Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

By: Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Narrated by: Edward Bauer

Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs?

Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.

In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.

Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (P)2019 IT Revolution Press

Nice of you’re Amazon or Google

The book becomes extremely repetitive and the same concepts are covered over and over with slight variations.

This could be summarized into a 20 page booklet.

The viability of what the book suggests relies on having mature and motivated teams who buy into a restructuring of the organization. None of this is practical in a smaller company.

I suspect that this book will lead to many failed organizations where management believes that they can pivot into value aligned teams easily.

In reality, you can have the best roadmap on earth, but you’ll go nowhere if the bus is filled with people who don’t want to take the ride. The book fails to address issues with staff motivation, maturity, and communicating the huge changes to the troops.

Inspiring insight into team architecture

This book came as a safeguard just in the moment I thought I wouldn’t know what’s the best way to reorganize teams for continuous business value delivery. It makes some very lovigal points very explicit and can help you if you see the way you work need a change, and even if you don’t it will help you to recognize the moment you do.

If you are coaching software teams this is a must have

I have more than 5 years of experience in working w Software teams and helping them build team first processes, but I learned so much from this book that is missing in my own implementations.

This is one of few books that, I have ordered both audio and kindle version, as it will be a guiding study material rather than a book.

Highly recommend to Agile coaches, TPMs , Product Managers, and of course Engineers and Eng leaders

How to build functional teams.

This book covers multiple methodologies for team organization. It should be required reading for any organization working to improve workflow and providing value to the business

Inspired

My takeaway was the need for team apis and the different collaboration modes needed.

Fracture planes

I learned a bit about how to break complex systems down: fracture planes. I’m looking forward to applying this idea.

Wasn't for me, not sure why.

While there are some good concepts and advice, I found it hard to stay engaged with the book. I was only able to endure to the end because of a work related goal that involved completing this book. Maybe it's just me, because others say the book is great.

Incredibly Salient Advice

If you're suffering from Conway's Law, you really need to digest what the authors lay down in this book. Please remember that even though it's simple, it will probably not be easy.

Novel ideas for working in large orgs

There are great, novel ideas in this book for working more effectively in large orgs with many two-pizza teams that have high separation of duties among them. It gives practical advice for how these teams should interact founded on two fundamental theories: Conway's Law and Dunbar's number. I'd be careful about taking the actual Dunbar numbers put forward too literally but the basic premise about trust levels diminishing as more people are involved is solid.

The one thing that I would beg Audible to do is redo this with a different narrator. The pretentious performance is grating and borderline unlistenable. It's like he's wearing a tuxedo and bobbing his head from side-to-side the entire time. I'm sorry Edward but you need to dial it back and be more genuine.

Hard. Pass.

No proof is provided. This book is all assertions with no evidence. There are quotes from people with fancy titles and mentions of findings produced by companies we all know, but it's all anecdote. Large words are used when smaller ones would do, making it feel like the authors are more concerned with sounding fancy than being understood. There is a constant disregard for the individual and a general tone of separation from the people that make up your teams and management chains. I frequently found myself thinking the authors have been *near* software development, but never a part of it.

A book that would be better to read then listen to

The book refers to a lot of diagrams that one would benefit from seeing

Useful concepts - a bit abstract

The concepts about team structure influencing flow and technical architecture make a lot of sense, and I am sure a lot of benefit can be gained by implementing them in the right way. However, I found it all quite abstract, with a lack of concrete examples, and therefore hard to understand what it really means in practice and how to implement it.
It would be great to have plenty of examples of the right and wrong way to implement each element.

Can be dangerous

I had an epiphany when listening to this, that, if said to my boss and his bosses, might get me fired.

Insightful and developmental

This book manages to weave together dozens of relevant references into a coherent model for team interactions and to introduce novel structures, roles, patterns, and anti-patterns.

It would be easy to become a convert— to believe this the only way teams should work — but even with a more measured response, it seems likely that most organisations would learn something valuable from consulting this book.

Excellent book

Excellent content, narrator brings the overall experience down however.

About to start my third cover-to-cover session.

Good but too long

Good book, but same things are repeated 2 or even 3 times. Could be just shorter and then it would be much better.

Fascinating read

Great book, really easy to follow even though Im not in the field. think the concepts apply to general business beyond just Software Engineering.
Felt the narration might have been picked for the American readers.

Zzzzzzzz

I'm really interested in the topic of team typologies. This book explains it in a dull manner and frequently makes a assertions without reasoning. I really wanted to get something out of this but I really can't. The example cases in real companies are few and far between.

Fairly technical and a bit dry, but still good

Fairly technical and a bit dry, but still good. I liked the simplicity but could be more engaging

Teams First!

Manuel and Mathew have one of freshest views on software development organizations I have seen in a while. This is not another [something] first, the is a grounded view on how team types and they way they interact has a major impact on the outcome of any software (and I'd go as far as saying any) systems. Very well written and easy to follow, if a little repetitive at times.