Organisational Dysfunction of the Day
Team Topologies, the wrong way round
Context: Leadership has read Team Topologies. The insights are compelling: stream-aligned teams owning end-to-end delivery, platform teams reducing cognitive load, enabling teams building capability. A reorganisation is planned. Teams are renamed and restructured. The new topology is announced. People find themselves in stream-aligned teams that still wait for approval from the same architects, report to the same managers, and receive priorities from the same product managers who held the backlog before. The platform team is the old infrastructure team with a new name and a mandate to serve internal customers, though nobody agreed on what that means. The enabling team runs workshops that nobody has time to attend. Six months in, the cognitive load has not decreased. Delivery has not improved. Leadership concludes that the teams need to embrace the new model more fully. Another round of communication is planned, and product coaches are hired en masse to fix people.
OST explains: Team Topologies describes structural patterns that emerge from healthy organisations. Like DORA, it is a map of what good looks like, not a recipe for getting there. The patterns only function as intended when the teams operating them are genuinely self-managing, owning their work, coordinating among themselves, and making decisions without constant escalation. Imposing the topology from above while leaving the underlying design principle unchanged is a bureaucratic (DP1) move applied to a self-managing (DP2) framework. Stream-aligned teams become delivery units with a new name. Platform teams become service departments, and their internal customer model quietly recreates the same dependency it was meant to dissolve. Goodhart's law applies here as much as it does to DORA: the moment the topology becomes a target, it stops being a good topology. The book is right. The reorganisation missed the point.
#OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #TeamTopologies
From the Leanpub Blog: The Leanpub Podcast ๐ Feat. Org Topologies, Author of 10X ORG โ Powered by Org Topologies: A Manager's Guide to Elevating Business Performance with People and AI
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalDesign #BusinessTransformation #Management #Leadership #TeamTopologies #LeanpubPodcast #DigitalTransformation
NEW! The Leanpub Podcast ๐ Feat. Alexey Krivitsky, co-author of 10X ORG: A Manager's Guide to Elevating Business Performance with People and AI
#books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalDesign #BusinessTransformation #Management #Leadership #TeamTopologies #LeanpubPodcast #DigitalTransformation
Platform Timing Is a Strategic Decision
์ด ๊ธ์ ํ๋ซํผ ์์ง๋์ด๋ง์์ 'ํ๋ซํผ ํ์ด๋ฐ'์ ์ค์์ฑ์ ๊ฐ์กฐํ๋ค. ํ๋ซํผ ํ์ด ์กฐ์ง ๋ด ์คํธ๋ฆผ ์ผ๋ผ์ธ๋ ํ๋ค์ ์ค์ ์๊ตฌ๋ฅผ ์ถฉ๋ถํ ์ดํดํ๊ธฐ ์ ์ ํ๋ซํผ์ ๊ตฌ์ถํ๋ฉด, ์ฑํ๋ฅ ์ด ๋ฎ๊ณ ๋ถ๋ง์ด ๋ฐ์ํ ์ ์๋ค. ํ๋ซํผ ๊ตฌ์ถ ์ ์๋ ํ ๊ฐ ํ์ ์ ํตํ ์๊ตฌ์ฌํญ ๋ฐ๊ฒฌ๊ณผ ๊ฒ์ฆ, ์๋ฒ ๋ฉ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ์ ์ง์ ์ ๊ทผ์ด ํ์ํ๋ฉฐ, ํ๋ซํผ์ด ์ง์ ์ผ๋ก ํ์ํ ์์ ๊ณผ ๋ฒ์๋ฅผ ์ ์คํ ํ๋จํด์ผ ํ๋ค. ์ด๋ฅผ ํตํด ์กฐ์ง ๋ด ํ๋ซํผ์ ํจ๊ณผ์ ๋์ ๊ณผ ํ์ฉ์ ๋๋ชจํ ์ ์๋ค.
https://www.michael-ploed.com/blog/platform-timing-is-a-strategic-decision
#platformengineering #teamtopologies #softwaredevelopment #organizationaldesign #agile
Wanting a platform is not the same as having earned one. Organizations stand up a platform team and ship a v1, only to watch stream-aligned teams route around it. This post treats platform timing as a strategic decision in its own right. It offers signals that the timing is wrong, smaller practices
Zsรณfia Herendi and I will be running a hands-on lab at DDD Europe in Antwerp on June 12.
The premise: you can't design teams without understanding how the business creates value.
We'll connect Business Model Canvas to Team Interaction Modeling. Practical heuristics. Real design work.
This is not a slideshow. A lab where you will share insights with others!
Engineering Leadership Playbook: Build Systems That Scale ๐ #EngineeringLeadership #SystemDesign #TechLeadership
Most engineering teams donโt fail because of weak engineersโthey fail because of broken systems, unclear ownership, and poor architecture decisions. This deep dive breaks down how elite engineering leaders design scalable systems, reduce friction, and build high-performance teams that ship consistently without burnout. #TechLeadership #SoftwareArchitecture #DevOps #EngineeringManagement #ScalableSystems #Leadership
Considerations on cognitive load and organisational structure in sociotechnical systems.
A blog by Martijn Ras
In this article we present our rule of thumb for the sizing of solutions based on what an organisation can handle. Our primary goal is to make you aware of cognitive load theory and sociological considerations on organisational structure. Be...
#dev #softwaredevelopment #TeamTopologies #Cognitiveload #Sociotechnicalsystems #Domain-drivendesign #Agilescaling
In this article we present our rule of thumb for the sizing of solutions based on what an organisation can handle. Our primary goal is to make you aware of cognitive load theory and sociological consi
You can't design teams and software without understanding how value flows through the business.
My new case study: an e-learning SaaS company used DDD principles and practices to move from a Big Ball of Mud to domain-oriented teams.
The customer onboarding went from 60 days to 20 minutes. Cloud costs dropped 80%.
But the story doesn't end here. Read the full case study: https://joaorosa.consulting/services/organization-transformation/scaling-a-corporate-e-learning-saas-platform/
This is just one lesson in a broader course on modern ways of working โ covering how teams can move faster, deliver better, and reduce friction that holds progress back.
โถ๏ธ Check out the full course on the Team Topologies Academy: https://bit.ly/41HqZ9t
#TeamTopologies #ProductDevelopment #DevOps #ModernWaysOfWorking
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
We've known this since Fred Brooks wrote it in 1975โthe opening sentence is a direct quote. Yet many projects still try to add people to meet deadlines, and it fails.
Even skilled developers need ramp-up time, during which they reduce the team's productivity.
I wrote about why this happens and what actually works: https://factor10.com/news/why-is-it-so-hard-to-optimise-software-delivery-under-stress/
#Development #SoftwareDevelopment #Productivity #Automation #TeamTopologies #DevOps #CI
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