People

Val Yonchev joins Team Topologies as the Head of Customer Success to shape our Go-to-Market strategy and help us scale our approach relying on strong partnerships with practitioners, solution partners, advanced partners and training partners. His leadership will help us impact the life of more people who in turn will create even more value and success for the organizations they form.

Erica is a Business Agility Coach, driven by a deep passion for both people and technology. She is an early adopter of Team Topologies and experienced how easy it was to establish a common language with organizations based on the concepts in the book. She has vast experience in supporting organizations in increasing their agility, resilience, and innovative power by using Team Topologies alongside other practices covering the sociotechnical system.

Working in technology for over 20 years – and especially her experience in Open Source organizations – shaped her holistic approach to business agility. True agility necessitates simultaneous improvements on technology, structure, culture, and the work itself if you aspire sustainable and impactful results

As a sociotechnical systems thinker, I work closely with CTOs, managers, architects, and software teams to revolutionise the way we design and develop software. The goal is to foster a collaborative software design approach and ensure that stakeholders and development teams co-create solutions that perfectly address both customer and business needs.

I have been leading and facilitating collaborative modelling sessions for over eight years. My journey began with Eventstorming, letting stakeholders participate to design software. As time has passed, the range of techniques in my repertoire has grown to encompass Example Mapping, Wardley Mapping, Business Model Canvas, Domain Storytelling, and the Team Topologies tools, among others.

A pivotal aspect of these sessions has always been the art of decision-making and inclusion. To enrich this process, I weave in my understanding of Deep Democracy with an anthropological lens, ensuring that the resulting decisions are sustainable, inclusive and reflect the collective wisdom, and are thoroughly supported by the group. I have distilled my experience into the book I co-authored, “Collaborative Software Design: How to Facilitate Domain Modelling Decisions,” which serves as a guide for those seeking to navigate the complexities of collaborative decision-making in software design.

João is an early adopter of Team Topologies in his consultancy practices. When the book was published, he integrated it into Domain-Driven Design training. His customers could use the concepts to discuss software and team boundaries and how those interact with each other. He wrote about his journey at ABN AMRO, where he was part of the DevOps transformation program. Team Topologies were applied to several departments during his time to visualise and discuss the upcoming change. He is an executive advisor, using the Team Topologies to explain why any evolutionary journey is non-linear; he profoundly believes in the old saying: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.". As such, he works as enabler within the organizations to create a sustainable cadence of change. The tiny line between change and chaos agent! :)

Eduardo has a long track record of leveraging and combining Team Topologies with many highly related ideas, such as improving organizations approach to sociotechnical systems evolution, architecture & leadership modernization, and developing Effective Enabling teams. He consults, writes, and speaks on “scaling sustainable fast flow of change” in software tech-enabled organizations. Eduardo brings a wide range of experience: from hands-on engineer and architect to first-hand experience scaling tech-enabled organizations and technical leadership.

Susanne is a Team Topologies Valued Practitioner (TTVP) due to her work on combining Wardley Maps, Domain-driven Design, and Team Topologies, first with her series of talks and more recently as the author of the book Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies: Architecture for Flow (Addison-Wesley, 2021). Susanne brings a wealth of experience in software and IT.

Rich was involved in one of the first implementations of Team Topologies at PureGym shortly after the book launch in 2019. Since then Rich has been working closely with Matthew and Manuel to further develop additional materials such as the Team Shape Templates, Infographics and Frequently Asked Questions. Rich has also helped to develop and deliver the Team Topologies Guided Workshop - Blockers to Fast Flow (P89) and the Team Topologies Guided Workshop - Define and evolve a Platform (P803).