Book review — Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

The options to organise tech and software-focused organisations is an incredibly well documented area that has come on in leaps and bounds over the last 15 years. Nevertheless, the flow of new books in this space continues unabated.

Having spent most of my career either designing and building large scale software and the related organisations, or consulting in the domain for clients, I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on the domain. Despite this, I was attracted to Team Topologies with its promise of linking the business and technology organisations for “fast flow”:

This is a topic that is still flawed in practically every organisation and typically, where excellence does exist, it is driven by clarity of vision over the purpose of the organisation and the centrality of technology to the success of that mission.. so at best in a few world-beating organisations at scale and then in *pockets of excellence* in a small, but — thankfully — ever increasing number of companies.

So now for the review; Team Topologies is an excellent book, an easy and quick read, with some excellent structures to think about team design, operating models for software engineering at scale and the link between the architecture of systems and the related organisations (with some great insights into how to leverage the well known “Conway’s Law” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%... — to find out more if not familiar to you) to improve operations, with what the authors memorably refer to as a “reverse Conway manoeuvre”.
The topology referred to in the book is welcome and clear. Crucially, the introduction of explicit inter-team communication patterns and some connected diagrammatic standards to support the design and communication of an operating model and organisational design leveraging the principles in the book, is extremely helpful.

Where this book falls down in my mind is on addressing the points relating to the barriers to flow external to the engineering operations. There is nothing wrong with the obstacles outlined in the book, but I couldn’t help feeling that they underplay topics relating to the broader organisational design, especially with respect to value streams, ownership and participation of “traditional” business functions in these value streams, clarity of purpose of the organisation, the management of end-to-end operations and the interplay between managing the existing business and creating continuous flow of new capabilities effectively.

So in summary: lots of great hands-on recommendations for the design and ongoing development of well-functioning scaled delivery engines, less good on creating genuine flow across an entire organisation beyond the tech units (and of course, in fairness, the related product and/or value stream owners in an organisation)… perhaps that can be the topic of a sequel...

First published on goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44135420-team-topologies