Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Bas Vodde

Interesting thoughts that I would not recommend

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2020

This book was hard for me to read and hard for me to review. It made me angry at times. Some of the recommendations of the book almost made me throw it away on the spot. Yet, I wanted to hear what the authors have to say. The further I got in the book, the more I became to see some value in what they were sharing. Yet... I would not recommend following the suggestions from this book.

This book is about teams and organizations. How should you structure your teams and the organization? It proposes four types of teams (topologies) that you might need to build products. Their argument, when you make these teams topologies clear and specify the interaction modes then that should greatly improve your product development.

However... the whole book stands and falls with their interpretation of Conway's Law and the strict approach to code ownership they take (chapter two). They see that components/services must be owned by teams and the team design must map to the architectural structure. Personally, I disagree with both of them and worked for over a decade in environments where this isn't true... making it hard to continue the rest of the book. They also argue that teams should be separated on purpose and only coordinate with the designated interaction mode... which is the exact opposite of the environments that I enjoyed working most where interaction between teams was frequent and informal. In my experience, this level of ownership and separation is going to cause silo forming and will make building one product really hard. I would recommend against this.

The rest of the book explores the four team-topologies (stream-aligned teams, enabling teams, complicated sub-system teams, and platform teams. Of these, the authors recommend most teams ought to be stream-aligned and I would agree with that. That said... many stream-aligned teams in the same product would likely need to work on the same services/components, yet the author seems to claim that this isn't the case as good modular architecture can solve that (?!?). Here my world must be very different from the authors as I do not see how this can be resolved.

The last part explores the three team-interaction modes, (1) collaboration, (2) x-as-a-service, and (3) facilitating. The different kind of teams have different default interaction modes. Again, I found the recommendations against non-standard team interaction quite harmful.

All in all, as said, this is a difficult book to read and review. I learned from it, I liked it at times, it was vebose but written ok… yet I would never recommend it to anyone, with the exception of people who want to learn about what is the opposite of multiple teams interacting closely on shared code. For this reason, in the end, I decided on two stars.

141 people found this helpful

Carissa

Great content, hard to power through

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 6, 2022

Verified Purchase

We read this book as part of a work book club and while there was a lot of good ideas and content, many found it tough to absorb and apply. Perhaps it was not the right read for us at the time but I definitely will continue to use this book as needed, just tough to sit down and read it consistently over a couple weeks.

3 people found this helpful

Marcelo Isolani

Muito bom !

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on June 29, 2022

Verified Purchase

Livro muito bom !
Traz para teoria o que muitas vezes organizamos na pratica e nao sabemos o motivo.
Bastante interessante e vira material de consulta.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Really good book, different perspective for people that is to technical

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 1, 2022

Verified Purchase

The book gives you a different perspective regarding how to build software in an effective way, by putting a team first approach and given the proper tools and guides to achieve it

Fernando Luiz Goulart

Arquitetos de TI são gerentes

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on June 20, 2022

Verified Purchase

Livro essencial para arquitetos de sistemas (qualquer sistema seja front, back, mobile, banco de dados e etc).
Traz a visão de que o arquiteto de sistema deve ser um gerente, já que a organização dos times influencia diretamente na arquitetura dos sistemas e vice-versa. E consequentemente no fluxo de entrega de software pronto pra uso.

2 people found this helpful

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Aimee D. Bechtle

Second Time Was a Charm!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

Finally a resource that looks past the agile teams and supporting business facing only products by introducing Enabling and Platform teams. I read this book twice. The first time I read it I was working at another company and many of the teams were stream-aligned and there were platform teams, so the book was more validation rather than giving me new knowledge. I am now reading it through the lens of my new company and how they are organized and I am riveted. The business unit I am in is Conway’s law amplified and the book is giving me the words to be able to communicate the problems and why. I’m looking at the communications and dependency overhead and inside I am screaming “look at the software architecture!” And “break up the DB and Ops silo!” I myself am forming a platform X-as-a-Service team for Cloud-Native apps that includes CICD, containers, microservices architecture, data analytics services, observability services and using the book to help me design the teams. It is a well written and actionable book.

8 people found this helpful

Geir

Good starting point

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 26, 2021

Verified Purchase

Good perspectives and ideas, however a bit repetitive. Lacks a bit in relating the ideas to the wider organisation they are to be implemented in. Does not spend any time on the humans that make up the teams.

3 people found this helpful

Rod Soares

Interesting why to manage software delivery teams

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 25, 2021

Verified Purchase

Interesting theory, easy read with great real live examples.
I personally would like more implementation examples and templates but overall Teams Topology is a well worth read for anyone delivering software at scale.

Jerreck McWilliams

Software Architecture For Teams

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 5, 2019

Verified Purchase

If you're a busy CTO, the audiobook is just as excellent as the written one.

Team Topologies highlights the problems your org chart is creating for your software's architecture (and as a result, your business).

To remedy these problems, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais offer a different perspective on org structure in the form of four fundamental team topologies: value stream aligned teams, enabling teams, platform teams, and complicated subsystem teams.

The theory behind these team structures is chiefly built upon the premise of the Inverse Conway Maneuver, which "recommends evolving your team and organizational structure to promote your desired architecture."
Ideally, this would require skilled software architects also be the architects of the teams in order to - for example - develop well-defined team APIs since software architects are already expected to be masters of API development.

Additionally, the concepts of developing sensing organizations, using Domain Driven Design to identify fracture planes, and managing a team's cognitive load are dissected to explain how to effectively structure high-performing teams.

If you have read and implemented the practices espoused in Project to Product, the Devops Handbook, and Accelerate but are still encountering communication bottlenecks and problems with scaling your existing team structures to meet product demands, then I highly recommend Team Topologies.

18 people found this helpful

Rüdiger Fritsches

Sehr interessante Denkansätze

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

Das ein weiter-so in Deutschland nicht sinnvoll oder gar möglich ist, durfte so gut wie jeder in diesem Land in den zwei Jahren Corona-Pandemie am eigenen Leib erfahren. Man muss nicht Allem in diesem Buch zustimmen, aber Markus Väth liefert reihenweise gute Denkansätze, geschrieben, wie üblich, in seiner manchmal sarkastischen und polemischen aber immer sachlichen Art. Definitiv lesenswert!

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