Skip to content
Nerdy beta

Fractal Topologies

Team Topologies Organizational Design

Team Topologies doesn't stop working when your organization gets bigger. You just apply the same patterns at every scale.

Team Topologies patterns apply fractally, within different Organizational Layers. The diagrams below are our original illustrations of these concepts.

single-product-multi-team A single product with multiple teams can organize internally using the same four team types and three interaction modes. A large platform can itself be a team-of-teams composed of specialized stream-aligned, enabling, and platform sub-teams.

whats-in-a-platform

For a large developer platform, the platform group might contain a CI/CD Pipelines & Tooling team (platform), a PaaS Onboarding team (enablement), an API team (stream aligned to consumers), and an Internal Developer Portal team. The platform itself scales while mitigating Cognitive Load because each sub-team owns a coherent slice.

The key insight is that as organizations grow, you don’t abandon the model; you apply it recursively. The same principles (minimize Cognitive Load, align to Flow, choose from Three Team Interaction Modes) hold whether you’re designing a 5-team product group or a 50-team organization.

Resources