Team Topologies

• Do we have the right teams in place?
• Are we lacking capabilities in some areas that are not being addressed by any team?
• Do teams have the necessary balance between autonomy and support from other teams?

Development and operations leaders can better understand if the right teams are in place by looking at their organization through the lens of Team Topologies. We recommend reducing the number of team variations to four fundamental Team Topologies that are easily digestible for both upper management and the actual team members themselves:

• Stream-aligned team
• Platform team
• Complicated-subsystem team
• Enabling team

Keep in mind these team types take different forms depending on the size and maturity of the company. In reality, a combination of more than one type of team, or a team transforming into another, is often the best approach.

Stream-aligned teams focus on a single, impactful stream of work. It can be a single product or service, a single set of features, a single user journey, or a single user persona. 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.

Because stream-aligned teams work on the full spectrum of delivery, they are, by necessity, closer to the customer and usually already agile. This team incorporates customer feedback in development cycles, while maintaining software in production. 

While stream-aligned teams are common at many software companies, other organizations may be more familiar with team structures organized by function (i.e. separate teams for engineering, design, QA), rather than the delivery stream. 

Since the stream-aligned team is the most common team type in organizations, the role of other teams is defined relative to stream-aligned teams. Stream-aligned teams should regularly reach out to the following supporting teams (complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform) to continuously improve the speed of delivery and quality of their products and services.

Platform teams enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. While the stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing an application in production, the platform team provides internal services that the stream-aligned team can use.

Platform teams create capabilities that can be used by numerous stream-aligned teams, with little overhead. By optimizing a product, platform teams minimize resources and cognitive loads of the stream-aligned team. This also benefits end-users too, since platform teams can create a cohesive experience that spans across different user experiences or products.

Here at Atlassian, platform teams build services used by all of our products (like identity management) and are expected to provide documentation, support, and consultation for stream-aligned teams.

A complicated-subsystem team is responsible for building and maintaining a part of the system that depends on specific skills and knowledge. Most team members must be specialists in a particular area of knowledge to understand and make changes to the subsystem.

The goal of this team is to reduce the load of stream-aligned teams who work on systems that include or use the subsystem. With the complicated-subsystem team’s expertise and capabilities, stream-aligned teams don’t have to build capabilities in areas too complicated for their daily work. Team members from this team may have specialized knowledge in certain microservices (i.e. a billing service), algorithms, or even artificial intelligence. 

A common pitfall is to embed specialists in every stream-aligned team who uses the subsystem. While this may seem efficient, it’s ultimately not cost-effective and out of scope for a stream-aligned team. 

Stream-aligned teams are under constant pressure to deliver and respond to change quickly, making it challenging to find time for researching, learning, and practicing new skills.

An enabling team composed of specialists in a given technical (or product) domain help bridge this capability gap. These teams focus on research and experimentation to make informed suggestions about tooling, frameworks, and ecosystem choices that affect the tool stack.

This gives stream-aligned teams time to acquire and evolve capabilities without taking time away from their primary goals. The enabling team seeks to primarily increase the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by growing their capabilities with a focus on problems, rather than solutions.

If an enabling team does its job well, the team it assists should no longer need help after a few weeks or so. The enabling team should never work on a permanent dependency.