Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
December 2023
A practical guide to organizing business and technology teams for fast flow, focusing on team patterns and interaction modes that reduce cognitive load and improve delivery.
Key Concepts
- Four Fundamental Team Types: Stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem teams
- Three Team Interaction Modes: Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating
- Cognitive Load: Understanding and managing the mental effort required for teams to be effective
- Conway's Law: Leveraging the relationship between organization structure and system architecture
Personal Takeaways
This book has fundamentally changed how I think about team structure and responsibilities. At 5X, we reorganized our engineering department following the team topologies approach, establishing clear stream-aligned teams focused on specific customer value streams, with a dedicated platform team supporting their needs. This shift dramatically reduced coordination overhead and accelerated our delivery cycles.
Practical Applications
The concept of cognitive load management has been particularly valuable. We intentionally limited the scope of each team's responsibilities to ensure they could maintain deep expertise in their domain. We also established clearer interaction modes between teams—explicitly defining when teams should collaborate closely versus when they should operate as service providers to each other. This clarity reduced friction and improved overall system quality.
Recommendation
Essential reading for engineering leaders and architects. The book provides a practical framework for organizing teams that aligns with modern software development practices. The authors balance theory with actionable guidance, making it immediately applicable to real-world organizations of any size.