We are developing the teamcognitiveload.com application, and while doing so, we are reflecting on how we are doing stuff, on Team Topologies concepts and fast flow of change. Today we came out to the next realization.
We are a stream-aligned team.
It is so obvious that we just give it for granted.
We see all the benefits that any stream-aligned team enjoys/aims for:
Continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain.
Clarity of purpose.
Empowered to build and deliver user value as fast, safe, and independently.
No hand-offs to other teams.
I totally understand why people love startups, they enjoy the benefits of working in stream-aligned teams before things get messy.
How many times did you hear someone at an startup that it is no longer as it was before due to the bureaucracy and they start looking for a change? I do think Team Topologies can help maintain that startup mindset that people enjoys so that organizations do not lose talented people.
Then stuff gets messy
If startups have a good start by being a stream-aligned team, when things start going in the wrong direction when the organization grows?
It’s a mix of multiple things.
There are some points that might be the first problems you might detect:
A forever increasing cognitive load.
Creating handovers and dependencies between teams.
But today, I want to share about a case that might not be that obvious to detect.
The forgotten team that everyone collaborates with
No, it is not the infrastructure team. Indeed, it is a team that I cannot categorize as any of the four fundamental teams of Team Topologies.
The leadership/C-level team.
When organizations start growing, they might take the organizational decision to:
Dedicate a PM in each stream-aligned team.
They moving into a “higher-level/strategic” position to focus on the important stuff.
They have weekly check-ins to verify that things are going in the right direction.
All the sudden, they are in collaboration with all the teams. You adopt this approach because you want to avoid top-down decisions and creating hand-offs between teams (leadership team → other stream-aligned teams).
This approach doesn't look bad per se, indeed, people says that collaboration is great, and when things go wrong, it is because we are not collaborating effectively, isn't it?
Indeed, the more teams you have, the more collaboration it requires, and you start having those wierd dynamics of “we are so slow on decision making”, “as a leader, I need to be everywhere so that we ensure we go in the great direction”, “why teams don’t have more ownership instead of asking leadership to make decisions”?, “(leader) I have too many meetings, let’s hire a manager so I can delegate those day to day meetings to them”, and a long etc.
All the sudden, we have created that middle management due to the constant need of collaboration and alignment. Ending with a fractal structure that repeats itself over-and-over making the organization slower and slower by design.
A key approach here is to map teams and how they collaborate, if we miss an important team as Leadership and how it interacts with other teams, we might aim to have fast flow of change but with only a partial view on the organizational problem that won’t allow us to solve the root cause, we will only achieve a local optimization.
I don’t mean that teams shouldn’t collaborate with leadership team for example, but understanding how the relationship is impacting on fast flow of change.
Is there any solution to this? 😟
No, we are doomed. Good luck my friend.
Or…. we adopt a Platform as a Product mindset from Team Topologies.
If I recall correctly, at Fast Flow Conf, Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies, mentioned something in the lines of:
Indeed, we are seeing that leadership teams should act as a Platform Team to allow fast flow.
See reference here.
And indeed, based on this anti-pattern of long-lived collaboration between leadership team and other teams, appling Team Topologies principles, it tells us that we should aim for XaaS to enable fast flow of change.
It just makes so much sense 🤯
We have seen this approach materialize in other forms such as:
Guidelines
Principles
OKRs
So, we have been doing this somehow already, and it makes so much sense. What I am trying to say here is that, by being intentional, we can impact better our fast flow of change.
If you are in a leadership team, let me ask you a question. Are you supporting stream-aligned teams with a platform as a product mindset or you require a forever open collaboration?
Detecting soon that you are going in the wrong direction
That’s exactly that we aim to solve with teamcognitiveload.com.
You add a new team, and a feedback cycle later you detect that:
Team cognitive load got worse.
A hand-off between two teams is happening, a dependency were created.
That team is in continue collaboration with the other team.
All those signals of your organization being shaped in the wrong direction detected early is a game changer to enable a sustainable fast flow of change.
We always have great intentions on our decisions, yet we are in a complex system which the actions and the initial expected outcomes and the reality have nothing in common with the reality.
Having a fast feedback loop at organization level decision-making between you make a decision and be able to review those signals is critical to detect that the direction your organization is taking isn’t the one you intended. Detecting early those outcomes will help you avoid inertia to change and don’t waste critical time and resources in nowadays competitive market.
