Team Topologies (book) book
Four team types and three interaction modes for organizing software teams around fast flow of change.
Four team types and three interaction modes for organizing software teams around fast flow of change.
why it matters
The book that named 'cognitive load' as a first-class architectural concern and 'platform team' as a specific organizational role. If you've tried to scale eng beyond one team and watched it sprawl, this gives vocabulary for what went wrong and a model for what to try next.
key ideas
- Four team types: stream-aligned, platform, enabling, complicated-subsystem. Most teams should be stream-aligned; the others exist to support them.
- Three interaction modes: collaboration (intense, time-bounded), X-as-a-service (low coupling, high stability), facilitating (one team helps another acquire capability)
- Cognitive load is a hard constraint on team scope — assign teams problems that fit in their cognitive budget
- Conway's Law as a tool: shape the org you want before the architecture you want
- Fracture planes: where to split monoliths along business, change, geographic, or compliance lines
- Thinnest viable platform — the platform is a product, with users (other teams), and should be sized to its real demand
memorable framings
- Team-first thinking, then technology
- A platform team's job is to reduce cognitive load on stream-aligned teams
who should read it
Engineering managers, staff+ engineers, and anyone in a platform / DevEx role. Read alongside Accelerate for the metrics side.