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🧩 Team Topologies

✅ Overview​

Approach to systematize team structure and collaboration patterns, and link software architecture with organization design.

✅ Problems Addressed​

  • Team boundaries and system boundaries do not match, high change cost.
  • Communication load increases, development speed decreases.
  • Platform and common infrastructure are scattered, operation management becomes chaotic.
  • "Shape of team" becomes structural problem hindering architecture.

Team Topologies provides a perspective to "Treat team structure itself as an architecture element" for these.

✅ Basic Philosophy & Rules​

● 4 Team Types​

  1. Stream-aligned Team (Product / Domain charge)
    • Continuous development along the stream of business value.
  2. Platform Team
    • Provide "Internal Platform" for internal developers.
  3. Enabling Team
    • Support other teams and nurture technical capability.
  4. Complicated Subsystem Team
    • Charge of special expert area (Optimization / ML / Video processing etc.).

● 3 Collaboration Modes​

  • Collaboration: Cooperate closely in short term.
  • X-as-a-Service: Provide / Use as service.
  • Facilitating: Capability support / Coaching.

● Matching Team Boundary and Architecture Boundary​

  • Match organization structure and system structure based on Conway's Law.
  • Design collaboration patterns with less friction.

✅ Suitable Applications​

  • Products with clear domain division.
  • Organizations adopting Microservices or Modular Monolith.
  • Environments requiring maintenance of Platform / Infrastructure.
  • Services developed continuously by multiple teams.

❌ Unsuitable Cases​

  • Small-scale products operable by small number of people.
  • Corporate culture where organization change is difficult (Rigid organization structure).
  • When platform maturity is insufficient and service provision becomes a burden.

✅ History (Genealogy / Parent Styles)​

  • Organizational architecture method evolved from DevOps context.
  • Systematized under influence of Conway's Law, SRE, Platform Engineering.
  • Recently spreading as standard framework for modern organization design.

✅ Related Styles​

  • DevOps: Cultural/Technical approach eliminating boundary between Dev and Ops.
  • SRE / SLO: Standardization of operational quality.
  • Platform Engineering: Practical form of Platform Team.
  • Microservices / Modular Monolith: Matching of team boundary and service boundary.

✅ Summary​

Team Topologies clarifies the message "Organization structure is architecture",
and provides theory and practice to balance development speed and organizational health through team placement, collaboration modes, and boundary design.