Team Topologies
Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow: book + training + consulting
EIEzvdaU0AAejXI.--DOES_USA-landscape.jpg

Key Concepts

Core ideas in Team Topologies

 

Four fundamental topologies

Four fundamental topologies shown with the flow of change

Four fundamental topologies

  • Stream-aligned team: aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain

  • Enabling team: helps a Stream-aligned team to overcome obstacles. Also detects missing capabilities.

  • Complicated Subsystem team: where significant mathematics/calculation/technical expertise is needed.

  • Platform team: a grouping of other team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream-aligned teams

 

Guided enablement workshops

For those seeking swift adoption of cutting-edge strategies, these enablement workshops offer an unparalleled opportunity to catalyze change and drive success. Team Topologies Guided Workshops present an expedited route for organizations eager to integrate Team Topologies methodologies swiftly. Crafted and endorsed by the visionaries behind Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, these workshops distill years of consultancy into dynamic 3-hour sessions, delivering immediate, tangible results. By prioritizing interactive group dynamics, attendees are empowered to grasp concepts firsthand, accelerating organizational understanding and implementation.

Four fundamental topologies - with the flow of change

The flow of change is shown left-to-right. Stream-aligned teams own an entire slice of the business domain (or other flow) end-to-end. The Stream-aligned teams are “You Built It, You Run It” teams. There are no hand-offs to other teams for any purpose.

This diagram is a snapshot in time. The team relationships WILL change as new goals are set and the teams discover new things.

 
 

Team Topologies Academy

To learn more about key ideas from Team Topologies like the four types of teams, the three core interaction modes, the platform as a product approach, or how to align teams with true value streams, have a look at the self-paced Team Topologies Distilled course on the Team Topologies Academy.

 
 

3 team interaction modes

Three team interaction modes

There are only three ways in which team should interact:

  • Collaboration: working together for a defined period of time to discover new things (APIs, practices, technologies, etc.)

  • X-as-a-Service: one team provides and one team consumes something “as a Service”

  • Facilitation: one team helps and mentors another team

Further details - articles and videos

Key Concepts
Team Interaction Modeling with Team Topologies
Team Interaction Modeling with Team Topologies

Team Topologies provides a combination of principles and practices that can help structure and evolve an organization for effective collaboration, autonomy, delivery focus, and product alignment. Using the Team Topologies shapes and diagramming principles, it is possible to create a series of snapshots of your organization at various points in time that help you understand why the teams within your organization communicate and interact.

Read More →
Exploring team and service boundaries with User Needs Mapping
Exploring team and service boundaries with User Needs Mapping

User Needs Mapping refers to the first four steps of the Wardley Mapping process that can provide significant value when helping understand users/customers, their needs and the dependencies required to deliver those needs within an organization. By mapping out the dependency tree/value chain we can begin to explore, visualize and identify potential team boundaries by simply re-organizing the dependency tree and overlaying the Team Topologies team shapes. Using these visualizations we can then discuss whether those team boundaries seem appropriate and adjust where necessary. This can then form the basis of a Team Interaction Modeling process using the Team Topologies team shape templates.

Read More →
Finding good stream boundaries with Independent Service Heuristics
Finding good stream boundaries with Independent Service Heuristics

The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product. The ISH approach is a “rapid results” approach, and complementary to the approaches from Domain-driven Design (DDD). In particular, ISH is very suitable for conversations with people without an engineering or software background, enabling important discussion and alignment across organisational boundaries.

Read More →
Remote-first Team Interactions with Team Topologies
Remote-first Team Interactions with Team Topologies

Remote-first work is the "new normal" for companies around the world. There is no shortage of advice on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely.

However, there is not much on how to address remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely, as part of the same value stream. Moving from the physical to the online world can further expose pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times and slow down delivery and possibly response to incidents.

Based on the ideas from Team Topologies, Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton present some useful approaches to clarify and evolve inter-team interactions and communication in this remote-first world.

Read More →
Moving beyond static team structures to interactions and dynamic evolution
Moving beyond static team structures to interactions and dynamic evolution

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - discuss the need to move beyond static organizational structures and embrace dynamic, learning organizations where certain team interactions are explicitly specified and expected.

Read More →
What are the core team types in Team Topologies?
What are the core team types in Team Topologies?

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - discuss the four core team types defined in the book Team Topologies and how these help to achieve a good flow of change and reduce cognitive load for people working on software systems.

Read More →
What is a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)?
What is a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)?

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - discuss the concept of a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) and what this means for organizations building and running modern software systems.

Read More →
Working with Gene Kim's IT Revolution Press
Working with Gene Kim's IT Revolution Press

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies - discuss what it was like to work with the publisher IT Revolution Press and the cover design of their book.

Read More →

Infographics on Team Topologies

Infographics
Getting started with Team Topologies - infographic
EN
Getting started with Team Topologies - infographic
EN

The Getting Started with Team Topologies infographic provides some suggestions for how to get started using the Team Topologies patterns and practices. Free to download and share.

Read More →
EN
Team Topologies in a nutshell - infographic
EN
Team Topologies in a nutshell - infographic
EN

The Team Topologies in a nutshell infographic explains the key concepts in Team Topologies and how they relate. Free to download and share.

Read More →
EN

What are the core team types in Team Topologies?

 

What is a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)?