When the Team Topologies book was released at the end of 2019, I was able to connect a lot with the principles and practices that Manuel and Matthew explain with great detail.
Since I read it during 2020, and starting to apply those principles, I understood the humanistic values that are behind those principles and practices, the vision they aim to transmit to the readers to think about organizations as they are; a sociotechnical system that changes constantly.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you already know that I write a lot about my experiences on different organizations applying Team Topologies. The good outcomes, the learnings of undesired consequences, and my frustrations as a manager by not having enough tooling to create that organizational sensing that Team Topologies empathizes on.
I understood the principles, I was applying the concepts, we created a good organizational sensing, but it was so painful and it relayed completely on the leadership level having a deep understanding of Team Topologies, and creating custom build tooling (google forms and a lot of spreadsheets) to have a feedback loop of how the organization was evolving.
When the people with deep understanding of Team Topologies left the company, most of those principles and approach was lost with them. It has been painful to see how a high performing and fast adapting teams just become bureaucratic when you no longer have the support of a leader with that approach 😞.
People might leave, but tooling stay, at least for a while. Can tooling help those principles to stay for long enough until the new leadership becomes familiar with them so not all effort is lost?
That’s why a year or so ago, I started developing a tool that I would liked to have as a manager to measure a crucial aspect of the team to make informed decisions and understand its consequences, the Team Cognitive Load.
Hypothesis: If you reduce the cost of measuring, the cost of understand the team cognitive load, and you make it observable to the organization, it should create a culture of making informed decisions by data-driven team metrics, shouldn’t it?
I was developing this tool and doing some interviews when some ex colleges that suffered the same pain as myself joined to help me on the development. Later on the tool become enablingflow.com.
Usually, we don’t start projects because they are easy, we start them because we thought they were easier.
The complexity of a domain as it is organizational sensing though measuring team cognitive load is huge! So, challenging to build an effective model that would impact a huge variety of organizations in different maturity levels, business models, etc.
Along the journey, I was in contact with Manuel about my advances on the tooling and my vision on what is needed in the industry to help organizations understand better their teams, how they evolve, and understand themselves as complex adaptive sociotechnical systems.
Our conversations were super fulfilling and I was able to understand Manuel’s vision on a tool that was specifically to measure team cognitive load, what later become teamperature.com 🙌
During the experience of building enablingflow, I found myself with several blockers that could prevent me to develop the product effectively.
Then it was when I spoken again with Manuel, where he was able to explain a little more about the company and product vision, and how they are approaching the product development.
We found a common fit.
I had expertise on the domain of using team cognitive load on different organizations and team structures, plus I was thinking deeply about the domain and informing myself about previous studies.
Manuel was building the product and needed a person to delegate the product decision making.
It makes total sense to join forces to impact the Team Topologies ecosystem! It is about the vision and the purpose.
As you might guess, it is a total honor to join Team Topologies on continuing impacting organizations 😄
I’m sure that this journey will bring us a huge amount of learnings and the impact will exceed our expectations.
Join the wait list to not miss the product launch!
