Fast Flow Conf 2025: Team Topologies and the Language of Flow

Consider this paradox for a second: imagine studying grammar for a language that doesn’t exist. You know all the rules in theory, yet you can’t communicate with anyone. After attending Fast Flow Conference in London earlier this week, that metaphor came to my mind for those organizations that try to introduce Team Topologies as a silver bullet without fully assessing the sociotechnical system around them.

Leaders with reductionist tendencies are always looking for a formula, especially in the world of technology teams. Some of them may have thought they found one in the rigid, comforting set of options in the 1st book published by Skelton and Pais — a grammar, indeed, to label teams and their interactions.

Team Topologies practitioners use those team types and interaction modes both in a descriptive way (to depict an organization’s current state) and in a prescriptive way (to design its intended state). But if those reductionist leaders had been in the room with us at Fast Flow Conference, they would have realized that such patterns were never meant to be used in isolation.

Over the years, the Team Topologies community has expanded its toolkit. It now includes old and new methodologies, critical to develop a much deeper understanding of the dynamics of how organizations evolve over time. I call this toolkit the Language of Flow. Team types and interaction modes constitute the grammar of that language.

Over two days of exciting talks, I heard success stories highlighting the importance of EventStorming, Wardley mapping, value stream mapping, and systems thinking — a set of collaborative techniques that complement each other by putting humans at the center of the stage. I saw a strong emphasis on the role of enabling teams and on the principle of sharing knowledge across silos. I attended workshops where platform engineers were given discovery tools drawn directly from the best product management practices. And I saw two key figures in the Team Topologies world, Matthew Skelton and Joao Rosa, delivering talks that broadened everyone’s perspective by zooming out from the narrow focus on engineering teams to discuss strategic topics such as budgeting, economies of scale vs economies of ‘empowerment’, compliance, and more.

None of that felt forced or like a hard sell, and that’s precisely because all the speakers share the same Language of Flow, a toolkit that can reshape organizations by thinking human-first. The original patterns of Team Topologies are a core part of that language, acting almost like an orchestrator, but they lose their transformative power when they are introduced in an organization that is not fluent in the Language of Flow.

If you thought applying the grammar rules to your teams was enough to change how your organization works, you've missed the bigger picture. You need to introduce the Language of Flow as a whole.

DataChef has a proven history of being an agent of change in companies such as PostNL, CarNext, Rituals, and Allseas. Reach out if you need to accelerate your journey.