Team Topologies 1: Organizing Business and Technology Teams w/ Manuel Pais & Matthew Skelton

**Manuel Pais** (0:00)
We were seeing some of the patterns that were working and helping teams get work done more efficiently with faster flow, with better feedback loops. And we were also seeing some of the patterns that didn't work so well.

**Matthew Skelton** (0:12)
We talk about the sensing organization, and I certainly see many organizations as effectively blind. Imagine an amoeba, like proto-animal, but basically kind of doesn't have any eyes or doesn't have any ability to sense anything.

**Dan Lines** (0:25)
Today, I'm joined by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton, writers of the book, Team Toplogies, Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow.
Sign up free at linearb.io. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton, writers of the book Team Toplogies, Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Guys, thanks so much for joining us on the pod today.

**Matthew Skelton** (1:11)
It's good to be here. Thanks.

**Manuel Pais** (1:12)
Thanks for having us.

**Dan Lines** (1:14)
Yeah, absolutely. Before we dive into your book, I'd love to give the audience a chance to get to know you a little bit better. So, Manuel, you've been a thought leader in DevOps for years now. In fact, you helped found DevOps Lisbon.
Can you tell us a little bit about what brought you into the organizational and team design space?

**Manuel Pais** (1:40)
Yeah, it still feels weird when I hear someone saying, I'm a thought leader, but yes, I've had that tag from Tech Beacon and others. Basically, I've been involved with DevOps since around 2011 So pretty much more or less when it started a couple of years later. And so for me, it made a lot of sense because my background is in computer science and I had a number of different roles from development to testing, to build and release engineering.
And so this idea of we need to break down the silos and get teams to collaborate when they need to get work on things that are affect both teams or multiple teams. And that we should, we cannot just be working silos and expect things to improve. That made a lot of sense to me. And then I started DevOps Lisbon with a friend of mine a few years later, which has been quite successful. And I'm originally from, I am from Lisbon in Portugal. And so it was really great to see a community start forming around the ideas of DevOps over there. And we have, I think more than 4,000 members now. So that's really great. But over time, and when I started working with Matthew, so we met at the conference in 2015 and Matthew had already started talking about DevOps topologies.
And I found that fascinating because again, was looking at the team side and what are the things that the challenge is to improve the way that organizations work and get things done basically. And so I started working with Matthew as well. And again, we were working around DevOps and continuous delivery, but often clients thought what they need is better tooling and better practices. And that's really just the start of the story. You always end up realizing actually there are problems here in terms of how teams interact or don't interact. And lack of understanding of the purpose of team and who are their customers and things like this.
So it was around that time that I got started to really focus more and more on team design and interactions.

**Dan Lines** (3:54)
Yeah, really cool to hear that DevOps Lisbon is 4,000 plus members. That's awesome. And with the team topology stuff, probably not talked about enough as you think about solutions for moving faster and that type of thing. Matthew, for you, in addition to coining the term team topologies, that somewhat describes how teams are arranged into an organization, you're a well-recognized name in the DevOps community.
But when I was doing some research for this pod, I also saw that you have a master's degree from Oxford in neuroscience. How has your experience in that field informed your work in software and org design?

**Matthew Skelton** (4:43)
That's a great question. Thank you. So, yeah, my first degree was from University of Reading in the UK in cybernetics and computer science. On the computer science side, the core ideas around networking and operating systems and writing software and all that kind of stuff. But we also did a bunch of stuff around cybernetics, which is control systems, basically, the science of control theory, feedback loops, that kind of thing. But it was applied to all sorts of different situations. We obviously, in the lab, we did experimental stuff with electronics and things that are easy to experiment with. But the theory was applied, the principles were applied to situations like organizations, in fact, but also planets. So a planetary science, and we did some stuff around psychology and so on, so systems as a general principle. Some of that stuff got me interested in how the brain works. I went and did, I got a scholarship, actually, to do the Masters in Oxford, Masters in Neuroscience. Now, the word neuroscience nowadays, 20 years later, can mean something a bit popular, a bit like popular science about how people think the brain works. It doesn't mean that, certainly didn't mean that back then. It meant, this is biology, this is experimental biology, how does the brain work? How do we understand? How do we perceive? And I think my experience there informed the team topology stuff, it informed how I approach these things on a few different levels. It helped me get some interesting insights into kind of individual psychology, the kind of, in particular, how perception works. Perception as in seeing, listening, touch, that kind of some of the ways in which perception can be modulated.