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Team Topologies in action - early results from ...

Team Topologies in action - early results from industry - ITARC 2021 - 2021-10-18

Since the book Team Topologies was published in 2019, organizations around the world have started to adopt Team Topologies principles and practices like Stream-aligned teams, modern platforms, well-defined team interactions, and team cognitive load as a key driver for fast software delivery and operations.

We will look at examples from these organizations:

- Footasylum gives fashion-focused youth a multi-branded retail experience mixing global sportswear household names with emerging brands and its own stable of in-house labels. Founded in 2005, Footasylum now has 70 stores across the UK and a thriving ecommerce platform, with revenue of £260m per annum and over 2500 employees. Footasylum used Team Topologies patterns to revolutionize their ecommerce platform.

- PureGym is Britain’s largest gym chain - the first to gain over 1 million members. As PureGym expanded, so did the need for software to enable their members to book and manage gym sessions. Since 2019, PureGym has re-aligned its teams and team interactions based on Team Topologies patterns, helping to scale the engineering teams and improve flow.

- uSwitch / RVU, one of the UK’s leading consumer price comparison websites, has grown a modern platform from scratch, allowing stream-aligned teams to focus on consumers needs, offloading infrastructure provisioning concerns to the platform which also provides cross-cutting services around scalability, security and data management

- Wealth Wizards is a UK company making financial advice affordable and accessible to everyone through online tools and apps. The engineering division at Wealth Wizards has used the Team Topologies ideas around team cognitive load to help right-size their teams and align teams to the most important flows of business change.

For each of these examples, we explore how the ideas and patterns in Team Topologies were useful to the organization and the results of the changes.

Matthew Skelton

October 20, 2021
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  1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Team Topologies in action early results from industry

    - October 2021 Matthew Skelton co-author of Team Topologies @matthewpskelton ITARC 2021 - 18 October 2021
  2. 2 Manuel Pais IT organizational consultant and trainer at FlowOnRails

    Ex-dev, ex-build manager, ex-tester, ex-QA lead Twitter: @manupaisable LinkedIn: manuelpais Matthew Skelton Founder at Conflux Experience as: software developer, technical director, change enabler, conference organizer... Twitter: @matthewpskelton LinkedIn: matthewskelton
  3. Team Topologies 3 Organizing business and technology teams for fast

    flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, 2019 teamtopologies.com/book
  4. “innovative tools and concepts for structuring the next generation digital

    operating model” Charles T. Betz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research 4
  5. 12

  6. 13

  7. 14

  8. • Founded 2005 • 70 stores in the UK •

    £260m revenue • 2500 employees • 2019: changes to make IT more responsive 17
  9. Team Topologies for Product Managers 21 Jun 2019 “The Product

    Managers from each team took special interest in the team interaction types as it helped them to have useful, directed conversations about upcoming work, they could essentially fact-check their different roadmaps and make sure that the interactions required were lined up in advance. “ -- Andy Norton, Software Development Manager, Footasylum
  10. Adopt the Thinnest Viable Platform 25 Feb 2020 Static data

    fine to begin with: shops rarely move!
  11. Concepts • Stream-aligned (business domain) • Thinnest Viable Platform •

    Team Interaction Modes • Combine with Wardley Mapping 27
  12. Results • Product Mgt superpowers • Effective comms during COVID-19

    • Responsive, autonomous teams 28 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
  13. “the interaction modes defined by Team Topologies gave us real

    insight into how we could maintain effective practices, and also cross-team collaboration.“ -- Andy Norton, Software Development Manager, Footasylum 29
  14. • 2015-2020 • Huge growth in members • Joining (mobile

    app) • Bookings, payments • “Online-first” experience 34
  15. Less Than 10 People Project A Project B Bugs Small

    Changes GSD Projects BAU Project C Handover 35 2015
  16. Bugs & Small Change Project G Project H Project I

    Project J Project K Trigger: Rapid Team Growth to 40 Projects BAU GSD Handover 37 2019
  17. The Monolith Site Project G Project H Project I Project

    J BAU Vendor API Reseller API Mobile App Mobile Team Customer API Membership Management System Single code repository 38 2019
  18. Re-defining Teams SRE Developer Experience Membership Management Gateway (MMG) Acquisition

    Join Process Landing Pages … Gym Team Time Tables Gyms … Payments Reconciliation Join Payments … Retentio n Members Area CRM … Other …. … Streams Enabling Mobile ?? Platform 40 2020
  19. SRE DevEx Using Facilitation and Developing X as a Service

    In Gym Experience Team Payments Team Mobile Team ? Acquisition Team Membership Management Gateway Team Retention Team 42 2020
  20. Continuous Collaboration and Facilitation SRE DevEx In Gym Experience Team

    Payments Team Mobile Team ? Acquisition Team Membership Management Gateway Team Retention Team 43 2020+
  21. “Team Topologies helped us at PureGym to evaluate the relationship

    between our teams and the business strategy, to increase team efficiency, and evolve away from a monolith.“ -- John Kilmister, Principal Software Architect, PureGym 45
  22. Concepts • ‘Fracture Planes’ for splitting code • Cognitive Load

    for boundaries • Interaction Modes for clarity • Team Types for purpose 46
  23. Results • Balanced ownership of services • Improved team morale

    • Better long-term architecture 48 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
  24. • UK's leading comparison and switching service • Founded in

    2000 • ~250 staff, £140m+ revenue • > 2010: Autonomous teams • > 2017: Platformization 51
  25. “people were spending more time having to interact with relatively

    low-level services thus spending their time on relatively low-value decisions” Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU / Uswitch 54
  26. 55 2017 Infra platform started with few services First customer

    (centralized logging, metrics, auto scaling)
  27. 57 2017 Infra platform started with few services First customer

    (centralized logging, metrics, auto scaling) 2018 Started using SLAs and SLOs, clarifying reliability/latency/etc Growing traffic in platform vs AWS
  28. 59 2019 Addressed critical cross-functional needs (GDPR, security, alerts +

    SLOs as a service) Adoption by HMRT (Highest Maturity & Revenue Team) 2017 Infra platform started with few services First customer (centralized logging, metrics, auto scaling) 2018 Started using SLAs and SLOs, clarifying reliability/latency/etc Growing traffic in platform vs AWS
  29. “Engineering principles guided the way we organise teams: loosely-coupled and

    highly cohesive. Team Topologies is great for tying a lot of those ideas together, and most importantly giving it some language.“ Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU / Uswitch 70
  30. Concepts • Platforms to reduce cognitive load • Platform as

    a product / MVP • Discover good boundaries & APIs • Clear team interaction modes 71
  31. Results • From autonomy to self-sufficiency • Patterns applied beyond

    IT • Balancing fast flow with reliability 73 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
  32. Thanks to: Paul Ingles Chief Technology Officer RVU / Uswitch

    Tom Booth Head of Infrastructure & Security RVU / Uswitch 74
  33. • Financial advice • Founded 2009 • Consumers & companies

    • 'Explainable AI' • Increasingly successful 76
  34. Independent Service Heuristics 80 https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Independent-Service-Heuristics Rules-of-thumb for identifying candidate value

    streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product.
  35. “Instead of recreating the existing communication structures within our organisation,

    we were then able to identify discrete domain areas, growing and re-aligning our existing teams to match the desired architecture.“ Becky Pauley, Platform Engineer, Wealth Wizards 84
  36. Concepts • Stream-aligned: build & run • Boundaries that help

    flow • Supporting team types: reduce cognitive load on Stream teams 85
  37. Results • Clear patterns and language • Framework for design

    decisions • Confidence in scaling approach 86 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
  38. Thanks to: 87 Becky Pauley Platform Engineer Wealth Wizards Marc

    Burton Head of Software Engineering Wealth Wizards
  39. 89

  40. 100 Manuel Pais FlowOnRails Twitter: @manupaisable LinkedIn: manuelpais Matthew Skelton

    Conflux Twitter: @matthewpskelton LinkedIn: matthewskelton Copyright © Conflux Digital Ltd and FlowOnRails 2018-2021. All rights reserved. teamtopologies.com