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 @Thoughtworks, 16-Time QCon Chair, & Creator of The InfoQ Podcast
With over 20 years of delivering and architecting sociotechnical systems, Wesley Reisz has led the technical delivery of multi-million dollar software projects, chaired numerous software conferences across North America (and the United Kingdom), created a highly respected podcast, and spent over a decade teaching 400-level software architecture/programming courses as an adjunct professor. These experiences have given him deep expertise in software architecture, cloud-native engineering, team topologies, and platform thinking (alongside a broad knowledge of different software domains).
Wes is a Technical Principal at Thoughtworks, where he specializes in reducing complexity in software through systems thinking, application modernization, platform engineering, and AI-First Software Delivery. Embodying the concept of a T-shaped engineer (blending broad expertise across a wide range of software domains with deep technical knowledge of the cloud-native ecosystem), Wes strongly believes in the transformative power of sharing knowledge through speaking, teaching, and continuous learning.
You can reach Wes via:
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