Topologies
resource was a primary resource in firstly convincing myself that
we had matured and grown to a point to justify SRE, but also in
articulating to the business stakeholders the strategy for our new
DevOps model. I am extremely pleased that Matthew and Manuel are
growing on the success of the DevOps Topologies website and turning
their further learnings into the far-reaching Team Topologies book
for organization design.”
*Crystal Hirschorn, VP of Engineering, Global Strategy and
Operations at Condé Nast*
“I have found Matthew and Manuel's work on patterns and language to
be incredibly valuable in both shaping strategies to transform team
contexts over time across our organization, as well as in helping
business and technology leadership connect with the topics of flow
and continuous delivery.”
*Richard James*
“DevOps is great, but how do real-world organizations actually
structure themselves to do it? You can't just put everyone on a
single, silo-less team, all sitting together in one giant open-plan
office and going out to lunch or playing foosball together. Team
Topologies provides a practical set of templates for addressing the
key DevOps question that other guides leave as an exercise for the
student.”
*Jeff Sussna, CEO, Sussna Associates*
“Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais say ‘Team Topologies is meant to
be a functional book'—and it is. It's well constructed and
signposted, based in sound thinking, and challenges readers to
assume, like them, that an organization is a socio-technical system
or ecosystem. From this assumption comes practical suggestions, no
prescriptions, and skill in explaining an approach that provides
for effective tech/human organization design. For anyone in the
tech/organization design field, [Team Topologies is] well worth
reading.”
*Dr. Naomi Stanford, Organization Design Practitioner, Teacher, and
Author*
“I've long enjoyed learning from Matthew's and Manuel's work, and
have been recommending their content to clients and peers for
several years (in particular, DevOpsTopologies.com). It's great to
see that their wisdom for organizing teams has been collated into a
single book, because as the cliché goes, the hard stuff when
working in an organization is always in relation to the ‘soft'
skills (and people and teams). If you're looking for an analysis of
the challenges with the traditional ways of working, and also some
practical guidance on mitigation strategies (e.g., new interaction
modes, reducing cognitive load, and creating appropriate ‘Team
APIs'), then this is the book for you!”
*Daniel Bryant, Technical Consultant/Advisor and News Manager at
InfoQ*
“Team Topologies makes for a fascinating read as it explores the
symbiotic relationship between teams and the IT architecture they
support. It goes beyond the common approach of static org charts or
self-organizing chaos and shows how to evolve the people system and
IT system together.”
*Mirco Hering, Global DevOps Lead Accenture and Author of DevOps
for the Modern Enterprise*
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