Team Topologies Quotes

“When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“To avoid the too-common trap of building a platform disconnected from the needs of teams, it is essential to ensure that the platform teams have a focus on user experience (UX) and particularly developer experience (DevEx).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The purpose of a platform team is to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. The stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing their application in production. The platform team provides internal services to reduce the cognitive load that would be required from stream-aligned teams to develop these underlying services.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams is fundamentally wrong.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The most important part of the platform is that it is built for developers.”21”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Fast flow requires restricting communication between teams. Team collaboration is important for gray areas of development, where discovery and expertise is needed to make progress. But in areas where execution prevails—not discovery—communication becomes an unnecessary overhead.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“As Allan Kelly says, “software developers love building platforms and, without strong product management input, will create a bigger platform than needed.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Furthermore, the common belief that open-plan offices increase collaboration has been disputed by a field study that found that in two organizations that adopted open offices “the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approximately 70%)”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“We need to look for natural ways to break down the system (fracture planes) that allow the resulting parts to evolve as independently as possible.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The mission of a platform team is to reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams by off-loading lower level detailed knowledge (e.g., provisioning, monitoring, or deployment), providing easy-to-consume services around them.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Organizations should be viewed as complex and adaptive organisms rather than mechanistic and linear systems. —Naomi Stanford, Guide to Organisation Design”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Act and operate as an effective team? ​•​Own part of the software effectively? ​•​Focus on meeting the needs of users? ​•​Reduce unnecessary cognitive load? ​•​Consume and provide software and information to other teams?”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“functional silo”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“domain-driven design”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Most teams in a flow-optimized organization should be long-lived, multi-disciplined, stream-aligned teams. These teams take ownership of discrete slices of functionality or certain user outcomes, building strong and lasting relationships with business representatives and other delivery teams.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“autonomy, mastery, and purpose,” the three key components of engaged knowledge workers,”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The architecture of the system gets cemented in the forms of the teams that develop it. —Ruth Malan, “Conway’s Law” In many organizations, there is a variety of team types and there are even teams taking on multiple roles (e.g., an infrastructure and tooling team).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“When organizations do not explicitly think about team structures and patterns of interaction, they encounter unexpected difficulties building and running software systems.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“hidden monoliths and coupling in the software-delivery chain.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Work information: what the team is working on now, what’s coming next, and overall priorities in the short to medium term”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Eyes On, Hands Off”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“with less context switching and frequent intra-team communication (thanks to a single shared purpose rather than a collection of purposes).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Domains help us think across the board and use common heuristics.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“When measuring cognitive load, what we really care about is the domain complexity”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Every part of the software system needs to be owned by exactly one team. This means there should be no shared ownership of components,”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Forming: assembling for the first time Storming: working through initial differences in personality and ways of working Norming: evolving standard ways of working together Performing: reaching a state of high effectiveness”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams? . . . Does the structure encourage teams to communicate who wouldn’t otherwise do so?”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow