A fast flow of work and seamless collaboration across multiple teams are essential for software and digital product development.
Team Topologies and Feature Teams have emerged as popular approaches, each capable of ensuring a frictionless enjoyable collaboration and a fast flow of work.
Each claims universal applicability.
This session delves beyond sales pitches and hype, and offers a pragmatic comparison of both models, based on over 20 years of real-world experience.
You'll gain insights into the trade-offs and the criteria to decide your approach based on your specific context and circumstances.

Target Audience:
------------------------------
Technical and Team Leaders/Managers, Team members, delivery orchestrators, facilitators, change agents (tech/agile coaches, scrum masters, etc.)

Learning objectives
----------------------------------
a) a pragmatic comparison of both models, Team Topologies and Feature Teams
b) the Feature Teams approach transcending Conway's Law, its pros and cons
c) the Team Topologies approach embracing Conway's Law, its pros and cons
d) a set of trade-offs and criteria to choose, mix and match the two approaches based on your specific context and circumstances

Level: expert
-------------------------

Prerequisites:
--------------------------
- experience working in a cross-functional team under multiple different settings
- experience and some awareness of the impacts of different settings on the planning and coordination of the work and on the effectiveness of the collaboration

Session length and format:
--------------------------------------------------
75 minutes

This session is a short frontal presentation with several Q&A and inclusive conversations facilitated by the presenter.

Keywords:
---------------------
Cross-team Collaboration, Cross-team dependencies, Conway's Law, Team Topologies, Feature Teams, Shared work, flow, delays, hand-offs

Previous presentation iterations
----------------------------------------------------
- 2023: Agile Manchester
- 2023: DevDays Europe & DevOps Pro Europe, Day-1 Closing Keynote

Reference material
------------------------------------
The content of the session has been discussed at length with Bas Vodde co-author of Feature Teams, with Matthew Skelton co-author of Team, with Jon Kern co-author of the Agile Manifesto and many other experienced tech leads.
The content of the session has also been discussed in this series of long posts:

- https://www.smharter.com/blog/2022/08/08/agile-cross-team-collaboration-how-tos-long/
- https://www.smharter.com/blog/2022/11/21/transcending-agile-cross-team-collaboration-with-shared-work/
- https://www.smharter.com/blog/2024/01/01/when-how-to-move-effectively-tasks-responsibilities-outside-the-team/