Wed 20th March - Andy Butcher: Autonomy and choreography - using Conway's Law to tackle the company scaling problem plus Matt Skelton: Beyond the Spotify Model: using team topologies for fast flow and organisation evolution

Andy Butcher: Autonomy and choreography - using Conway's Law to tackle the company scaling problem Small companies can move fast and stay aligned because communication is easy with a small team. But as companies grow, communication becomes exponentially harder. A command and control, top-down hierarchy inevitably emerges. And to protect the culture, companies often adopt an ""internal marketing"" narrative which software teams can find disingenuous. This talk is based on the challenges we've faced at Sky Betting & Gaming, which has tripled in engineering headcount over the last 3 years as we've become the number one sports betting company in the UK by customer volume. I'll explain why the concepts of choreography and orchestration apply to horizontally scaling an IT driven organisation, and how splitting into autonomous teams (with the right alignment and accountability) can create a workplace where you can get things done, and people feel excited and passionate about what they do. Bio: Andy is an architect at Sky Betting & Gaming, working on the SkyBet website and app, which handle the equivalent of Black Friday every Saturday afternoon. He's a passionate advocate of agile practices, and believes that software engineering is about people. Twitter: @MrAndyButcher Website: Andy Butcher's Blog Matt Skelton: Beyond the Spotify Model: using team topologies for fast flow and organisation evolution For effective, modern, cloud-connected software systems we need to organize our teams in certain ways. Taking account of Conway's Law, we look to match the team structures to the required software architecture, enabling or restricting communication and collaboration for the best outcomes. This talk will cover the basics of organization design using Team Topologies, exploring a selection of key team types and how and when to use them in order to make the development and operation of your software systems as effective as possible. The talk is based on the forthcoming 2019 book Team Topologies and first-hand experience helping companies around the world with the design of their technology teams. Key takeaways: 1. Why using the “Spotify Model” of team design is not enough 2. The four fundamental team topologies needed for modern software delivery 3. The three team interaction modes that enable fast flow and rapid learning 4. How to address Conway’s Law, cognitive load, and team evolution with Team Topologies Bio: Matt is the Founder and Head of Consulting at Conflux. He has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. As Head of Consulting at Conflux, he specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability and organisation dynamics for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016), Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016), and Team Topologies (IT Revolution Press, 2019).  Matthew founded Conflux in 2017 to offer training and consulting to organisations building and running software systems.  Twitter: @matthewpskelton  LinkedIn: matthewskelton Slideshare: matthewskelton