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.

Transcript

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. PROBLEMS TO SOLVE with Team Topologies
6. Why is our transformation not achieving fast flow?
7. What’s our purpose and mission as a team within the wider organization?
8. Why are our teams not able to respond quickly to business needs?
9. How can we safely remove low-level complexity from customer-facing teams?
10. TODAY Team Topologies in action
11. October 2021: 25 months since publication Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash 11
15. 15 Flow of change
16. Case Study 16
17. • Founded 2005 • 70 stores in the UK • £260m revenue • 2500 employees • 2019: changes to make IT more responsive 17
18. High fragmentation of work and focus 18 Jan 2019
19. Identify boundaries - business domain 19 m id-2019
20. Team Topologies at DOES London 2019 20 Jun 2019
21. 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
22. Align to Team Topologies concepts 22 Aug 2019
23. Combine with Wardley Mapping 23 Jan 2020
24. Focus on bounded contexts in Platform 24 Feb 2020
25. Adopt the Thinnest Viable Platform 25 Feb 2020 Static data fine to begin with: shops rarely move!
26. Clarity of purpose from team types 26 Feb 2020
27. Concepts • Stream-aligned (business domain) • Thinnest Viable Platform • Team Interaction Modes • Combine with Wardley Mapping 27
28. Results • Product Mgt superpowers • Effective comms during COVID-19 • Responsive, autonomous teams 28 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
29. “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
30. Thanks to: Paul Martin IT Director, Footasylum Andy Norton Software Development Manager, Footasylum 30
31. Case Study 31
32. • 2015-2020 • Huge growth in members • Joining (mobile app) • Bookings, payments • “Online-first” experience 34
33. Less Than 10 People Project A Project B Bugs Small Changes GSD Projects BAU Project C Handover 35 2015
34. 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
35. 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
36. 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
37. SRE DevEx High Collaboration Phase Payments Team Acquisition Team Retention Team Gym Team MMG Mobile? 41 2020
38. 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
39. Continuous Collaboration and Facilitation SRE DevEx In Gym Experience Team Payments Team Mobile Team ? Acquisition Team Membership Management Gateway Team Retention Team 43 2020+
40. “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
41. Concepts • ‘Fracture Planes’ for splitting code • Cognitive Load for boundaries • Interaction Modes for clarity • Team Types for purpose 46
42. Results • More business-responsive • Projects+BAU → Streams • Separate services: Join / Book / ... 47
43. Results • Balanced ownership of services • Improved team morale • Better long-term architecture 48 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
44. Thanks to: John Kilmister Principal Software Architect PureGym Rich Allen Head of Consulting Conjurer Solutions 49
45. Case Study 50
46. • UK's leading comparison and switching service • Founded in 2000 • ~250 staff, £140m+ revenue • > 2010: Autonomous teams • > 2017: Platformization 51
47. Autonomous stream-aligned teams 52 2015 ...
48. 53 Low-level AWS service calls before platform adoption 2015-2016: direct AWS API calls
49. “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
50. 55 2017 Infra platform started with few services First customer (centralized logging, metrics, auto scaling)
51. 56 2017 Early platform (first customer)
52. 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
53. 58 Low-level AWS service calls since platform adoption 2015-2018: direct AWS API calls
54. 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
55. 60 Measure and demonstrate 2019
56. 66 2020
57. “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
58. Concepts • Platforms to reduce cognitive load • Platform as a product / MVP • Discover good boundaries & APIs • Clear team interaction modes 71
59. Results • “Curated” platform experience • Reduced complexity for teams • Addressed cross-team needs 72
60. Results • From autonomy to self-sufficiency • Patterns applied beyond IT • Balancing fast flow with reliability 73 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
61. Thanks to: Paul Ingles Chief Technology Officer RVU / Uswitch Tom Booth Head of Infrastructure & Security RVU / Uswitch 74
62. Case Study 75
63. • Financial advice • Founded 2009 • Consumers & companies • 'Explainable AI' • Increasingly successful 76
64. < 2019: product growth 77 x 6
65. Mid-2019 78 HALT!
66. September 2019 79
67. 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.
68. Iteration 1 81 Stream-Aligned Team for each capability
69. Iteration 2 82 A transitional phase
70. Iteration 3 83 Visualising … and a Reverse Conway Manoeuvre
71. “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
72. Concepts • Stream-aligned: build & run • Boundaries that help flow • Supporting team types: reduce cognitive load on Stream teams 85
73. Results • Clear patterns and language • Framework for design decisions • Confidence in scaling approach 86 https://teamtopologies.com/examples
74. Thanks to: 87 Becky Pauley Platform Engineer Wealth Wizards Marc Burton Head of Software Engineering Wealth Wizards
75. Summary: Team Topologies in action 88
77. The Stream-aligned team is the starting point: fast flow and feedback from running systems
78. Team Topologies provides a common language and set of patterns for the whole IT organization
79. Explicitly design for team cognitive load
80. A platform is a curated experience for engineers to accelerate and simplify software delivery
81. What’s next? 94
82. Free Resources 95 teamtopologies.com/resources (links, slides, video) teamtopologies.com/tools (templates, assessments, etc)
83. Infographics • Getting Started • In a Nutshell 96 teamtopologies.com/infographics
84. academy.teamtopologies.com
85. TeamTopologies.com @TeamTopologies Team Topologies Partner Program 🤝 partners@teamtopologies.com
86. Sign up for news and tips: TeamTopologies.com 99
87. 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