Team Topologies Updated Its Concept of Platforms
Matthew Skelton recently updated a crucial concept from Team Topologies that changes how platforms scale in larger organizations.
The original model described platform teams as one of four fundamental team types. The updated model recognizes that successful platforms outgrow single teams:
“In our world a team is a group of up to about eight people. So very high trust and multiple different skills and so on. Whereas the platform concept is actually more like a grouping of teams. We expect to see inside a platform, inside a kind of platform boundary. We expect to see multiple different types of teams in a large organization.” (00:35:03)
This solves a practical problem: platforms serving dozens of stream-aligned teams need more than eight people, but teams larger than eight lose effectiveness. The solution isn’t bigger teams—it’s platform groupings containing multiple teams within clear boundaries.
What’s particularly insightful is Skelton’s expectation of “multiple different types of teams” within platform groupings. You might have stream-aligned teams focused on platform capabilities, enabling teams for platform adoption, or complicated-subsystem teams for specialized platform components.
The boundary shifts from team-level to platform-level, but the principles remain: clear ownership, reduced cognitive load, and enabling autonomous value delivery.
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