team-topologies

The four team types are stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated subsystem teams. Every team should map to exactly one type, with stream-aligned teams being the most common and other types existing to support them.

Team Topologies defines three interaction modes: collaboration for discovery work, X-as-a-Service for consuming well-defined services, and facilitation for capability transfer. Every team-to-team relationship should be explicitly categorized as one of these modes.

A Thinnest Viable Platform provides just enough capability to accelerate stream-aligned teams rather than everything imaginable. Bloated internal platforms become slow bottlenecks, so platforms should start minimal and grow based on actual consumer need.

Conway's Law states organizations design systems mirroring their communication structures. The Inverse Conway Maneuver applies this deliberately by restructuring teams first so the organization nudges the system toward the desired software architecture.

Create a complicated subsystem team only when a component's technical complexity genuinely exceeds what a stream-aligned team can absorb, such as signal processing or complex mathematical models. It should be the rarest team type and expose a clean interface.

Team Topologies provides vocabulary and patterns rather than a fixed checklist, and its guiding principles are recurring themes rather than a numbered canon. Team boundaries require ongoing review since organizational design accumulates debt like software.