team-topologies

Align most teams to streams of business change so each owns a slice end to end, then add platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem teams only to reduce stream teams' cognitive load. Declare an explicit interaction mode for every pair of dependent teams.

The four types are stream-aligned (owns a flow of business change end to end), platform (provides self-service internal products), enabling (transfers capabilities through time-boxed engagements), and complicated-subsystem (owns deep specialist components). Stream-aligned is the default and most common type.

Split along fracture planes, defaulting to business-domain bounded contexts, with regulatory scope, change cadence, or performance isolation as alternatives when evidence justifies them. Form the owning team before extracting code, and give every artifact exactly one owner.

Use time-boxed collaboration while an interface is still being discovered, then shift to X-as-a-Service once it stabilizes and change requests become rare and backward-compatible. If consuming a service routinely requires meetings, the interface needs product work or the mode should switch back temporarily.

It adds a third silo and another handoff queue instead of removing one. The recommended fix is a platform team offering self-service tooling, or an enabling team that grows operability skills inside stream-aligned teams.

A team can hold at most one complicated domain, or two to three simple domains alongside its main work, and a complex domain needs a dedicated team. Never split one complicated domain across two teams; transfer the whole domain instead.