Team Topologies

Team Topologies is a framework for designing team structures, built on the insight that a system’s architecture mirrors the communication structure of the organization that builds it. This principle, known as Conway’s Law, implies that anyone who wants better software must first get the teams right.

The framework defines four team types. Stream-Aligned Teams work along a value stream and deliver directly to the customer. Enabling Teams temporarily support other teams in building new capabilities. Platform Teams provide internal services that Stream-Aligned Teams consume. Complicated-Subsystem Teams own areas that require deep specialist expertise. Three interaction modes complement these types: Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and Facilitating. In an organization with multiple product teams, a Platform Team might provide the CI/CD pipeline and infrastructure so that Stream-Aligned Teams can focus on their respective business domains.

The book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais was published in 2019 and has become a standard reference for organizational design in software development. It is particularly useful when organizations outgrow individual Scrum teams and want to deliberately shape their team structure.