On the Convergence between Software and Organizations — with Matthew Skelton

Podcast Notes

It’s undeniable that the role of software in any modern organisation is essential — untangling software from the organization is almost impossible today. With new solutions emerging as part of the low-code or no-code movement, what’s the best way to organise around software effectively? Why is it so important to remove hand-offs between teams and to ensure that self-directed teams can be enabled by platforms? What are the overlaps between the world of DevOps and the work we’re doing at Boundaryless around ecosystemic, and entrepreneurial organizations?

To better understand these questions, we bring on Matthew Skelton, co-author with Manuel Pais of ‘Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow’. It’s a seminal text that speaks about how to build the best team structure around the role that software has for your specific organisation.

Matthew is recognised by TechBeacon in 2018, 2019, and 2020 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps. He curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com. He is also Head of Consulting at Conflux and specialises in continuous delivery, operability, and organisation dynamics for modern software systems.

In this conversation, Matthew helps highlight the real impact of digital transformation on companies, and what it means for team coordination. Join us as we explore key insights from his and Manuel’s book ‘Team Topologies’, low-code development platforms, API-drivenness, observability, and the impact of market validation and software-centric ways of organizing.

To find out more about Matthew’s work:

• Website: https://teamtopologies.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewskelton/
• Team Topologies Academy: https://academy.teamtopologies.com/
• Team Topologies Partner Program: https://teamtopologies.com/partner-program

Other references and mentions:

• Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Topologies-Organizing-Business-Technology/dp/1942788819
• IT Revolution: https://itrevolution.com/
• Domain Driven Design Community: https://www.dddcommunity.org/
• Core Domain Charts: https://github.com/ddd-crew/core-domain-charts
• Conway’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
• “Building Extensible Platforms”, Shopify case study: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GqGNA8GnOOE&feature=youtu.be

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 7 June 2021.

Key Insights

1. Delivering and running software has become a really important aspect of how successful businesses or organizations can be. Matthew points out the importance for organizations to consider higher-order, higher-level of innovation, and to really consider where the organization is investing in IP since — in his words — for “organizations that have entirely pushed all of its business processes out to commodity low-code or no-code platforms, there’s a real danger that that organization just doesn’t really have any useful intellectual property”. The rule of thumb is to focus effort in making software around the core business mission. This requires being honest and realistic about which aspects of your organization are actually important or unique (or close to being unique). If they’re not distinctive to your organization, then you shouldn’t be building software around it; those are things you should pull in from the ecosystem from software as a service.

• Listen to the discussion around software development choices and how it impacts the organization around min 8:42.

2. Conway’s law is based on the observation that there’s a “mirroring effect” between the shape of communications inside an organization and the shape of software that gets produced. This further implies that the shape of the organization’s communication pathways is a constraint on its solution search space. Traditionally, since organizations have been very siloed in terms of functions, this has limited the kind of solutions they can find, as well as the speed at which solutions can be found. To avoid these negative effects of Conway’s law, Matthew and the Team Topologies team advocate for cross-functional teams with zero hand-offs to “make sure that our organization communication is not fighting against the kind of solutions that we want to find”. This further enables organizations to respond quickly to the market environment.

• Listen to the passage on Conway’s law, zero hand-offs and cross-functional teams from min 22:56.

3. Team Topologies identifies four main team types to allow for enabling fast flow. The starting point is always the “stream-aligned team”, a 15 people maximum team (ideally 8–9) with “end-to-end responsibility, no handoffs, very close to the customer, and long term responsible for a particular part of the kind of business domain or service or product or user journey or something”. The other team types are at the service of stream-aligned teams. “Enabling teams” help to bridge the capability gap that might help the stream-aligned team to understand how better to use some kind of machine learning or data, infrastructure, or technical practices. “Complicated subsystem teams” are rare, but can be formed to take away a very highly specialized cognitive load from a stream-aligned team. Finally, “platform teams” (referred to as internal platforms) take away some of the non-differentiating details for stream-aligned teams around data, machine learning, infrastructure, or deployment capabilities. Again, the decision criteria for this supporting team type is to reduce cognitive team load, and it’s up to the stream-aligned team to adopt it. In addition, the Team Topologies team had spotted a “service experience team”, thinking about the full lifecycle product experience and sitting alongside the stream-aligned team pulling in data and insights from other places (market pricing, customer feedback, etc).

• Listen to the description of different team types from min 30:39.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.