Team Topologies - Organizing for fast flow of value

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Andy Norton - Team Topologies Advocate

Andy Norton - Team Topologies Advocate

Andy is a senior engineering manager, and over the last few years has worked at one of the UK's most successful unicorn start-ups, one of the big high-street retailers, and now at Y Combinator backed start-up Prolific - a company changing the way we do research online.

At every step of this journey, he's focused on pragmatic ways of working, meaningful change that sticks, and working with teams to help them to get better at how they deliver. A big fan of the socio-technical side of agile, he firmly understands that developing software is a people thing.

You can reach him in the following ways:

Team Topologies advocacy

In 2019 Andy was part of the team at Footasylum that used the principles from Team Topologies to improve team interactions, codify team types and help transform how the engineering team delivered value. This was turned into a case study on the Team Topologies website.

After moving to cinch in 2021 as Head of Engineering Practices, Andy co-presented a talk on the scaling practices at cinch and how Team Topologies and specifically the concepts of Enabling and Platform teams were essential to scaling from 25 to 400 people and moving cinch from start-up to scale-up. This talk ended up being presented at both Lean Agile Scotland and Agile Cambridge in 2022.

Andy also presented a talk at Leeds Test Atelier on how the focus on flow using examples from Team Topologies should help frame how QA and Software Engineers can work better together, and provide enabling opportunities and encourage flow-first behaviours.

At Fast Flow Conf 2023, Andy co-presented a talk with Toli Apostolidis on 'Field Notes of Flow' explaining how the book has influenced their approach to working with teams, developing socio-technical practices and building high performing teams.