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Organizational Design

Team Topologies Organizational Design Strategy

Old school organizations design their teams around technical layers, functional silos, or historical accidents. The result is slow delivery, unclear ownership, and constant coordination overhead.

Our workshop applies the well known Team Topologies pattern language directly to your real organization: you’ll map how work flows today, design a future-state team structure optimized for fast flow, and build a concrete plan for closing the gap.

The approach is practical. Every exercise uses your actual teams, value streams, and pain points. The maps, plans, and decisions you create are working artifacts, not classroom hypotheticals.

Who It’s For

Engineering leaders, product leaders, and organizational designers responsible for how teams are structured and how work flows. We recommend including people from across the delivery chain; the exercises work best when multiple perspectives are in the room. Cohorts accommodate up to 20 people.

Format

  • Remote: 3 sessions delivered over 2-3 weeks
  • In-person: 2 days

What You’ll Walk Away With

  • A clearer picture of how your teams and value streams work today
  • A shared language for diagnosing and designing organizational structure
  • A practical understanding of the Team Topologies framework and how to apply it
  • A draft design for a more effective, product-aligned organization
  • A high-level roadmap for moving from today’s structure to tomorrow’s
  • A digital whiteboard with all workshop examples, curriculum, and exercises

Sessions

Session 1: Understanding Our Current State

How does work actually flow through your organization? We start with Conway’s Law and Westrum’s Typology to build a shared vocabulary for how org structure shapes both architecture and culture. Then we get concrete: you’ll sketch a value stream for a recent capability your teams delivered, mapping which teams were involved at each phase and where delays, handoffs, and blockers appeared.

Session 2: Designing Our Future State

With a shared picture of the current state, we go deep on the Team Topologies framework: the four team types, the three interaction modes, and how interactions evolve over time as platforms mature. We cover practices for each team type, from product trios and dual-track agile for stream-aligned teams to golden paths and platform-as-a-product thinking for platform teams. Then you’ll apply these ideas to redesign your teams.

Session 3: Create a Path Forward

Designing the future is the easy part; getting there is the real work. We revisit Shook’s Model (change behavior to change thinking, not the reverse) and cover common anti-patterns and traps that derail org design efforts. Then you’ll build a change plan: gap analysis between current and future state, a “big bet” structural change with a clear hypothesis, and the supporting changes needed to make it stick.

Attribution

This workshop applies select concepts from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’ Team Topologies (IT Revolution Press, 2019) to real organizational challenges. We recommend reading the book as a companion to our workshop.