In my previous blog, "Overcoming Challenges in Adopting Software Tools for Distributed Teams", we explored the challenges and benefits of the distributed team organizational model. Building on that discussion, this blog takes a deeper dive into how distributed teams can be structured for success using the Team Topologies framework. We’ll also explore how Service Reliability Management (SRM) supports these team structures, enabling organizations to optimize collaboration, reliability, and scalability.
Introduction
In today’s fast-paced digital world, organizations are increasingly turning to distributed teams to boost innovation, agility, and responsiveness. However, to truly benefit from distributed models, it’s essential to structure teams in a way that promotes collaboration and efficiency. Team Topologies, a concept introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, provides a framework for structuring teams to optimize for flow and reliability. In this blog, we’ll explore the principles of Team Topologies, look at real-world examples, and see how Service Reliability Management (SRM) can support these team structures to enhance organizational success.
What is Team Topologies?
Team Topologies is a model designed to help organizations structure their teams for effective software delivery, particularly in complex, distributed environments. The framework categorizes teams into four main types, each with a distinct purpose and function:
- Stream-Aligned Teams
- Platform Teams
- Enabling Teams
- Complicated-Subsystem Teams
Each of these teams plays a unique role, and together they form a balanced approach to delivering reliable, scalable services. Let’s break down each team type and explore how they function in the real world.
The Four Team Types in Team Topologies
Stream Aligned Teams
Definition: Stream-aligned teams are responsible for a specific product, service, or customer journey. They own the end-to-end delivery process, including development, testing, deployment, and operations.
Example: At Amazon, the "two-pizza team" model embodies stream-aligned teams. Each team is small enough to be fed by two pizzas and is aligned to a specific service or product area. This enables rapid decision-making and reduces bottlenecks, as teams have full ownership of their services.
How SRM Supports Stream-Aligned Teams:
ServiceNow SRM enables stream-aligned teams by providing real-time insights into service health, incident status, and performance metrics. SRM gives these teams full visibility into their service reliability and allows them to set and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs). With SRM’s automated incident response and workflow management, stream-aligned teams can address issues faster, reducing downtime and improving customer satisfaction.
Platform Teams
Definition: Platform teams provide reusable services, tools, and infrastructure that other teams (primarily stream-aligned) depend on. The goal is to reduce redundancy and enable development teams to focus on delivering product features rather than managing infrastructure.
Example: Spotify’s "tribes" and "platform teams" demonstrate this structure. Platform teams provide core services (e.g., authentication, payments) that all squads can use, which minimizes duplication of effort and increases efficiency.
How SRM Supports Platform Teams:
ServiceNow SRM is particularly beneficial for platform teams by offering a unified platform to monitor and maintain the shared infrastructure. Through SRM, platform teams can proactively monitor service performance, manage incidents, and ensure that the underlying services supporting other teams are running smoothly. SRM’s dashboards enable platform teams to track dependencies, manage service health, and provide visibility to stream-aligned teams, ensuring consistent, reliable infrastructure across the organization.
Enabling Teams
Definition: Enabling teams are specialized teams that work with other teams to help them adopt new technologies, practices, or processes. Their role is typically temporary and focused on guiding teams through unfamiliar areas, such as a new tool, methodology, or technology.
Example: Netflix has enabling teams dedicated to security, which help development teams adopt secure coding practices and tools. These enabling teams provide training and support until the development teams are self-sufficient in applying security best practices.
How SRM Supports Enabling Teams:
For enabling teams, SRM provides a resourceful platform to facilitate learning and best practices. Enabling teams can use SRM’s dashboards and analytics to identify areas where stream-aligned teams need improvement, such as response times or incident management practices. By providing insights into operational bottlenecks or reliability gaps, SRM helps enabling teams tailor their guidance to specific needs. This allows the enabling teams to efficiently empower other teams and monitor progress, ensuring that teams adopt practices successfully.
Complicated-Subsystem Teams
Definition: Complicated-subsystem teams handle specialized parts of the system that require deep expertise, often due to high complexity or unique technical requirements. These teams work independently on specific subsystems, which they maintain and optimize.
Example: At a company like Tesla, there might be a complicated-subsystem team dedicated to the autonomous driving system. Due to the specialized expertise required, this team focuses solely on that subsystem, ensuring it operates with maximum reliability.
How SRM Supports Complicated-Subsystem Teams:
SRM helps complicated-subsystem teams manage their specialized areas by providing dedicated monitoring and incident tracking for complex subsystems. For example, a complicated-subsystem team responsible for a critical backend service can use SRM to set specific SLOs and monitor subsystem health. SRM’s real-time alerts and detailed reporting enable these teams to detect and resolve issues in highly technical subsystems, maintaining reliability and performance without impacting the broader system.
Real-World Examples of Team Topologies in Action
Spotify’s Agile Structure: Spotify is renowned for its unique organization of squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds, aligning with Team Topologies’ principles. Squads act as stream-aligned teams focused on particular features, while platform teams provide reusable services. Enabling teams at Spotify help implement best practices across squads, particularly around DevOps and agile methodologies. Using a tool like SRM could enhance this setup by providing centralized oversight across their teams, ensuring reliable service delivery and effective incident management.
ING’s Agile Transformation: ING implemented Team Topologies-inspired structures to streamline operations and increase agility. By creating stream-aligned teams for customer services and platform teams for backend infrastructure, ING managed to improve its time-to-market and reliability. ServiceNow SRM would be ideal in this setup, providing each team type with tailored monitoring, incident response, and performance metrics to maintain consistent, high-quality service.
How Service Reliability Management (SRM) Fits into the Team Topologies Model
SRM supports the Team Topologies model by providing a centralized, adaptable platform that aligns with each team type’s unique needs. Here’s how SRM adds value across team types:
- End-to-End Visibility: SRM offers dashboards and reports that give stream-aligned and platform teams full visibility into service health, performance, and incidents, enabling proactive management and ownership of their services.
- Rapid Updates and Proven Scalability: Built on the NOW Platform, SRM leverages existing ITSM/ITOM components that are proven at scale. This enables organizations to adopt SRM quickly and scale as the team needs grow.
- Automated Incident Management: SRM’s automated workflows and alerting capabilities streamline incident response, empowering teams to resolve issues faster without manual intervention.
- Support for Team Autonomy: By providing actionable insights and visibility into service reliability, SRM allows each team to operate independently while maintaining alignment with the organization’s overall goals.
- Adaptability for Specialized Teams: For enabling and complicated-subsystem teams, SRM provides flexibility to monitor specific metrics and practices, making it easy to guide other teams or manage complex systems effectively.
Conclusion
Effective distributed teams require careful structuring to maximize productivity and reliability. Team Topologies provides an invaluable framework for organizing these teams into stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem teams, each serving a unique purpose in the organization. However, to realize the full potential of this model, organizations need a tool like SRM.
SRM supports distributed teams by aligning with the needs of each team type, providing end-to-end visibility, automating incident management, and enabling scalable, reliable service delivery. Whether your organization is working to improve product reliability, optimize platform support, or facilitate new technology adoption, SRM is designed to make distributed team structures efficient, responsive, and scalable.
By structuring teams according to Team Topologies and supporting them with ServiceNow SRM, organizations can unlock the full potential of distributed teams and achieve long-term success.
Explore More:
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
- The Basics of Team Topologies: Building High-Performing Teams
- Service Reliability Management | Product Page
- Service Reliability Management | Data Sheet
- Service Reliability Management | Product Documentation
- [Demo] Optimizing Service Reliability with Service Reliability Management
- [Demo] Service Reliability Management: On-call scheduling
- [Demo] Service Level Management Demo
- Beers With Engineers - Episode 25 - Service Reliability Management
