Case studies of Team Topologies applied in practice

The following case study explains what led Trade Me to introduce the concept of the Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) from the book Team Topologies. We will explore what sparked our need to change the way we previously had been working, what we did, and the lessons we learned.

Flo Health is the world’s most popular app for female health, with 350 million downloads, 70 million active monthly users and close to 5 million paid subscribers globally. After achieving a market fit, Flo embraced the super-app strategy for growth.

In 2023, Flo added more than 10 million active monthly users. With growth, one of our main challenges was building holistic user journeys across domains. Delivering user value demands orchestration across multiple teams, which brings a lot of cognitive load due to the large number of team interactions.

We rethought our approach by introducing product platforms for personalization and explicit interaction strategy. Team Topologies helped shape our journey by providing a framework for structuring teams and optimizing their interactions.

How the Belgian telecom provider Telenet applied Team Topologies at enterprise level to increase business agility

Telenet, a Belgian telecom provider, began implementing agile at scale in 2019, when the company implemented an agile way of working based on the Spotify model.

By 2022, three years into that journey, the company had embraced agile and the benefits it brought in terms of transparency, collaboration, and customer focus. The agile way of working had become part of the company’s DNA. However, structural friction in the way the company was organized inhibited true business agility.

To overcome this, inspired by Team Topologies thinking, the firm revamped and reinvigorated its entire operating model empowering teams and optimizing for fast flow,

Docker is a technology company that has popularized containerization in the software industry. After reaching Series E status in 2017, we sold off our Docker Enterprise Edition product to Mirantis in November 2019, returning to our roots, and reinvesting in our end developer products, especially Docker Hub and Docker Desktop. With this refocus, we had to build new revenue streams as a Series A, 60 person company.

Our turnaround was swift, as we announced $50m in ARR on February 1, 2022, with a 4x increase in our previous fiscal year. We announced a Series C investment on March 31, 2022.

While this is building off our prior product adoption, success, and developer loyalty, we’ve also rebuilt our culture and organizational structure, including shaping our Product Development organization around concepts found in Team Topologies.

Founded in 2012, Improbable is a British technology company, dedicated to solving the challenges of building rich virtual worlds and pioneering the path to the metaverse. … In 2020 Improbable acquired Munich-based video games company Zeuz, a managed hosting service used by the makers of hit online games such as SCUM and Conan Exiles, to further the company’s mission to make online games development more efficient, effective and accessible for developers. …

Merging two companies that had significantly different approaches to software development was a daunting task. Using some of the key principles and practices defined in Team Topologies, Improbable were able to identify and execute on a plan to evolve the team structure in a way that would align with their future growth goals.

NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) is the largest public agency in Norway. Our mission is to assist people into work, and we provide a series of benefits related to pensions, disease, unemployment, and others. We provide services to over 5 million Norwegian citizens.

Over the past 3ish years, we have developed platform products which support our digital product teams. … The next evolutionary step was to think of this set of features as one or more platform products, and develop them with the same mindset as any other digital product. A guiding principle has been to make the platform attractive to use through reducing the cognitive load for the product teams, as recommended by the book Team Topologies.

Learn how financial advice provider Wealth Wizards uses Team Topologies to guide and evolve their software and teams to respond to rapid growth and increasing domain complexity.

CROZ is a professional services company. This means that we do not build our own products. Instead, we use our technical, domain, and organizational expertise to help our clients build their products and achieve their business goals.

A year after introducing the platform team and establishing interactions with the rest of the organization, we found that the new team structure promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing in a better way, relieves cognitive load from existing teams enabling them to focus on delivering value to our clients, and serves as additional leverage for organizational improvement initiatives.

We spoke to Andy Norton, Software Development Manager at Footasylum, about the ways in which Team Topologies has helped to shape teams and software delivery within Footasylum.

We spoke with Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU which operates the UK’s leading home services price comparison site Uswitch, to understand their approach to teams and practices for accelerating the flow of software delivery and operations across a growing number of internal engineering teams.

We spoke to T. Alexander Lystad, Chief Cloud Architect at Visma, about the ways in which Team Topologies has helped to shape teams and software delivery within Visma.