Most companies assume that if they just hire great people and put them into teams, the work will take care of itself. Then reality sets in—slow decision-making, endless dependencies, and teams constantly stepping on each other’s toes. That’s because teams don’t exist in isolation—they exist in a system. And if that system is broken, even the best teams will struggle.
Enter Team Topologies, a framework by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais that focuses on optimizing how teams interact, reducing cognitive load, and improving the flow of work. Instead of structuring teams around hierarchy or function, it emphasizes team responsibilities, boundaries, and interaction patterns to minimize friction and maximize efficiency.
If your teams feel stuck, the problem may not be the people—it may be how they’re structured and expected to collaborate.
What Is Team Topologies?
Team Topologies is a model that helps organizations design teams that can operate effectively by minimizing unnecessary complexity and optimizing interactions. Instead of traditional department-based silos, it introduces four key types of teams, each with a distinct role.
- Stream-Aligned Teams – These teams are aligned to a business domain, product, or customer need. They own their work end-to-end and are optimized for fast delivery with minimal external dependencies.
- Enabling Teams – These teams help stream-aligned teams adopt new technologies, practices, or capabilities. They don’t own delivery but accelerate learning and help teams improve.
- Complicated Subsystem Teams – These teams manage highly complex or specialized components that require deep expertise, reducing cognitive load for other teams.
- Platform Teams – These teams build internal tools, infrastructure, and services that help other teams move faster by avoiding duplicated effort.
But team structure alone isn’t enough. How teams interact matters just as much as how they’re formed.
How Teams Should Interact: The Missing Piece
Many companies focus on who reports to whom but don’t define how teams should collaborate. This leads to confusion, duplication of work, and wasted time.
Team Topologies introduces three key interaction modes that help teams work together more efficiently.
- Collaboration – When teams need to work closely together to solve complex, evolving problems. This is intensive but necessary in certain situations.
- X-as-a-Service – When one team provides a repeatable service (such as infrastructure or platform support) that other teams can consume with minimal friction.
- Facilitating – When an enabling team helps another team improve by sharing knowledge or coaching without taking over their work.
Without clear interaction rules, teams either collaborate too much (leading to inefficiency) or not enough (leading to silos and duplication of effort). Defining how teams interact ensures that work moves smoothly instead of getting lost in endless coordination.
How Companies Get This Wrong
Even organizations that try to implement cross-functional teams often make structural mistakes that increase cognitive load, slow decision-making, and create unnecessary dependencies.
Here’s what usually goes wrong.
- They rely too much on function-based teams. When teams are grouped by function (marketing, engineering, operations), work gets bogged down in dependencies. Instead of owning outcomes, teams are forced to coordinate constantly.
- They create too many dependencies. If one team can’t make progress without input from three others, bottlenecks pile up fast. Instead of aiming for total autonomy, organizations should design managed dependencies that allow for smooth handoffs without constant delays.
- They overload teams with too much cognitive load. This isn’t just about workload—it’s about the complexity teams are expected to handle. If teams are responsible for too many domains, systems, or processes, they get bogged down, make more mistakes, and struggle to move quickly.
- They fail to evolve team structures over time. Team needs change as organizations scale, yet many companies assume that once teams are formed, they should remain static. Team Topologies emphasizes evolutionary team design, meaning teams should shift and adapt as the business grows.
How to Try Team Topologies in Your Organization
- Map your current teams. Do your teams align with clear business outcomes, or are they structured based on hierarchy and function? Identify where dependencies and bottlenecks exist.
- Reduce unnecessary complexity. Minimize cognitive load by ensuring each team has a clear, manageable scope. If a team is overwhelmed with competing priorities, consider breaking it into a stream-aligned team and supporting it with an enabling or platform team.
- Clarify team responsibilities and interactions. Every team should understand whether they are a Stream-Aligned, Enabling, Complicated Subsystem, or Platform Team—and how they should interact with other teams. If teams are confused about their role, friction will slow everything down.
- Define and refine interaction patterns. Decide when teams should collaborate, provide services, or facilitate learning. Without intentional interaction modes, teams either duplicate effort or waste time navigating unclear handoffs. These interactions should evolve as needs change.
One caveat: There is no silver bullet for increasing speed and focus in organizations. Team Topologies might be beneficial as an organizing methodology for teams, but your teams and their ways of working will still require lots of concerted attention and continuous improvement.
Beyond Tech: Why Team Topologies Isn’t Just for Engineering Teams
Although Team Topologies originated in the world of software engineering and DevOps, its principles apply to any knowledge-work organization. Marketing, product management, customer experience, and even HR teams can benefit from streamlining team interactions and reducing unnecessary complexity.
A marketing team could use a platform model for shared content creation tools while having stream-aligned teams focused on specific customer segments.
A customer success team might operate with enabling teams that help frontline staff adopt better processes and technology.
A strategy team could shift from an isolated planning function to a facilitating team, helping business units refine and execute long-term plans.
The key is understanding cognitive load, optimizing team collaboration, and evolving team structures over time.
Final Thought
Your org structure isn’t just a chart on a slide deck—it can have a huge impact on how work flows, how fast teams can execute, and whether people spend their time creating value or navigating bureaucracy.
If your teams feel like they’re constantly fighting bottlenecks, chances are the problem isn’t the people—it’s the system.
Team Topologies is a solution that offers a dynamic, evolving approach to structuring teams so they can focus on delivering value rather than navigating organizational friction.
