Val Yonchev

Val Yonchev is an early adopter and advocate of Team Topologies.

At present, Val spends a lot of time on Platform Engineering and you can find him in the CNCF Platform Workgroup or some of the most popular Platform Engineering meetups and conferences. He is key driving force in the Team Topologies community when it comes to Value Stream Management, Product Operating Models and Technology Strategy (using Wardley Mapping)

Val believes and practices Outcome- and Intent-Based Leadership and was a prominent advocate for Open Leadership while at Red Hat.

Val advises, mentors and coaches leaders across FSI, Telco, Media, FMCG, Automotive and Aerospace on building and leading product organizations through a combined approach mixing Product Development frameworks with Agile, DevOps, Domain-Driven Design and Wardley Mapping for high business impact.

Val has a unique combination of engineering leadership, business and finance leadership, enhanced with focus on continuous improvement (he is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt).

His team at Red Hat (Open Innovation Labs) was an early reviewer and contributor to the first edition of the Team Topologies book. As soon as the book came out, under his leadership his teams started actively promoting and advising on the adoption of the Team Topologies approach for organizations looking to accelerate innovation with cloud native technologies.

2018 - inspired by the DevOps Topologies blog, his team at Red Hat helped a Finnish Insurance company capture a market opportunity by delivering a new product to production 10 times faster.

2019 - his team and with his leadership (Red Hat Open Innovation Labs) combined the Team Topologies ideas with Target's Dojo approach to enable several of Europe’s biggest banks, insurance companies and automotive producers to get more impact from the technology products they are building at unprecedented speeds. 

You can reach Val via:

• Linkedin

• Val's website

• Val writes on Substack

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

• Mapping Teams To Value Streams (Flowtopia 2024)

• Principles for Decision-Making and Team-of-Teams Design in Platform Orgs at Platform Engineering Meetup

• Building scalable platforms: Lessons from embedded systems to finance