Team Topologies Map of Content

Team Topologies provides one of the clearest mental models I’ve found for organizing software teams and the systems they build. These posts explore the intersection of team design, platform thinking, and organizational evolution.

Core Principles

Conway’s Law as Organizational Design Principle
Why your org chart is your most important architectural document, and how to design with Conway’s Law instead of fighting it.

Understanding Cognitive Load in Team Design
The simple question that cuts through productivity theater to reveal why talented teams struggle with their domains.

Team Boundaries as System Architecture
How team boundaries function as architectural decisions and why clear ownership eliminates coordination overhead.

Team Design Patterns

Four Team Types for Modern Software Development
Stream-aligned teams, platform groups, enabling teams, and complicated-subsystem teams—and why most teams should be stream-aligned.

Three Patterns for Team Interaction in Team Topologies
Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and Facilitating—and why sometimes the best team relationship is intentionally limited communication.

Platform Thinking

Team Topologies Updated Its Concept of Platforms
How successful platforms evolve from single teams to platform groupings while maintaining Team Topologies principles.

Platforms as Internal Products
Why platform teams need product thinking, user research, and the Thinnest Viable Platform approach.

Not Everything is a Product in Team Topologies
Clarifying the boundaries of product thinking within Team Topologies patterns.

Applied Thinking

When Platform Products Fail - About Maps, Domains, Topologies
How Wardley Maps, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies intersect to explain platform failures and evolutionary misalignment.

Applying Team Topologies to Marketing and Community
Extending Team Topologies thinking beyond engineering to other organizational functions.

Related Mental Models

On Explorers, Villagers, and Town Planners of Simon Wardley
Wardley’s organizational thinking about different types of work that complements Team Topologies patterns.