Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

By: Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Narrated by: Edward Bauer

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

Great book and narration, but confusing chapter titles

The book itself is excellent and the narrator does a great job. My only frustration is with how the audiobook chapters were labeled. In the actual book, each chapter has a clear title, but in the audiobook everything is just called “Chapter 1, Chapter 2,” etc. For example, the Preface is labeled as Chapter 1, and the real Chapter 1 (“The Problem with the Organization”) is labeled as Chapter 4. This makes it really confusing to follow along or reference specific sections.

Inspired

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

Chapter numbering does not match book

Chapter numbering does not match the actual book chapters. It makes it a challenge to find out where you are in the book if you are reading the actual book simultanously

Must read

Must read for devops practitioners and leads.
Gives a fair idea to how to approach a monolith and find ways to decompose it.

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.