John Wilson - Team Topologies Advocate
John Wilson - Team Topologies Advocate
John is currently a Senior Agile Coach at Booking.com. He is passionate about technical excellence and whole team approaches to ways of working that enable sustainable fast flow of value. Previously, as a Director of Technology for an M&A firm, he defined technology roadmaps for acquired companies, led cloud migration programmes and achieved regulatory compliance in safety-critical industries. His earlier career includes founding a consultancy focused on Extreme Programming and DevOps, and as a developer for one of the largest European aviation maintenance software providers.
He first discovered Team Topologies while watching a Dave Farley video on the (then) Continuous Delivery YouTube channel and has been using it to influence effective enablement of teams and the evolution of organisational design ever since.
You can reach John via:
Team Topologies Advocacy
John founded the Fast Flow Community of Practice at Booking.com which focuses on connecting people interested and practicing the functional ideas from the Team Topologies and Flow Engineering books. To kickstart this community he hosted the Fast Flow NL Meetup group at Booking's Amsterdam campus.
He regularly speaks about Team Topologies ideas and concepts at internal and external events, and hosts workshops on user needs mapping, team interaction modelling and recognising and assessing cognitive load. He has adopted and delivered ideas and concepts from Team Topologies to help influence the coaching team at Booking. Including aligning to the expected behaviours of a (structural) enabling team and consulting business units and large programs of work on organisational design.
Contributions
Full timeline of TTOP activities: Miro board (Password: Fastflow1$)
Sept ’24 – Booking.com Engineer Leaders Summit (Manchester): Team types and cognitive load
Jan ’25 – Hosted Fast Flow NL Meetup group
May ’25 – Facilitated multiple “Learning Hours” on Team Topologies – a model for reasoning about organising teams for the humane and sustainable fast flow of value
Learning Objectives:
Define the four team types and three interaction modes, and use them to map a current state.
Understand the difference between intrinsic, extrinsic, and germane cognitive load.
Articulate how to optimise for flow of value by organising teams to eliminate handoffs and optimise cognitive load.
May ’25 – LinkedIn post describing the Learning Hour created above, incorporating User Needs Mapping.
→ This led to a collaboration with Rich Allen and the co-authored article:
When shapes don’t fit: Modelling team interaction with honesty
June ’25 – Spoke at Colchester Digital Meetup group: Enabling teams to reduce intrinsic cognitive load through deliberately practising tacit technical skills… why “Agile Coach” isn’t always a bulls**t job.
