Toli Apostolidis - Team Topologies Advocate
Toli Apostolidis - Team Topologies Advocate
Toli is a Software Engineering Practitioner with over 12 years’ experience across many industries. Experience has taught him that learning and working together are catalysts for high performing software-first teams. Toli specialises in DevOps, observability, and event-driven socio-technical practices, with a preference for serverless architecture and product thinking.
His career began in the field of maths and physics, which led him into the world of software engineering, where he spent 7 years learning the craft while writing algorithms for solving large scale "travelling-sales-person" problems across the globe. He has since worked with Brent from The Phoenix Project for an energy company, fell in love with Dave Farley (Continuous Delivery), Charity Majors (Observability) and Team Topologies and discovered a new passion for serverless and event-driven architectural paradigms.
Toli was part of the core team that drove cinch from inception to the fastest growing unicorn in UK startup history. At cinch, he learnt how cultivating communities of practice and becoming an advocate of optimising for flow are the differentiators for fast flowing, high performing teams in the 2020s. Toli is currently putting all this into practice again at Flipdish - the next generation of restaurant tech which is on a mission to give the power back to local restaurants and help their businesses thrive through technology.
You can reach him in the following ways:
Team Topologies advocacy
In 2019, while working with Brent from The Phoenix Project and reading up on DevOps, in desperate need for ideas to improve his ways of working and organisational problems, Toli went to a local tech conference in Manchester. Among the buzzword noise, he came across a talk about an upcoming book titled "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow". Gosh. This is exactly what they needed at his then current business! A few weeks later, with the book launched, Toli was starting at a small, ambitious startup called cinch - an attempt at digital automotive 2.0. While building out the teams, Toli mentioned the book to the CPO and before they knew it, they had the books on all of their desks.
At cinch, effective collaboration was at the core of what the company believed contemporary product engineering was about in the 2020s. Team Topologies concepts enabled cinch to have a common language with which they could reason about their teams (types, Team APIs, Team Cognitive Load) and their collaboration modes to strive for fast flow in a humane way (and how, shockingly, silos can be a good thing sometimes). At cinch they grew from 2 teams to 20+ teams within 2 years, eventually reaching unicorn status.
Toli’s colleague Andy Norton and he were delighted to tell their story of "unicorn scale" at Agile conferences across the UK. They came together as accidental Team Topologies Practitioners to write their final "Field Notes of Flow", having applied the Team Topologies concepts at 3 different companies combined. They presented them at the first ever FastFlow Conference in London, UK .
All of Toli’s talks (not all Team Topologies related):
Field notes of flow: becoming accidental Team Topologies Practitioners
Links to slides, video for Achieving unicorn scale, using Team Topologies at cinch
