Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Summary: Limit Teams’ Cognitive Load and Facilitate Team Interactions to Go Faster In a fast-changing and challenging context, teams are more effective than groups of individuals. Successful organizations—from the US military to corporations large and small—treat the team as the fundamental means of getting work done. Teams are generally small, stable, and long lived, allowing team members the time and space to develop their working patterns and team dynamics. Importantly, due to limits on team size (Dunbar’s number), there is an effective upper limit on the cognitive load that a single team can bear. This strongly suggests a limit on the size of the software systems and complexity of domains that any team should work with. The team needs to own the system or subsystems they are responsible for. Teams working on multiple codebases lack ownership and, especially, the mental space to understand and keep the corresponding systems healthy. The team-first approach provides opportunities for many kinds of people to thrive in an organization. Instead of needing a thick skin or resilience in order to survive in an organization that atomizes individuals, people in a team-first organization have the space and support to develop their skills and practices within the context of a team.