Val Yonchev - Team Topologies Advocate
Val Yonchev - Team Topologies Advocate & Practitioner
Val Yonchev is an early adopter and advocate of Team Topologies.
Val is a Director-level technology leader with 20+ years of senior leadership across EMEA and APAC. He is currently Head of Enterprise Solutions and Customer Success at Apollo GraphQL and Associate Principal at Conflux — the consultancy co-founded by Matthew Skelton.
He is one of a small number of practitioners globally to hold the Team Topologies Valued Practitioner (TTVP) designation. He works closely with Matthew and Manuel, including on extending Team Topologies into AI operating models and agentic delivery contexts.
Val's work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, organisational design, and Customer Success as a structural discipline. He is a contributor to the CNCF Platform Workgroup and a regular speaker at Platform Engineering meetups and conferences — including Flowtopia, the Platform Engineering Meetup, and joint sessions with the Team Topologies core team.
His perspective is grounded in practice rather than frameworks alone. His team at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs was an early reviewer and contributor to the first edition of the Team Topologies book. Before that framing existed in print, his teams were already combining what would become Team Topologies thinking with Target's Dojo approach — helping some of Europe's largest banks, insurers, and automotive manufacturers get meaningful outcomes from their technology investments at speed.
The core argument he returns to, across every context: fast flow of value is a prerequisite, not a destination. The actual destinations are platform engineering done right and a genuine product operating model. Most organisations confuse the two, and pay for it.
He advises and coaches senior leaders across FSI, Telco, Media, FMCG, Automotive, and Aerospace on the organisational design decisions that determine whether technology investments compound or stall. He brings a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt's rigour to that work — quantifying what others treat as qualitative, and diagnosing structural root causes before prescribing anything.
Val publishes the Platform Curve newsletter — a dual-section publication covering the fast flow of value from both sides of the adoption curve: vendor-side CS and PS leaders navigating complex enterprise relationships, and enterprise technology leaders making the platform and operating model decisions that determine whether their organisations can actually move.
Team Topologies Advocacy
Val has plenty of contributions and frequently talks about how to combine Team Topologies with other approaches and ideas. This is a selection of a few of his contributions
Project to Product Transitions: Challenges and Solutions Nobody Talks About - Val in conversation with Matthew Skelton
Building scalable platforms: Lessons from embedded systems to finance
