Team Topology

Enable Fast-flow, by organizing teams and their interactions.

When any organization grows things often tend to just… slow down. In this workshop we figure out what your leadership team needs to do to set up team structures to regain that speed. We’ll use the Team Typologies framework to do.

Agenda

1. [9am] Morning - Learning

   1. [120min] Core concepts

      1. What’s a team?

      2. What introduces cognitive load?

      3. What’s Fast Flow and Conway?

      4. Types of Team Typologies

   2. [15min] Break

   3. [45min] Case Study A - Team APIs

   4. [45min] Case Study B - Flow Blockers

2. [1pm] Lunch Break

3. [2pm-6pm]Afternoon - Doing

   1. [~30min] What topologies do you have now?

   2. [~90min] Finding fracture planes with Independent Service Heuristics (ISH)

   3. [15m] Break

   4. [~75min] Mapping out the next future state, and how to transition to that

   5. [~30min] A processes to change ourselves regularly (as needed)

*Note: We can change this into two half-day workshops, even doing the first one virtually and the second one in-person.

1 Day, €3000
Up-to 10 People

Send an email to book a workshop:
Brian@BuildingBetterTeams.de

How does it work?

✅ Entirely online
⏳Full day workshop (9 hours including breaks)
🆙 For Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and Tech Leads.
📝 Walk away with the next iteration of your org structure
🤝 1-hour follow-up call any time in the next 30 days.

Learn to effectively organize your team

In this workshop, you and your leadership team will gain the knowledge to understand the reasons that some team structures work and other’s don’t. They’ll get enough experience with Team Topologies to see how to structure teams in different ways. More importantly, we’ll work on case-studies to discover how to remove blockers from fast-flow of teams, and how teams should clarify their interactions with other teams to avoid problems and speed up collaboration.

In the 2nd part of the workshop, we focus specifically on your company. We identify how your actual teams work. How to break them up based around value delivery. How to design the next structure for your teams, and how to manage the whole process on your own.

Your Facilitator

Brian Graham

What won’t you get?

• The perfect team structure

  • Team Topologies is a system to help you regularly update your team. We use the tool to look for blockers to fast flow, make improvements to our team interactions, and also help guide the changes. This is a constant process that will never be perfect, only “better than before”.

• A way to solve internal team processes and “ways of working”

  • Internal team topics are very important, but not the focus of this workshop. We will focus on the types of teams you need, and how how they should interact. How those teams run their internal processes is a topic we can help you with in a different workshop (just send an email).

• Architecture Diagrams & Models

  • One really important realization in team structure and software development is that the software architecture often ends up mirroring how the teams were structured and interacting (also known as “Conway’s Law”). A big part of Team Typologies is concerned with building the right kinds of teams so your architecture is correct, but we won’t get into that in this workshop. However, you can additionally book our “Diagram your Architecture“ if you need this solved.

What do you need to bring?

Because this isn’t a lecture but really an interactive workshop, we’ll need you to bring a few things with you!

• Bring the participants to a 20-minute check-in call a week before our session. Having a quality workshop depends on your team being ready to discuss the product and customer facing value. We do this check-in because it can be very common for development teams (and even Product Managers in some cases) to not know enough about the customer or the way the company provides value. This short call gives us a chance to check if the team already knows everything or they need to learn a bit internally before the workshop.

• Please prepare in advanced your best guess at how your teams are structured today (in any format), and what major customer facing products you offer.

• The absolute basics of using Miro (drawing boxes, writing text, adding lines between boxes). You’ll need to draw!

• If the session is virtual, we need every participant to be on their own individual laptop. The poor sound quality and inability to participate when everyone gathers around one laptop in a conference room leads to a very poor experience for everyone.

Who should attend?

This workshop is aimed at tech teams inside startups (usually in a growth phase) with more than one team. To be successful, you should bring your technical and product leaders. If you want to change the team structure, they both need to be part of it.

This session is usually sought out to help teams who want to get back to the kind of high-speed development org they had before they grew so large.

Note: If you have fewer than 15 people over all your teams, this workshop can help you plan before you grow but will not be immediately helpful.

More than just a workshop!

• Unblock your teams from moving quickly.

• Gain the tools and knowledge to constantly keep the teams moving fast as things change.

• Interactive workshops in Miro lets every participant learn by DOING instead of just watching!

Have questions?

Just send Brian an email!:
brian@buildingbetterteams.de