Team topologies
Team Topologies is an organizational design framework for structuring teams and their interactions to improve the flow of value in software delivery.
Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure
A team topology is an arrangement of teams and their interactions within an organization.
- How it is used
- Uses team topologies to align organizational and software boundaries around independent value streams and expose obstacles to fast flow.
- How deep it goes
- Explains organizing principles, team-type and interaction patterns, and an interaction-mapping diagnosis; leaves topology evolution as an ongoing practice.
- Examples
- Maps a cosmetics brand’s integration platform team and its collaboration with at least four other teams to explain a bottleneck.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Team Topologies to map team interactions, diagnose coordination bottlenecks, and refine candidate value streams.
Effective Platform Engineering
A team topology is an organizational model that defines distinct team types and their interaction boundaries for effective software delivery.
- How it is used
- Aligns team boundaries and collaboration patterns with business value, platform consumption, specialized expertise, and capability development.
- How deep it goes
- Defines four team types and illustrates their responsibilities through platform-engineering and organizational-restructuring scenarios.
- Examples
- Uses e-commerce, mobile app, inventory management, platform services, CI/CD pipelines, and shared observability and identity services.
- What you can do after
- Apply team topologies to reduce silos, lower cognitive load, clarify ownership, and improve delivery speed, quality, and team morale.
Read how Effective Platform Engineering explains team topologies →
Related concepts
- stream-aligned teamincludes · A stream-aligned team is a long-lived team organized around a continuous flow of customer or business value, with responsibility for delivering and maintaining its product or service.
- engineering platform teamincludes · An engineering platform team is an organizational team that builds, operates, and evolves internal platforms providing shared capabilities for software development and delivery.
- enabling teamincludes · An enabling team is a specialist team that helps other teams acquire capabilities and overcome technical or organizational obstacles without permanently owning their work.
- independent service heuristicsused by · Independent service heuristics are a set of heuristics for assessing the independence of a value stream and identifying concerns that may limit its effectiveness.
- Conway's lawused by · Conway’s law is the observation that a system’s structure tends to reflect the communication structure of the organization that designs it.
- durable teamuses · A durable team is a team that remains responsible for a product or value stream over an extended period rather than disbanding after a project ends.
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