Team Topologies - Organizing for fast flow of value

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Newsletter (November 2024): From Strategy to Practice: Team Topologies Across Diverse Industries

Ana Ciobotaru

The shift to Product Operating Model, aka Project-to-Product comes with many challenges, especially when applied to enterprises with significant history and pre-existing technology and products. Team Topologies provides leaders with an approach to organizational design that addresses many of these challenges.

People often limit the "product" notion to the applications their teams are building. As Marty Cagan points out, the internal platforms that enable application development also need to be considered products.

Another key challenge isdefining product boundaries in ways that empower teams to own the products they build and operate.This becomes even more complex when considering products that require multiple teams to work on different parts of the product. Some parts are reusable and get embedded in multiple products. A clear understanding and effective use of value streams in this context is critical for a successful transition. This goes beyond identifying value streams; it requires a multidimensional approach in which value streams are reviewed in the context of the architectures being built and the team-of-teams design behind those architectures.

Many challenges that transitioning businesses face stem from slow delivery, often due to high coupling between teams. Decoupling requires reviewing the architecture through a value stream lens. The resulting decoupling of teams and their responsibilities allows for greater independence, speeding up delivery. For instance, JP Morgan restructured its teams to reduce dependencies by 60%, significantly accelerating value creation from its enterprise platform delivery.

Take a value stream view on your architectures and accelerate flow of value.

Structural complexity often hinders growth and agility. By adopting modular architectural patterns, focusing on value streams, and combining techniques from Domain-Driven Design and Wardley Mapping, Telenet identified a matching team-of-teams design for their flexible "tribe" model. This enables the company to adapt quickly to market changes without sacrificing delivery speed or business agility.

Large organizations frequently struggle to balance innovation with standardization. Teams need the freedom to innovate, while the organization requires consistency in user experience. The BBC addressed this by optimizing team structures, improving consistency across services without compromising the creative autonomy necessary for innovation. This approach enhanced both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Another major focus and key principle inTeam Topologies is reducing cognitive load on teams by making repetitive, high-effort tasks easier. SAP applied this principle by implementing a platform that minimized repetitive tasks for its development teams, enabling them to focus on innovation and delivering customer value.

In the case of GfK, a global leader in consumer intelligence, the company applied Team Topologies to improve decision-making speed by empowering teams with better access to knowledge. Through an enabling team approach, GfK fostered faster, more informed decisions, improving the overall flow of work and organizational learning.

If you are new to Team Topologies the Team Topologies Distilled video-based course is your go-to resource for mastering the core principles of Team Topologies. Whether you're a team leader, software engineer, or organizational change agent, this course equips you with the tools to:

  • Create dynamic, adaptable teams

  • Design software and team structures for fast flow

  • Avoid the common pitfalls of scaling teams

  • Align team behaviors with business outcom

Discover how you can leverage Team Topologies in your company. Talk to us.

What’s Coming Up Next?

We are gathering all Team Topologies events on our Events page and would love to hear your feedback about the ones you have attended or the ones that we have missed.

Have we missed an event around Team Topologies? Let us know.

Join the Community

We have launched the Team Topologies Community two weeks ago and over 300 members, including the co-authors of the book and core-team members are already there.

Join the community to find your space for every Team Topologies questions and more.

We are happy to enrich the practice of Team Topologies with new ideas and best practices. This is why the community plays a crucial role in ever-evolving. You can also become a partner and help companies leverage Team Topologies. A warm welcome to our newest partners:

If you're passionate about Team Topologies and want to become an advocate, we would love to have you join us. Or, if you have a story to share, we would be honored to feature it on the website.

Was this newsletter useful? Please share your thoughts on how we can make it better. Send us an email.

If you'd like to share your experiences or need assistance, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

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