Matthew Skelton

Businesses can no longer choose between optimizing for stability and optimizing for speed

members of the technology teams managing these interfaces, we must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to treating people and technology as a single human/computer carbon/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem

Systems thinking focuses on optimizing for the whole, looking at the overall flow of work, identifying what the largest bottleneck is today, and eliminating it. Then repeat

organizations need to develop more realistic pictures of the expected and actual communication happening between individuals and teams

Much like a software architecture document gets outdated as soon as the actual software development starts, an org chart is always out of sync with reality

Niels Pflaeging, author of Organize for Complexity, identifies not one but three different organizational structures in every organization:2
Formal structure (the org chart)—facilitates compliance
Informal structure—the “realm of influence” between individuals
Value creation structure—how work actually gets done based on inter-personal and inter-team reputation

empowering teams, and treating them as fundamental building blocks, individuals inside those teams move closer together to act as a team rather than just a group of people. On the other hand, by explicitly agreeing on interaction modes with other teams, expectations on behaviors become clearer and inter-team trust grows

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating

Conway’s law: “Organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

sort of “revival” of Conway’s law took place around 2015, when microservices architectures were on the rise. In particular, James Lewis, Technical Director at Thoughtworks, and others came up with the idea of applying an “inverse Conway maneuver” (or reverse Conway maneuver), whereby an organization focuses on organizing team structures to match the architecture they want the system to exhibit rather than expecting teams to follow a mandated architecture design