Team Topologies Overview

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Team Topologies provides principles, patterns and practices for shaping the team dynamics to optimize delivery speed and minimize cognitive load. These principles are key to creating effective team boundaries within any organization.

Why Team Topologies?

Traditional team structures often create silos and inefficiencies, hindering value delivery. Team Topologies introduces a dynamic approach to team design based on two core principles:

  1. Fast flow of change: Teams should be structured to deliver value quickly and with minimal friction.
  2. Cognitive load optimization: Team responsibilities must be manageable without overwhelming members.

By aligning teams with these principles, organizations can achieve better collaboration, clearer ownership, and faster delivery.

Team Topologies Book

Team Topologies was voted one of the best Project Management books of 2020.


Key Concepts

The four fundamental team types

The four fundamental team types

  • Stream-Aligned Teams: Deliver value directly to users or customers by focusing on a specific stream of work.
  • Enabling Teams: Support stream-aligned teams by providing expertise or removing obstacles.
  • Complicated Subsystem Teams: Manage areas of high technical complexity requiring specialized skills.
  • Platform Teams Grouping Build and maintain reusable services or systems that other teams rely on.

Note: Although in the book the term “Platform Teams” is used, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais recommend using the term “Platform Grouping” since it is highly unlikely there will on ever be a single team that owns the platform. An organization may be made of multiple platform groupings all containing multiple stream-aligned teams within them.

The three interaction modes

The three interaction modes

  1. Collaboration: Short-term, intensive work between teams to solve a specific problem or deliver a shared outcome.
  2. Facilitating: One team helps another gain new skills or capabilities.
  3. X-as-a-Service: One team provides services or resources to be consumed by another in a self-service manner, such as platform tools or APIs.

How it fits with User Needs Mapping

There is value to be found in the first stage of Wardley Mapping. It provides a lens through which we can find candidate team and service boundaries. .

Matthew Skelton, Author of Team Topologies

The term User Needs Mapping was coined by Rich Allen when he joined the core team at Team Topologies and became a Team Topologies Valued Practitioner. At the time, Rich was working with several clients who were struggling to align their teams with their business goals. Rich had prior experience of using Wardley Mapping to explore strategic decisions but recognised that it could be quite overwhelming for people to get their heads around the concepts such as Landscape, Climatic Patterns, Doctrine and Leadership Plays.

How it fits with User Needs Mapping

Rich discovered that by removing the evolution axis of a Wardley Map and focusing on mapping the just the user needs and business capabilities it was easier for people to understand and apply. Getting people to talk and understand users and their needs is already a massive step forward for many organizations. Then by combining this with overlaying Team Topologies team types, it created a simple way to assign ownership of capabilities team structures that were better aligned to achieve a faster flow of value.

User Needs Mapping helps identify capabilities required to meet user needs. Team Topologies provides a structured way to assign ownership of these capabilities to the right teams.

Learn more about applying Team Topologies principles.