Empowering enterprise evolution: how Conflux sowed the seeds of Telenet's whole-organization transformation

Through a series of workshops and facilitated sessions, Conflux empowered Telenet with Team Topologies principles and practices, inspiring a complete reimagining of its operating model.

Telenet office, Mechelen, Belgium

Responding to Telenet's challenges with the Spotify model, Conflux shared decision heuristics and architectural concepts based on Team Topologies that inspired Telenet's leadership. Building on these foundations, Telenet developed its own innovative operating model tailored to its specific context and needs.

The transformation delivered significant benefits across the organization:

• Complete elimination of the traditional business-IT divide through embedded technology capabilities in customer-focused tribes.

• Significantly fewer dependencies between teams, resulting in faster delivery of value to customers.

• Enhanced organizational adaptability, capable of evolving in response to changing market conditions.

Today, Telenet stands as a thriving organization delivering at speed, capable of continuous adaptation while providing greater value to its customers.

"We realized that if we were going to set ourselves up for growth, we needed to rethink our operating model" — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Telenet’s journey towards fast flow

Telenet is a leading Belgian telecom company and part of the Liberty Global group. Serving over 3 million customers with mobile, fixed, and media products, Telenet employs approximately 3,500 people and generates around €3 billion in annual revenue.

The ‘Spotify Model’ Image - Kniberg & Ivarsson, 2012

In 2018, Telenet adopted the Spotify Agile operating model. After two years, teams were experiencing significant challenges to value flow despite initial benefits. Structural friction and complex interdependencies between teams hindered true business agility.

The ‘Spotify Model’; an Agile implementation made famous as the operating model in use at Spotify, and adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide. Telenet adopted the model, believing that teams could manage away complex interdependencies themselves, but as these proved too complex, a more bespoke operating model was required.

Challenges to flow with Agile

Telenet team, Mechelen, Belgium

While Telenet's Agile implementation brought benefits in terms of transparency and collaboration, the organization was experiencing significant structural frictions:

• Business and IT domains remained in distinct silos with misaligned priorities

• Teams faced high cognitive load, navigating complex interdependencies

• Even simple changes required coordination across 30+ teams

"We had lots of teams with lots of interdependencies, and to get anything produced took a hell of a long time, and on many fronts, we weren't meeting what we'd set out to achieve with this transformation." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

With Telenet focused on becoming a truly digital, data-driven company, and with structural frictions becoming increasingly problematic, the organization needed a more fundamental transformation to achieve true business agility.

Conflux's approach to empowerment

Led by Matthew Skelton, CEO/CTO of Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies, Conflux approached Telenet's transformation through guided discovery workshops rather than prescribing rigid frameworks. The workshops began with identifying blockers, mapping value streams, and finally reimagining roles and capabilities.

Conflux emphasized the importance of team involvement in organizational design decisions, and that effective boundaries emerge from the teams performing the work. This ground-up approach became central to Telenet's transformation journey.

The workshops challenged Telenet to examine its organization through four key lenses:

Software sizing and cognitive load: Conflux led Telenet to consider team cognitive load as a primary design criterion, revealing how scattered, complex application landscapes created barriers to flow. This principle extended beyond team design to procurement decisions, ensuring teams weren't overwhelmed by numerous application stacks.

Conway's Law as a design tool: When exploring Conway's Law, Conflux advised that bringing work to existing teams, rather than reforming teams, proactively applies this principle. This guided Telenet's thinking about organizational design, particularly in forming teams around customer journeys.

Team interaction patterns: Introducing explicit interaction modes (Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, Facilitating) helped Telenet reconceptualize team relationships beyond reporting lines. This provided a vocabulary for designing healthier team dynamics, particularly for platform teams.

Triggers for evolution: Conflux established a foundation for continuous sensing and adaptation by framing awkward interactions as signals for boundary changes. Telenet’s leadership moved from seeing their organization as a fixed structure to viewing it as a continuously evolving system.

"Having that system lens and having leadership be willing to take and use that system lens really makes a difference." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Team Topologies across the organization

Following Conflux's engagement, Telenet established a small task force* to explore how Team Topologies principles could be applied holistically across the organization.

Telenet’s transformation task force map their approach to organizational redesign, coming to the conclusion that a system-first approach was needed to address particular challenges in terms of organization structure. Image - "Barking up the Wrong Tree: Realizing the Agile Paradigm Shift at Telenet" Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit 2023. Telenet

"We parked the teams side of things, and then together with the [task force] team, we said let's take a step back and let's look at how we're organized as a company as a whole, and see if we can apply some of the team-level ideas, but elevate them to an Enterprise level." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

The task force validated their observations through concrete use cases, particularly in e-commerce, where interdependencies were especially problematic. They identified that domain boundaries were established around tasks rather than business capabilities, resulting in high coordination costs.

Building on Team Topologies principles, the task force developed a modular architecture based on three key tribe archetypes:

Customer tribes: organized around a single customer mission, empowered with all capabilities needed to achieve that mission.

Platform/Service tribes: building and managing common platforms used by internal customers.

Enterprise tribes: driving horizontal collaboration and alignment across the organization.

This architecture applied team-first thinking and interaction patterns at the enterprise level, creating a truly modular organization where tribes functioned as 'micro-enterprises' with clear missions.

Eliminating the traditional business-IT divide

Telenet's new operating model represented a significant departure from their original structure.

Telenet's new operating model: Customer tribes (yellow), Platform/Service tribes (blue), and Enterprise tribes (red), all geared to empower teams in providing customer value, reorienting the whole organization towards the customer. Image - Telenet, 2023

“We own our products; there's no finger-pointing. We own the thing end-to-end." — Johan Morel, VP Billing Experience tribe, Telenet

Customer tribes now own everything from strategy to operations. For example, the Billing Experience tribe is responsible for all billing-related activities within Telenet. This end-to-end ownership reduces handoffs and accelerates delivery.

Platform/Service tribes provide services consumed by other tribes. Using a constrained menu of platform offerings, customer tribes pull curated services as needed, rather than pushing new requirements. 

Enterprise tribes enable collaboration without imposing direct control, reimagining business functions such as Finance and Strategy as enabling services rather than controlling entities.

A key aspect was the absence of a traditional CIO function, with technology capabilities federated across the organization. Each Customer tribe became responsible for its full software development lifecycle, firmly aligning technology with business needs.

The transformation required significant leadership mindset shifts from managing teams to owning customer outputs, managing projects to partnering across boundaries, and becoming active architects of the operating model.

The impact of Team Topologies thinking

"Our tribes and teams are equipped to keep sensing the health of their team boundaries, and to fluidly adapt where their context requires it." — John Porter, CEO, Telenet

Holistically applying Team Topologies principles delivered substantial benefits:

Tribes empowered by technology: By embedding IT capabilities within Customer tribes, teams became truly cross-functional, leading to more cohesive solutions and faster decision-making.

Reduced coordination costs: Clearer team boundaries significantly decreased cross-team dependencies. 

Enhanced flow of value: Teams with end-to-end capabilities deliver more quickly and with higher quality, reducing dependencies and waiting times.

Increased adaptability: The modular architecture enables easier evolution in response to changing requirements. 

Greater employee engagement: Teams with clear missions and appropriate autonomy report higher satisfaction. 

"In this new model, people can see the value they bring to the organisation" — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

An empowerment approach to organizational transformation

Telenet team, Mechelen, Belgium

Providing Telenet with Team Topologies principles through targeted workshops ignited a transformation that extended far beyond Conflux's initial engagement.

Unlike the Spotify model, which provided a more rigid template, Team Topologies offered Telenet an approach that could evolve with changing conditions. This shift to developing context-specific organizational patterns empowered Telenet to create a sustainable approach to continuous improvement.

"It's my firm belief that if you do things on a program basis, then it doesn't work anymore, so it needs to be embedded in the fabric of your organization." — Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet

Telenet's journey showcases how thoughtful adoption of Team Topologies principles transforms business-IT alignment from aspiration to structural reality. Rather than bridging silos through governance, reorganizing boundaries around customer value streams creates natural alignment, where technology becomes an inherent capability of business teams rather than a separate function requiring coordination.

Book your discovery call today to discuss your organization's specific challenges and how our proven approach can help you achieve measurable improvements.

Thank you to Barbara Arnst, VP Agility and Transformation, Telenet for sharing her insights.

*The task force included consultants from Xebia, particularly João Rosa (now part of the Conflux network), who worked closely with Barbara Arnst to translate Team Topologies principles to the enterprise level.