Val Yonchev - TTVP
Val Yonchev is an early adopter and advocate of Team Topologies.
Val Yonchev is a Director-level technology leader with 20+ years of senior leadership across EMEA and APAC. He currently serves as Head of Enterprise Solutions and Customer Success at Apollo GraphQL and as Associate Principal at Conflux — the consultancy co-founded by Matthew Skelton.
His relationship with Team Topologies predates the book. His team at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs was an early reviewer and contributor to the first edition — working through the ideas in practice, with real organisations, before the framework had a name that anyone recognised. That combination of early adoption and sustained application is what the TTVP designation reflects.
Val's current focus is the intersection where Team Topologies meets the hardest unsolved problems in enterprise technology:
how do organizational design decisions determine whether AI investments compound or stall;
how platform engineering succeeds or fails based on structural choices made before a single line of infrastructure is written;
and why the project-to-product transition fails in most organizations not because of technology, but because of cognitive load, team boundaries, and the absence of a genuine product operating model.
He is a contributor to the CNCF Platform Workgroup, a regular presence at Platform Engineering meetups and conferences, and a frequent collaborator with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais on extending Team Topologies thinking into agentic AI operating models and post-sale value delivery.
The position he holds consistently: fast flow of value is the prerequisite, not the destination. Organisations that treat it as the destination stop short — they optimise delivery but leave the actual design decisions untouched. The destinations are platform engineering done right and a genuine product operating model. Getting there requires deliberate organisational design, not a renamed team and a new slide deck.
Val advises and coaches senior leaders across FSI, Telco, Media, FMCG, Automotive, and Aerospace on the design decisions that sit underneath technology strategy. He brings Lean Six Sigma Black Belt rigour to that work — treating what most practitioners handle qualitatively as something that can be diagnosed, measured, and designed for.
Connect with Val via:
Val Yonchev, Head of Customer Success Team Topologies
“I believe all organizations can be more successful and humane by designing for fast flow. “
Val has made 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
