Team Topologies
Team Topologies, codified in the 2019 book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, is a framework for organising engineering teams using four team types and three interaction modes. Team types: stream-aligned (delivers customer value end-to-end), platform (internal services for stream-aligned teams), enabling (helps other teams adopt new capabilities), and complicated-subsystem (specialist expertise in a hard area).
Team Topologies solved the problem 'how should we organise to get the architecture we want, given Conway's Law?' The four team types map onto the Inverse Conway Maneuver: most teams should be stream-aligned (owning a slice of the value stream); platform teams reduce cognitive load by providing self-service capabilities; enabling teams transfer expertise then leave; complicated-subsystem teams own the few areas where specialised expertise is irreducible. The three interaction modes (collaboration, X-as-a-service, facilitating) are deliberately chosen to be temporary — a team-pair should know which mode they're in and what the success criterion for transitioning is. Stride's team configuration uses these concepts directly.
Related terms
- Conway's Law
Conway's Law, formulated by Melvin Conway in a 1968 paper, states that any system's design mirrors the communication structure of the organisation that built it.
- Cognitive load
In engineering-team contexts, cognitive load is the amount of mental effort required for a team to be effective at its work — encompassing the domain knowledge, technical knowledge, and tool/process knowledge the team must hold in working memory.
- Microservices
Microservices is an architectural style where a single application is composed of many small, independently-deployable services, each owning its own data and communicating over the network.