Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

three core team interaction modes provide the clarity needed for all team interactions within the organization: Collaboration: two teams work closely together for a defined period to discover new patterns, approaches, and limitations. Responsibility is shared and boundaries blurred, but problems are solved rapidly and the organization learns quickly. X-as-a-Service: one team consumes something (such as a service or an API) provided “as a service” from another team. Responsibilities are clearly delineated and—if the boundary is effective—the consuming team can deliver rapidly. The team providing the service seeks to make their service as easy to consume as possible. Facilitating: one team helps another team to learn or adopt new approaches for a defined period of time. The team providing the facilitation aims to make the other team self-sufficient as soon as possible, while the team receiving the facilitation has an open-minded attitude to learning. The combination of well-defined team types and well-defined team interactions provides a clear and powerful way to promote team-based organizational effectiveness, avoiding the ambiguities and conflicts that many organizations experience.