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Scaling Delivery with Team Topologies

Scaling Delivery with Team Topologies

Exploring the much talked about approach to organize growing teams and increase workflow productivity.

Cliff Oguzie
January 13, 2025

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So you’re in a team and it’s growing. Now there are multiple teams, and the way you delivered your projects needs to change as there are more people, more opinions, more processes to follow…and more confusion

It’s now much harder to release code, there are more bugs than before and work feels less fun that it used to.

These are part of typical growing pains a business or organization faces, and one of the challenges that many delivery methodologies try to address.

In this post, I summarise the Team Topologies approach which is gaining traction through its aim to accelerate speed to value creation for growing organizations.

Fundamentals

Team Topologies was originally a book authored by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, who are leaders in organization design, working with multiple teams and companies.

The book was rated one of the ‘Best product management books of all time’ by Book Authority, and it’s success enabled the pair to expand Team Topologies to a collection of resources and events.

So what is the point of it all?

When teams deliver valuable services and features to customers, the work is often organized by product, and the respective teams can be grouped based on what they are delivering for that product.

These product-based teams can be responsible for the end-to-end build and release of that product, or could hand over to other teams such as testers, once built. This can cause the product teams to slow down when they are stuck, as they need to learn new skills, or find the right people to help them complete the whole development and manage everything around it.

This is just one of the issues that Team Topologies aims to address, by segmenting teams into four team types, and by organizing interactions between teams into three interaction modes.

TEAM TYPES

Stream Aligned Teams

These are teams aligned with delivering the flow of value through an organization, often focused on specific products, services or customer groups. This type of team is more in line with what most of us are familiar with.

Using an example of an enterprise learning software provider, a streamed aligned team could be the learning experience development team, creating the core learning platform including the user interface design and content delivery tools.

Platform Teams

Provide internal products or services to accelerate delivery by the stream aligned teams. They offer self-service capabilities for other teams to use.

Using the same learning provider example, a platform team could be the training infrastructure team who build and maintain the underlying systems that support the learning platform. This could include managing the underlying databases, APIs and cloud infrastructure, allowing other teams to focus on their specific areas without being slowed down by the foundational systems.

Complicated Subsystem Teams

These teams handle complex and unique challenges, that need deep expertise typically gained over years of practical experience or research.

As an example, the learning software provider could have an AI-driven personalization team, a team of specialists who develop algorithms for customizing learning pathways based on individual user data. Their expertise in machine learning and data analysis is pivotal for creating new functionality that stream aligned teams would not be able to alone.

Enabling Teams

These teams help to support and grow the skills and capabilities of other teams.

In the learning software example, the Learning Design Consultant team may support other teams or departments by lending their expertise to include learning strategies into their features and work together to improve overall training methods.

Team Topologies acknowledges that stream aligned teams are the core teams delivering value to customers and users, whilst the other teams are there in part to help stream aligned teams to be as effective and efficient as possible.

You may be wondering, “How do these teams work with each other?” Team topologies outlines 3 approaches.

TEAM INTERACTIONS

Collaboration

Where teams work together for a defined period of time working towards a specific goal.

For example, the Learning Experience team may collaborate with the AI Personalization team for a specific period to develop a new adaptive learning feature. The outcome is an integrated set of AI content recommendations within the core learning platform.

X-as-a-Service

Where one team provides aa service to another team to consume.

The Platform Infrastructure team may provide a content delivery network to the Course Development team, enabling them to focus on building learning content without the distraction of the underlying infrastructure.

Facilitation

Where one team supports and provides mentorship to another team.

The Learning and Design experts can facilitate workshops for the mobile app team to improve their understanding of specific design principles. This enables the mobile app team to develop more engaging mobile learning experiences.

Key Elements

In summary, the key elements of Team Topologies include:

Minimizing cognitive load on teams through clearly defining their responsibilities and areas of focus.
Giving emphasis to the flow of change from idea to working software.
Supporting stable, but adaptable teams, that are not fixed in their make up.
Ensuring each part of a solution is owned by one team, reducing confusion, waste and duplication.
Regularly assessing and reassessing team structures, adjusting their make up and interactions in line with changing needs and contexts.

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Examples

PureGym, a leading chain of gyms in the UK, successfully implemented Team Topologies to address challenges they faced as their technology team started to grow. Here’s how PureGym applied Team Topologies.

Team Types

Stream aligned teams: PureGym created teams such as Acquisition, Gym Team and Payments teams, each with responsibility for products in their areas.
Enabling Teams: They established dedicated teams to support their stream aligned teams.
Platform Teams: They Developed underlying platforms for steam aligned teams enabling them to focus on producing their products to be shipped to their users with reduced cognitive load.

Team Interactions:

Collaboration: Focussed collaboration between teams took place to break down silos. The collaboration had fixed durations, avoiding ongoing meetings when no longer required.
X-as-a Service: Teams developed or identified APIs to enable the solutions to be feature-rich.
Facilitation: Experienced teams acted as facilitators for build pipelines and infrastructure set up.

How it Helped:

Improved team morale and productivity.
improved alignment with business needs.
Improved communication of the changes within the business.
Reduction in cognitive load on team members.

Improbable is a software company that develops metaverse virtual worlds for other companies including gaming and corporate users. They applied Team Topologies to improve their speed to market.

Conways Law:

The team applied Conways Law to enable them to align team structures to desirable software architecture.
Conways Law is a business concept that reveals the connection between a company’s internal structure and the results it delivers to end users. The idea is that the way teams communicate and collaborate shapes the design and character of the systems and projects they produce.

Team Types:

Created stream aligned teams focused on different platform services such as orchestration, infrastructure hosting and compute services.
Established platform teams to reduce cognitive load on the other teams.

Team Interactions:

Used short periods of collaboration between stream-aligned teams to develop x-as-a-service capabilities.
Teams created their own team APIs, documenting their domains, communication channels and contact information.

Cross Functional Teams:

Combined engineering capabilities from Improbable with customer focus from another team, creating fully cross-functional teams.
Developed a “you build it you run it” mentality for their teams.

How it Helped: