Leaning heavily on Team Topologies (a book by Mathew Skelton and Manual Pais), this workshop explores team structures to reduce friction and improve flow.
Team Topologies discussed four fundamental team types for building software teams (stream aligned, complicated subprocess, enabling, and platform) and the interactions models between them. In this workshop, we present the core concepts from Team Topologies, discuss ways of thinking about team organization to improve flow and agility in your engineering org, and create a space for an open discussion on implementation practices. Core to this workshop on Organizing for Fast Flow are concepts on team happiness, structure and architecture borrowed from Daniel Pink, Team Topologies, and Melvin Conway.
Workshop Outline:
- Team Topologies - A Distilled Introduction
- Case Study - look into how one company organized their teams
- Kata: Working in groups, create and discuss team structures to solve several organizational and architectural challenges
- Introducing these approaches in your org (and some common gotchas)
Key Takeaways
1 The first pass at your architecture is your team structure. Consider first your architectural goals before organizing your teams.
2 By reducing cognitive load on development teams, platform engineering serves as an important enabler for cloud native software delivery.
3 Reducing friction and cognitive load on delivery teams is key to enabling fast flow.
Speaker
Wes Reisz
Technical Principal @EqualExperts, ex-Thoughtworker & ex-VMWare, 16-Time QCon Chair, Creator/Co-host of The InfoQ Podcast
Wes has been an active member of the QCon and InfoQ communities since 2015. Professionally, he is a Technical Principal at Equal Experts, where he specializes in app modernization and platform engineering. Wes embraces the notion of the T-shaped engineer, blending broad expertise across a wide range of software domains with deep technical knowledge in the cloud-native ecosystem. He believes in the transformative power of speaking, teaching, and continuous learning.
Wes has over 20 years of experience in software engineering. During that time, he has chaired more than 15 QCon software conferences in San Francisco, London, and New York; created the well-respected InfoQ Podcast; and spent over 10 years teaching 400-level courses on software architecture and programming at the University of Louisville. These experiences have provided him with broad knowledge across a wide range of areas in software while fostering technical depth in software architecture, cloud-native engineering, and platform thinking.
Before joining Equal Experts, Wes held technical leadership roles at Thoughtworks, where he focused on cloud and modernization; at VMware, as a Tanzu Platform Architect specializing in Spring, Kubernetes, and the developer path to production; and at an edge-related startup, where he served as VP of Technology, driving innovation at the edge.
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