Software Delivery in Small Batches

Adam worked at Saltside from 2014-2018. These episode tell the story for how events created a ground up, big-bang rewrite from 2014 through 2015. This is a five part series. Small Batches will back back in 2021.

Adam's Links

• Shipping Code at Saltside (DevOps Days India 2016; a day in the life post-rewrite)

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Adam worked at Saltside from 2014-2018. These episode tell the story for how events created a ground up, big-bang rewrite from 2014 through 2015. This is a five part series. Small Batches will back back in 2021.

Adam's Links

• Shipping Code at Saltside (DevOps Days India 2016; a day in the life post-rewrite)

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Today I’m covering the 2019 book "Team Topologies: Organizing Business & Technology Teams for Fast Flow" written by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais.

Let me read off their official bio:

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - have worked together on organisation design for modern software systems with many clients around the world. Their training sessions on Organisation Design for Modern Software Systems have helped numerous organizations to re-think their approach to team intercommunication and software architecture, improving flow and the effectiveness of software delivery.

So I’m stoked to finally discuss Team Topologies on Small Batches. This book has come up so many times in my work as an SRE at Skillshare and tangentially related to everything I’ve discussed on Small Batches to date. This is because team architecture and software architecture are directly related to software delivery performance.

That’s particularly why I enjoyed Team Topologies so much because it’s truly a book about high velocity software delivery. In fact it’s right there smack in the title. Plus it provides a language to discuss this facet of software delivery.

You’ve likely encountered some of these concepts before, so this time around it may just be a new language.

I’ll share a personal anecdote from earlier in my career to set the stage for this episode.

Roughly fives years ago I lead the platform team through a complete ground up rewrite at a previous company. We were divided into technology teams: The web, mobile, and platform team. Given these boundaries each of respective team lead set out to create their internal architecture. Nothing to see here: just Conway’s law in action. It worked well here because we had isomorphic technology and team architecture.

Then something happened out of the blue shortly after the rewrite completed.

The organization went through a total re-org that changed the team structure, their responsibilities and how they interacted without doing anything to address the underlying technical architecture. This created confusing boundaries, ownership responsibilities, and left so called "independent feature teams" at the mercy of the small number of capable backend engineers capable of working across the various internal services.

These problems could have been avoided with some foresight and planning. Plus it’s especially bothersome because the entire engineering team had just finished a ground up rewrite that architected a system to support an entirely different team topology! If there was ever a time for a reverse Conway maneuver that was not it.

This example speaks to the importance of Conway’s law and how team and software architecture fit together to create fast flow or on the other hand just inhibit it.

Team Topologies provides a framework that avoids this problem from the outset by optimizing for fast flow.

Links

• Small Batches #34: Team Topologies with Matthew Skelton
• @Manuelpaisable
• @MatthewPSkelton
• Buy Team Topologies
• Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load @ DOES Europe 2019
• Team Topologies Posters
• Team Topologies on Mik Plus One
• Team Topologies at Parts Unlimited w/Manuel Pais
• The Idealcast # 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear

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https://www.codewithjason.com/rails-with-jason-podcast/adam-hawkins/

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In this episode of Small Batches, host Adam Hawkins welcomes Alex Nesbitt, a strategy expert and member of the Flow Collective, to delve into the nuances of strategic thinking. The discussion covers different types of strategies, pro-tips on strategic thinking, and how strategy relates to the concept of flight levels.

Nesbitt shares insights from his extensive consulting career, touching on topics like identifying leverage points, the relationship between strategy and tactics, and why being strategic is often more critical than having a strategy. The episode also stresses the importance of having a clear vision, enabling organizational constraints, and the roles of resilience and maintenance in strategic planning. Alex mentions practical examples, resources, and tips to help software and business leaders enhance their strategic approach.

Want more?

• 🚀 New listener? Start with the introduction.
• 🎁 Enter the FREE giveaway for a copy of "Playing to Win"
• 🧭 Get the Small Batches Way guide to software delivery excellence
• 🥋 Software Kaizen: My One-on-One System for Engineering Leadership
• 📘 Playing to Win by Lafely & Martin
• 📘 Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Rumelt
• 📘 The Effective Executive by Drucker
• 🧠 Effectuation Theory

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:17) - Alex's Background
• (04:52) - What is Strategy?
• (08:10) - The Shadow Strategy
• (12:56) - How to Practice Strategy
• (22:03) - Software Architecture & Strategy
• (25:33) - Strategy & Being Strategic
• (29:50) - Five Pillars of Strategic Thinking
• (34:46) - Pain of Bad Strategy
• (37:22) - Alex's Tip for Surviving Ambiquitous Strategy
• (38:38) - Strategy Deployment & Hoshin Kanri
• (42:47) - Tip of Software Development
• (48:03) - Alex's Recommend Resources
• (52:47) - Adam's Takeaway & Segue into AI
• (55:19) - Alex's Links
• (57:19) - Outro

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