Moving to the Product Operating Model with Team Topologies

Key takeaways

• Organizations that adopt Team Topologies as the foundation for their product operating model are more likely to see success, thanks to shared language, compelling techniques, and increased staff engagement

• Adopting the product operating model is a huge opportunity to identify real value flows and revitalize the entire organization

• A new spirit of open inquiry around purpose injects energy and enthusiasm into the organization

• Leaders can speed adoption by making strategy and data self-service via ‘Leadership as a Platform’

• Team empowerment around true products leads to increased staff engagement and elevated business outcomes

Moving to the Product Operating Model with Team Topologies

The book Team Topologies Second Edition (2025) demonstrates convincingly that organizing business and technology for fast flow of value via empowered teams produces outsized results for enterprises worldwide. Many of the organizations finding success with Team Topologies have been inspired by the Product Operating Model, popularized by Marty Cagan of SVPG, which provides a blueprint for using product thinking and product management principles to encourage a strong focus on user needs and value flow.

In fact, the book Empowered by Marty Cagan - designed to help product and engineering leaders create an effective environment for the product operating model - draws from Team Topologies ideas and principles around team types, clear boundaries, and using cognitive load as a design heuristic. It’s clear that organizations that adopt Team Topologies as the foundation for their product operating model are more likely to see success, thanks to shared language, compelling techniques, and increased staff engagement.

The core principles from Team Topologies - organizing and empowering teams around independently-viable services, making cognitive load a key design principle, and making capabilities available via clear “vending machine” interfaces - act as clear orientation and navigation aids for adopting a product-centric way of working.

In this talk, Matthew Skelton / Manuel Pais - co-author of the groundbreaking book Team Topologies - shares deep insights about how organizations can move successfully to a product operating model by using the patterns and principles from Team Topologies, based on experience with hundreds of organizations worldwide. 

Key facts

• Language: English

• Length: 30-45 minutes

• Audience: C-suite / ExCo, especially CPO, CPTO, Head of Strategy, Head of Transformation, organization design practitioners, managers, and enterprise architects at organizations adopting the product operating model.

• Delivery: online or in-person (global 🌐)

• Code: K201