Thomas Krag &
Kenny Baas-Schwegler

12 - 13 March 2025 | Alte Kaserne Winterthur

Thomas Krag

Passionate about Platforms, DevOps, Socio-Technical Architecture

Thomas is a long time engineer and tech lead who has transitioned into an interim engineering manager, platform owner and consultant. As an early adopter of DevOps, including DevOps Topologies (which later evolved into Team Topologies), he possesses a deep understanding of Platform Engineering, socio-technical architecture and product thinking. He has successfully led multiple platform teams (observability, ci/cd, cloud, compute) and enabling teams such as architecture modernization and site reliability engineering.

Kenny Baas-Schwegler

Catalysing teams to design sustainable, resilient software through leadership and sociotechnical expertise.

I believe in collaborative software design where *‘every voice shapes the software’*. Leveraging a domain-driven design approach with Team Topologies, I facilitate clearer communication between stakeholders and software creators by collaborative modelling and deep democracy, decoding complexities, resolving conflicts and ensuring software remains agile to business demands.

As an independent software consultant and trainer, I specialise in technical leadership, software architecture, and sociotechnical system design. I work with organisations and teams to design and build sustainable and resilient software architecture.

Workshop

Enabling aligned decentralised architecture decisions through user needs mapping

Room “Malen” / 1st floor

Abstract:Our goal is to enable teams to maintain their flow of delivery, allowing them to focus on delivering continuous business value without being held up by dependencies on other teams. This requires teams to make decentralised architecture decisions whenever possible. However, decentralised decisions can have unintended consequences across the organisation. For example, a team’s decision to optimise for their specific user might negatively affect the resilience or user experience of another team downstream. To prevent this, teams are often forced to consider the wider organisational impact of each decision, which adds to their cognitive load and disrupts their flow. The challenge is: how do we foster alignment across teams so they can make decentralised architecture decisions without being overwhelmed by the complexity?

Join us for this hands-on session where you'll learn how to perform user needs mapping to enable aligned decentralised architecture decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain component of a Wardley Map, enriched with clearly defined team responsibilities. In this workshop, you'll work in groups, each assuming the role of a software team with its own unique context and landscape. You'll begin by mapping the user and their needs based on the information provided to each team member, then connect the software components required to meet those needs. As you outline your team's boundaries, you'll also uncover gaps in your team's knowledge. Once each team has completed its map, you'll collaborate with other teams to fill in those gaps—sharing insights, mapping inter-team dependencies, and refining your value chain to finalise your user needs map. By the end of the session, you'll have a solid grasp of user needs mapping, understand how it supports resilient and informed decentralised decisions, and learn how to keep these maps up-to-date and actionable.

Prerequisites for this workshop:

Participants (or at least one person per group) should bring a laptop and have a Miro account.
Participants are allowed to pre-read teamtopologies.com/unm, but it's not a requirement.
Previous experience with user needs mapping, team topologies, DDD or anything else isn't required.

Number of partparticipants:
The maximum number of participants at this workshop is 28.