Team Topologies 📘

My review, the best ideas, and takeaways from the famous book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.

Team organization — that is, how people communicate and work together — can make or break companies. Yet, when it comes to organizing engineering teams, it is hard to find good, comprehensive advice.

Most ideas out there feel either too abstract — e.g. “create two-pizza teams” — or too specific — e.g. “the ideal ratio between engineers and managers is 5”.

There are few works that manage to stay high-level, so to be relevant to many situations, while also being practical, so that you can apply lessons to your team.

Team Topologies is one of them.

Written in 2019 by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, both experienced DevOps consultants, it has rapidly become a seminal book about team organization.

It has achieved this by providing an original, brilliant mental model about collaboration, coupled with case studies that let people understand how to use it in practice.

So, today I will review the core ideas in the book and give you my own take on them. We will cover:

• 🔄 Conway’s reverse maneuvre — using Conway’s Law for good.

• 🏋️‍♀️ Cognitive Load — an original way to think at teams’ scope.

• 🍀 The Four Types of Teams — the core of the book.

• 💬 The Three Interaction Modes — how the types of teams work together.

• 📌 My takeaways — what I personally took from the book and how to use this in practice.

Let’s dive in 👇