Why Team Topologies Might Not Deliver The Value You Expect
29 Sep 2024 - Michael Voorhaen
After revisiting Team Topologies, I’m left with a lingering sense of unease. Can the approach work? Probably. But will it work for your organization if applied without careful consideration? I’m skeptical.
The book is based on concepts like Conway’s Law and Cognitive Load Theory but seems to rest on some misconceptions:
- Conway’s Law is often misinterpreted as a rigid rule, leading to the mistaken belief that shared ownership inevitably causes chaos. But that is not the original advice that Conway was trying to give. Here is a quote from “How do committees invent” by Melvin Conway: “Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design”. I won’t make any conclusions for you, I can only advice you to go back to source and read it for your self (Thank you Craig Larman for reminding me about this in your keynote on the LeSS 2024 conference and that going back to the original publication was the right thing to do).
- Similarly, the authors’ narrow view of Cognitive Load overlooks other strategies like cross-team collaboration and continuous learning. A broader perspective on managing cognitive load is explored in Cognitive Load: Unraveling the Myths and Realities by Jurgen De Smet and Viktor Grgic. In their book you will find plenty of background information and resources to dig deeper into to the topic yourself.
Moreover, the Team Topologies book provides limited guidance on when its approach is best suited for organizations of different sizes, leaving readers with unanswered questions about its applicability across various contexts.
But perhaps more concerning is the lack of emphasis on understanding why you’re changing your organizational structure in the first place. The push for faster delivery is often made without fully considering the underlying reasons. Speed is often seen as the solution when, in reality, the true issue might be a lack of clarity or alignment with long-term goals. Think about it—do you even know how to get to your goal? In many cases, our goals are long-term and evolving, not set in stone. We make assumptions about where we want to end up, and with each step toward that goal, we make further assumptions (see Evidence-Based Management). If your organization lacks mechanisms to track whether you’re genuinely moving toward your goal, Team Topologies won’t help and might even make things worse.
A final concern is that the authors don’t seem to start from the actual work that needs to be done or the real priorities of your business. While you might identify clear business domains for your stream-aligned teams, not all domains are equally important at every point in time. Upcoming work could have cross-cutting concerns that aren’t neatly contained within a single domain. What you gain in speed, you might lose in business agility. You might also just be shifting cognitive load towards a product management team as described in one of my previous posts.
Shortly after reading Team Topologies again, I picked up The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Published in 1984, it explores the Theory of Constraints and the journey of a plant manager working to save his factory through continuous improvement. One of the things that stood out for me is the emphasis on looking at the entire flow from start to finish. Without a broader view of the entire value stream, Team Topologies risks being just a local optimization. Your teams might achieve fast flow, but the way they are structured could turn into a bottleneck, preventing real value delivery and hindering your ability to reach your goals.
Are you wondering how you can ensure that your organizational structure truly aligns with your long-term business goals? Here are two recommendations on getting started:
- Read the book on Creating Agile Organizations by Cesário Oliveira Ramos. And I can highly recommend one of the Certified Designing Agile Organizations courses from Boost Your Scrum (DM me if you want a referral code for a 20% discount).
- Take a look at Org Topologies, read the primer and/or register for one of their courses.