Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

A “stream” is the continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain or organizational capability. Continuous flow requires clarity of purpose and responsibility so that multiple teams can coexist, each with their own flow of work. A stream-aligned team is a team aligned to a single, valuable stream of work; this might be a single product or service, a single set of features, a single user journey, or a single user persona. Further, the team is empowered to build and deliver customer or user value as quickly, safely, and independently as possible, without requiring hand-offs to other teams to perform parts of the work. The stream-aligned team is the primary team type in an organization, and the purpose of the other fundamental team topologies is to reduce the burden on the stream-aligned teams. As we see later in this chapter, the mission of an enabling team, for instance, is to help stream-aligned teams acquire missing capabilities, taking on the effort of research and trials, and setting up successful practices. The mission of a platform team is to reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams by off-loading lower level detailed knowledge (e.g., provisioning, monitoring, or deployment), providing easy-to-consume services around them.