DevOpsDaysPortugal 2019 - Manuel Pais - Product Teams Need A Family Too - Fundamental Team Topologies for Flow

So you’re trying to move from agile project teams to business-aligned product teams. Everyone from the CEO to middle management is on board. Yet somehow it’s not that easy, is it? You’ve just about figured out how to split infrastructure responsibilities between teams when the next great tech for cost-effective scalability is out there and it doesn’t fit in the new model. Oh, and let’s not forget that products X and Y have no automated tests since they were developed by temporary project teams.

The underlying questions are: What are the product team’s responsibilities? How do they interact with other teams and when? The fundamental team topologies provide a framework for thinking about and aligning teams with an expected set of behaviors and responsibilities. In other words, they clarify the teams’ purpose and ways of working.

We recommend four fundamental team topologies, each with a well defined purpose and responsibilities. Along stream-aligned teams (of which product teams are a subset), the other three topologies recommended are platform, enabling, and complicated subsystem. This family of topologies provides the support system necessary for product teams to thrive.

In this talk we will see what each of these topologies brings to the table and how they enable organizations to quickly evolve and respond to both new technology and business requirements over time. We will also map some common team types in the industry to the fundamental topologies, highlighting how the same team can be either a pattern or an anti-pattern depending on the context around them.

Transcript

1. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Product Teams Need a Family Too! Manuel Pais @manupaisable
2. “Great products emerge from empowered, fully cross-functional teams.” – John Cutler, 2019 2
4. devopstopologies.com
5. devopstopologies.com
8. 9 There’s a limit to the scalability of product teams alone
14. 15 Handovers (can) kill flow
17. “Great products emerge from empowered, fully cross-functional teams.” – John Cutler, 2019 22
18. “Despite striving to be cross- functional, one of the thornier problems product teams often face is lacking some necessary competence.” – Peter Neumark, 2015 23
19. arch & design coding testing deploying
20. coding testing deploying infra arch & design
21. coding testing deploying infra CI/CD arch & design
22. coding testing deploying infra ops CI/CD arch & design
23. coding testing deploying security infra ops CI/CD arch & design
24. coding testing deploying security infra ops CI/CD arch & design building the product right
25. coding testing deploying security infra ops UX monitor metrics product viability QA CI/CD arch & design
26. coding testing deploying security infra ops UX monitor metrics product viability QA CI/CD arch & design building the right product
27. 32 autonomy
28. 33 competences
29. 34 How to alleviate the tension between: team autonomy (increases flow) and lack of competences (decreases flow)
39. A good platform is treated as a product (reliable, usable, fit for purpose) 45
46. 52 When used with care, these are the only four fundamental team topologies needed to build and run modern software systems.
49. Nationwide Project to Product: Practical Realities at a Large Scale Enterprise Barclays The Yin and Yang of Speed and Control BMW Game Changer: 100% Agile Adidas DevOps Over Coffee DevOpsTopologies.com Mercedes DevOps Adoption at Mercedes-Benz.io Twilio Platforms at Twilio: Unlocking Developer Effectiveness MAN Truck & Bus How to Manage Cloud Infrastructure at MAN Truck & Bus Farfetch UX I DevOps - The Trojan Horse for Implementing a DevOps Culture
50. MAN Truck & Bus How to Manage Cloud Infrastructure at MAN Truck & Bus JUNE 17th!
51. Publication date: Sept 2019
53. END OF SLIDES 60
54. Support different individual profiles Product team for those who want to be multi-skilled and always learning Platform for those who like to automate processes and provide services that fit the org needs Enabling team for technical experts who want to shine in a given discipline Complicated subsystem team for highly specialized people who are not that interested in tech per
55. 62 Cognitive load Intrinsic (skills) Extraneous (mechanics) Germane (business focus)
56. “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” – Mel Conway, 1968 63
59. 66 Team Interaction Modes Collaboration: 2 teams working together X-as-a-Service: 1 provides, 1 consumes Facilitating: 1 team helps another
61. 68 Sensing for Evolution Not all teams in the org look the same Discover, then push to Platform Awkward team interactions are signals Evolve the org with changing ecosystem
63. 70 Evolve different team topologies for different parts of the organisation at different times to match the team purpose and context