Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Collaboration is good for rapid discovery and avoiding hand-offs and delays, but the downside is a higher level of cognitive load. Each side of the collaboration needs to understand more about the other side, so the team members have to retain more in their heads. However, this “collaboration tax” is worth it if the organization wants to innovate very rapidly. By contrast, with X-as-a-Service there is great clarity about which team owns what. There is also less mental context needed for each team, so the cognitive load on each side of the relationship is lower. It’s likely that as a whole, the teams innovate more slowly with X-as-a-Service than collaboration, precisely because their interaction is mediated and defined by a clean API that has locked down the interaction possibilities. X-as-a-Service is best for situations where predictable delivery is more important than rapid discovery.