Understanding Cognitive Load in Team Design

“Do you feel like you’re effective and able to respond in a timely fashion to the work you are asked to do?”

This deceptively simple question from Team Topologies cuts through all the productivity theater straight to what actually matters: cognitive load.

John Sweller’s three types of cognitive load reveal why it matters and why talented teams can still struggle with their domain:

• Intrinsic: the fundamental complexity of the problem
• Extraneous: overhead from tools, processes, environment
• Germane: the mental effort needed for learning and high performance

Even the best engineers get context-switched into ineffectiveness. The insight that kills traditional resource allocation: “A team responsible for a complex domain should not have any more domains assigned to them—not even a simple one.”

Allocating team members by percentages across projects isn’t optimization—it’s cognitive load multiplication without knowing the equation. The context switching cost is invisible but devastating.

Quote is from Team Topologies