Product Thinking – Episode 211: The Power of Team Topologies with Matthew Skelton

Host: Melissa Perri
Guest: Matthew Skelton, Co-Author of Team Topologies
Date: February 19, 2025

Overview

This episode brings together Melissa Perri and Matthew Skelton to discuss how the principles of Team Topologies intersect with modern product operating models and product operations. They explore how intentional organizational design and cross-functional collaboration can foster faster, more sustainable software delivery and ultimately add value to customers. The episode touches on practical anti-patterns, the real role of product operations, the complexity of moving from project to product models, and the impact of AI on product management workflows and team structures.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Team Topologies Meets Product Management (08:00–12:24)

• Alignment to Value:
  Matthew explains that both Team Topologies and product operating models center around aligning teams to streams of value rather than rigid roles or departments.

  • "Start with the value consumer. Understand what the value is, set things up in your organization so it makes it easy to deliver that value in the right way and rinse and repeat." – Matthew Skelton (00:00, recurring theme)

• Historical Roots:
  The DevOps movement, which strove for better flow and feedback loops, heavily inspired Team Topologies, and these lessons apply to product management as organizations mature.

  • "Turns out that that's basically the right way to do product as well. They're very, very complementary." – Matthew Skelton (10:49)

• Breaking Down Silos:
  Melissa highlights the recurring friction between product, sales, and marketing, and the need to dismantle silos to enable cohesive customer experiences.

  • "We silo ourselves off from marketing all the time from sales. There’s super big friction between sales and marketing and product, sometimes tech...if we're not all working together...you can’t do that in isolation." – Melissa Perri (13:17)

2. Core Patterns in Team Topologies (14:45–24:35)

• Fundamental Team Types:
  Matthew and Melissa discuss the four team types:

  • Stream-aligned teams (aligned to a flow of value/product/domain)

  • Enabling teams (uplift skills/capability in others)

  • Complicated Subsystem teams (deep specialist expertise)

  • Platform teams (create reusable capabilities to reduce cognitive load)

  • "We start with the premise: what would it take just to have stream aligned teams so teams are aligned to the stream of value. That's why it's called stream aligned." – Matthew Skelton (21:56)

  • "A wiki page...could be like a platform, if it improves flow and reduces cognitive load." – Matthew Skelton (24:35)

• Product ≠ Everything:
  Melissa and Matthew agree that not everything should be called a product, cautioning against a "products everywhere" mindset, especially when value is not directly external.

  • "Please, clearly, there’s massive value from using product thinking, but don’t obsess that everything has to be a product with an external consumer." – Matthew Skelton (22:56)

3. Anti-patterns and Challenges When Transitioning to Product Models (18:50–24:07)

• Underestimating Change:
  Matthew points out that renaming roles is insufficient; embracing a product mindset requires profound cultural and systemic shifts.

  • "They just think they’ll rename the project managers into product managers and then we're basically done. And you know it’s going to fail, right?" – Matthew Skelton (18:54)

• Superficial Adoption:
  People often fixate on team types and miss key later chapters about organizational dynamics, leading to shallow implementation.

  • "Lots of business books...first few chapters and then the rest…is just filler...we’ve had people misunderstand what's going on." – Matthew Skelton (19:45)

4. The Power of Enabling Teams and Product Operations (28:29–33:36)

• Leveraging Expertise at Scale:
  How enabling teams elevate multiple stream-aligned teams rather than embedding narrow expertise everywhere, echoing product operations’ mission.

  • "The enabling team does not build anything. They're there to uplift the skills and capabilities inside a stream aligned team." – Matthew Skelton (29:48)

• Product Operations as Organizational Glue:
  Melissa ties product operations to these patterns: identifying patterns across teams, removing friction, sharing knowledge, and creating internal platforms for product teams.

  • "That’s a big critical part of product operations is like, you are looking at all the teams in product management and saying, what do they need? Can I build a platform for this? Can I enable them in some way?...to help our flow of work?" – Melissa Perri (32:24)

• Resistance to Product Ops:
  Melissa highlights common pushback—and the need for visible operational support for large-scale product teams.

  • "A lot of the work that I've been doing along the way in transformations, when I leave as a consultant, if you don’t have somebody there to take over this, this falls apart..." – Melissa Perri (37:15)

5. SAFE, Process, and the Rise of "Certificate Circuses" (43:04–51:53)

• SAFE’s (Scaled Agile Framework) Role and Pitfalls:
  Matthew describes SAFE as a possible bridge for organizations beginning agile journeys, but critiques its evolution into a "certificate factory" that's rigid and hard to backtrack from.

  • "SAFE has turned into a big certificate factory. Yeah, it’s a certificate circus...once that stuff is in an organization, it’s very difficult to pull it out." – Matthew Skelton (47:26)
  • "It acts like an intermediate step, like someone who...couldn't walk...using a walking frame...But how do you get beyond that?" – Matthew Skelton (45:09)

• Misinterpretations Lead to Flow Breakdown:
  Melissa recounts organizations interpreting SAFE rigidly, locking themselves into fixed plans, stifling discovery and adaptability.

  • "Once you plan that quarter, there is no changing…there's no room for discovery...I've never seen anybody implement it differently..." – Melissa Perri (48:42)

• The Value Flow Mindset:
  True agility comes from asynchronous value delivery, frequent releases, and aligning teams to deliver value in small increments, not big batches.

  • "It's got the assumption that things need to be very big and chunky rather than...letting value emerge effectively bit by bit over time." – Matthew Skelton (50:53)

6. AI and Product Enablement (51:53–62:23)

• AI as a Force Multiplier:
  Both see AI as a tool for speeding up routine tasks in product management and surfacing insights, but not as a replacement for critical thinking or empathy.

  • "I do think it’s going to replace some of the menial tasks that we do...I also think it’s going to empower product managers to do their job better." – Melissa Perri (56:12)
  • "Even if we’re using AI agents, we’re framing the mission and the context for these AI agents in a particular way to achieve a particular goal." – Matthew Skelton (58:39)

• Product Ops and AI:
  Product ops teams will play a key role enabling access to this new tooling for all product teams, making knowledge and data available and actionable.

  • "That’s a big critical part in product operations—getting that stuff in there so that our product managers can actually take advantage of it and use it." – Melissa Perri (58:27)

• AI Team Topologies Parallels:
  As AI evolves, the subjects of bounded contexts and minimizing cognitive load, as outlined by Team Topologies, become directly relevant to “AI agents” working alongside humans.

  • "Patterns in Team Topologies and product operations will apply to agentic AI…It's knowledge work, it's manipulating information, it's about setting goals, it's trying to achieve something. It's ultimately the same kind of task..." – Matthew Skelton (61:07)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The Blueberry Muffin Analogy:
  "You can take a raw muffin and push some blueberries in. It doesn't make it a blueberry muffin...that it feels like that's what some of these approaches where they're just kind of cannibalizing or bringing in lots of different approaches and there isn't really a high degree of coherence…" – Matthew Skelton (43:14)

• Making Life Easier is Not Cheating:
  "It's almost as if some people think that things should be hard rather than easy…why would you want to make that as easy as possible for people to do, do it that way?" – Matthew Skelton (38:34)

• The Value Alignment Test:
  "Align teams to the flow of value. Well, what’s the value? We don't really know what the value is...It’s like they're on the psychologist couch. Like, tell me about yourself. What value do you provide?" – Matthew Skelton (40:29)

• Product Operations Naysayers:
  "I had somebody post on LinkedIn the other day, when is everybody going to realize that product operations is the biggest grift out there?" – Melissa Perri (35:20)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Team Topologies and product models align: 08:00–12:24
• DevOps parallels to product ops: 12:24–14:45
• Team Topologies team types explained: 21:15–24:35
• Missteps in moving from project to product: 18:50–24:07
• Enabling teams and product operations: 28:29–33:36
• Pushback against product ops and role at scale: 35:20–38:34
• SAFE critique and transition pains: 43:04–51:53
• Artificial Intelligence’s impact on teams & ops: 51:53–62:23

Conclusion

This episode demonstrates how Team Topologies thinking and product operations practices can be symbiotic, enabling organizations to cultivate high-performing product teams, reduce cognitive burden, and deliver continuous value to customers. Both hosts reinforce the need to move beyond rigid frameworks and certifications, instead focusing on organizational coherence, operational excellence, and adaptation to new technologies like AI.

For more on Team Topologies: teamtopologies.com
For Melissa’s work & resources: productthinkingpodcast.com