#11 Team topologies: Organizing teams for fast flow | Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies

My guest today is Manuel Pais.

Manuel is the co-author of the masterpiece book "Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow".

He's recognized by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, and is today an independent consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow.

We covered a lot, including some questions and comments from Lyse and Shibsted (read the full case here):

* Different types of teams and interaction modes, and why it's important to define them in your org

* Differences between "streams" and "products", and the importance of having stream-aligned teams able to discover and deliver as independently as possible

* Why team topologies should be seen as an ongoing model, with a mindset of experimentation, sensing, and responding (avoiding the "big reorg" antipattern)

* Conway's law and why it matters

* Navigating infrastructure changes and team topologies

* How to identify your streams using independence service heuristics

* How Shibsted organized itself in independent verticals and why value-stream thinking is important to achieve faster flow

* Product Ops teams as Enabling Teams

* Implementing and scaling enabling teams (with an example of data science teams)

* Common antipatterns when adopting team topologies

I love Manuel and Mathew's work, and see it as one of the most important contributions to the tech industry in the past few years.

I strongly recommend checking out the Shibsted case in combination with this episode, available at the Scandinavian Product Newsletter.

I had the pleasure to sit down with Jostein and Hatice and hear more in detail about their use of Team Topologies and how it shaped their ongoing transformation as well as many of their lessons learned.

Relevant links from the episode:

Main website: http://teamtopologies.com/

Tools & templates (includes ISH mentioned in the episode): https://github.com/teamtopologiesAcademy (where you can find the Effective Enabling Teams course mentioned in the episode): https://academy.teamtopologies.com/

Teamperature (a breakthrough product for assessing and managing team cognitive load): http://teamperature.com/