Introduction

A Brief Overview of Team Topologies

Team Topologies is the leading approach to organizing business and technology teams for fast flow, providing a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction. The Team Topologies ecosystem of partners, practitioners, and learning academy is transforming the approach to the digital operating model for organizations around the world.

In the Team Topologies model, four fundamental types of teams and three core team interaction modes combine with awareness of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load, and responsive organization evolution to define a no-nonsense, team-friendly, humanistic approach to building and running software systems.

The four fundamental types of teams are:

•Stream-aligned team: aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain.

•Enabling team: helps a stream-aligned team to overcome obstacles. Also detects missing capabilities.

•Complicated-subsystem team: where significant mathematics, calculations, and technical expertise is needed.

•Platform team: a grouping of other team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by stream-aligned teams.

There are three ways in which teams should interact (interaction modes):

•Collaboration: working together for a defined period of time to discover new things (APIs, practices, technologies, etc.).

•X-as-a-Service: one team provides and one team consumes something “as a service.”

•Facilitating: one team helps and mentors another team.

The basic principles behind Team Topologies help organizations take a team-first approach to help unblock flow.

How to Use this Workbook

We begin this workbook with an overview of the mindset and skills you and your organization will need to succeed in a remote-first world. The three main chapters (2, 3, and 4) each feature three patterns for improving team-based work in a remote-first context. Each improvement pattern has some explanatory context along with an example and suggestions for how to try it in your organization (labeled Now Your Turn). Each improvement pattern also refers to a section of the original Team Topologies book to provide a more detailed explanation, like this:

While it’s not necessary to read Team Topologies to take advantage of the patterns in this workbook, for the best results we recommend that you take time to contextualize the patterns of this workbook in combination with the ideas in the Team Topologies book.

Many of the patterns in this workbook also reference templates and other resources. Where possible, we’ve recreated the templates and resources for you in this workbook. We also provide links to these templates and resources online, so you can use them to get started. These online resources are free to use and open to contributions and suggestions for improvements. These tips will be featured like this:

We’ve also worked to show the various ideas or techniques in the workbook that are related so that it is easy for you to navigate and make connections. These relationships are shown like this:

We hope these callouts help you navigate and get the most out of this workbook.