Organizing Your Team with Team Topologies - Part 1 - The Nine Principles
When you’re a startup, everything begins with building your MVP. Maybe you’re a solo founder, working with a partner, or you’ve grown to a small team of developers. At first, every hire writes code or ships features. But as you grow, you start bringing on people who support the product indirectly, DevOps, QA, design, architecture, platform engineers, data specialists.
This is where the real question emerges:
How should you organize your teams so that everyone contributes to flow not friction?
As companies grow, the hardest challenges aren’t technical.
They’re organizational:
Who owns what?
Where are the boundaries?
How do teams interact?
How do you avoid bottlenecks while still maintaining control?
This is where Team Topologies provides clarity.
In this three-part series, I’ll break down the principles, patterns, and practical methods founders and CTOs can use to build healthier, higher-performing teams.
The Nine Principles
Team Topologies are built on nine principals
Focus on flow, not structure
High trust is non-negotiable
Keep teams together
Respect cognitive limits
Make changes small and safe
Connect teams directly to customers
Embrace complexity, don’t fight it
Foster continuous discovery
Eliminate team dependencies
These nine principles explain why high-performing teams work the way they do. They’re the foundation for designing teams that can deliver continuously without burning out or becoming bottlenecks.
1. Focus on Flow, Not Structure
Flow is the speed at which a new idea becomes real value in a customer’s hands. Whether that idea comes from the CEO, a customer, or the team itself, the moment it’s created, the value stream begins. The goal is to validate it, build it, and deliver it as quickly and safely as possible.
This is why flow matters so much: it measures how effectively your organization turns intent into impact.
Structure, roles, and org charts are only valuable if they accelerate that flow. If your organizational design produces more meetings than movement, or more documentation than delivery, it isn’t helping your customers, it’s slowing you down.
A team structure should remove friction, not create it. If it becomes a bottleneck or a bureaucratic maze, you’re not optimizing for value; you’re optimizing for stagnation.
High-performing organizations don’t obsess over structure; they optimize for flow.
2. High trust is non-negotiable
Trust is the foundation that makes or breaks teams. I operate from a trust-by-default mindset: if you hired someone, you already decided they are capable, responsible, and aligned with the mission. Treat them that way.
If you don’t trust someone to make certain decisions, don’t put them in a role where those decisions are required. But once they’re in the seat, trust must be present, otherwise everything slows to a crawl. Without trust, teams hesitate, wait for approvals, over-communicate, or defer responsibility. Flow evaporates.
Low-trust environments generate:
Excessive documentation
Defensive processes
Heavy-handed governance
Slow decision-making
Micromanagement disguised as “accountability”
Companies waste millions trying to solve trust problems with process, tooling, and frameworks. None of it works. Trust is not a corporate buzzword, it is the operating system that everything else relies on.
If trust is low within a team or between teams, leaders must uncover why and address it directly. Lack of trust is not just a cultural issue; it’s an everything issue.
High trust accelerates flow. Low trust kills it.
3. Keep Teams Together
Think about any team you’ve worked on. That first month is always rough. You’re learning the product, the processes, who excels at what, and how everyone communicates. Contrast that with a team that’s been together for a year. People anticipate each other’s needs, hand off work seamlessly, and collaborate without friction.
That difference is not accidental.
It’s the compounding effect of shared context.
Stable teams develop:
Faster communication loops
Higher trust
Deeper product knowledge
Stronger intuition
Better problem-solving patterns
A team that has been together will always outperform a freshly assembled group of rockstars. Chemistry beats raw talent every time.
Yet many organizations routinely reshuffle teams as if it were costless. It isn’t. Constantly reorganizing destroys accumulated context, resets trust, and forces teams back to the slowest stage of their lifecycle.
The hidden cost of breaking up teams is enormous. Keeping teams together is one of the simplest, highest-leverage decisions a leader can make.
4. Respect Cognitive Limits
Teams can only absorb so much complexity before their effectiveness starts to collapse. Every new tool, domain, integration, or responsibility increases cognitive load. Leaders often underestimate this and unintentionally turn high-performing teams into overwhelmed ones simply by adding “one more thing” without taking anything away.
Cognitive load isn’t a soft concept. It directly affects:
Decision quality
Speed of delivery
System reliability
Team morale
Ability to innovate
When a team’s domain becomes too large, you don’t fix the problem by demanding more documentation or process. You fix it by reducing cognitive strain, and that usually means standing up another stream-aligned team to own part of the domain.
This is not a sign of failure. It’s a sign of growth.
As your product expands, splitting domains and creating new teams is healthy, strategic, and necessary. Lean into it. A well-scoped, focused team will always outperform a team drowning under the weight of too many responsibilities.
Respect cognitive limits, and your teams will stay fast, creative, and resilient.
5. Make Changes Small and Safe
DevOps has championed this idea for years: teams that ship small, continuous improvements will always outperform teams that wait months to release large, risky changes. But this principle applies far beyond technology, it applies to organizational design as well.
Small changes are powerful because they:
Reduce risk
Increase learning
Shorten feedback loops
Build confidence
Make recovery simple when something goes wrong
Large, infrequent changes, whether to code or team structure, carry heavy uncertainty. They’re harder to validate, harder to roll back, and far more likely to fail in unexpected ways.
Design your organization the same way you design resilient systems: favor small, safe, continuous adjustments over massive, high-stakes overhauls.
You don’t need a big-bang release or a sweeping reorg to improve your team. Introduce incremental changes, observe the impact, learn, and adapt. Momentum compounds when change is designed to be safe.
Avoid betting your organization’s progress on a single huge rollout that can fail spectacularly. Instead, build a culture where improvement happens daily, not quarterly.
6. Connect Teams Directly to Customers
When teams can’t talk directly to customers, they’re forced to rely on secondhand interpretations filtered through layers of management and product owners. This creates a “telephone effect” where meaning, context, and urgency get distorted at every step.
By the time insights reach the team, they’re often incomplete, softened, or fundamentally misunderstood. And when teams have follow-up questions, those get routed back through the same layers, slowing everything down and weakening the connection to real customer value.
Remember: your value stream begins the moment an idea is created, even when the idea comes from the customer. Every hop, filter, or translation slows flow and increases the risk of building the wrong thing.
Trust your teams to speak with customers, understand their needs, and make informed decisions. Guardrails are fine, micromanagement is not. Direct communication creates:
Better context
Faster feedback loops
Higher ownership
More accurate solutions
When teams hear customer needs firsthand, value delivery becomes clearer, faster, and more aligned with reality. Empower them to build with real understanding, not filtered assumptions.
7. Embrace Complexity, Don’t Fight It
Modern software systems are inherently complex. Far too complex for perfect prediction, rigid planning, or upfront certainty. This is one of the core reasons agile exists. We can’t know everything in advance, so we optimize for learning, adaptation, and fast feedback.
Instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty, acknowledge it and design your teams to operate effectively within it.
Complexity isn’t a flaw to be engineered out; it’s a natural consequence of building real products in dynamic environments. The goal isn’t to simplify the world into something predictable, but to structure your teams in a way that can absorb and respond to complexity without being overwhelmed.
This is another reason cognitive load matters so much. When teams are overloaded, even small uncertainties become obstacles. When teams have room to think, learn, and adapt, they can navigate complexity confidently.
Embrace complexity by giving teams:
Clear, well-scoped domains
Room to explore and experiment
Direct access to customers
Autonomy to adjust their boundaries
The trust and psychological safety to make decisions
Fighting complexity with more process, more approvals, or more prediction only slows teams down. Embrace it, equip your teams for it, and let them adapt as the system evolves.
8. Foster Continuous Discovery
Breakthrough ideas rarely emerge from executive brainstorms or carefully planned offsites. They come from the teams who work closest to the product, understand the customer deeply, and have the autonomy and space to explore.
But teams can’t innovate when they’re overloaded. Treating them like a feature factory, churning caffeine into code, kills creativity and replaces innovation with technical debt. When every minute is booked for delivery work and status meetings, you’re not leaving any capacity for learning, discovery, or improvement.
Remember: the goal isn’t to ship code — it’s to deliver value.
Teams that stay together, trust each other, understand the customer, and have room to experiment are the teams that generate the next major breakthroughs. They see patterns leaders miss. They discover simpler solutions. They prototype ideas long before they’re officially requested.
Fostering continuous discovery means giving teams:
Slack in their schedules
Psychological safety to try things
Permission to experiment
Direct exposure to customer needs
Trust to pursue insights that emerge organically
Innovation isn’t an event — it’s a habit. And it only emerges when teams have the space to think.
9. Eliminate Team Dependencies
Nothing kills productivity faster than waiting on another team. You can optimize a single team to perfection, but if they rely on external approvals, handoffs, or queues, that optimization is meaningless. Flow isn’t determined by the speed of one team; it’s determined by the slowest dependency between teams.
The solution isn’t to “fix the team.” It’s to fix the handoffs.
Better yet, eliminate the handoff entirely by giving teams the autonomy and skills to own their outcomes end-to-end.
This is the true spirit of shifting left. not dumping more work onto developers, but building teams that have the capability and authority to:
Decide what they work on
Own how and when it gets delivered
Control their infrastructure
Manage their monitoring and observability
Release independently
When teams own the full value stream, dependencies disappear and flow accelerates dramatically.
Organizing teams by skillset (frontend team, backend team, DevOps team) guarantees handoffs. Organizing teams by value stream empowers them to deliver without friction.
Eliminate dependency, reduce coordination overhead, and build teams that can execute autonomously.
Principles alone don’t build high-performing teams, execution does. And in fast-growing startups, the gap between intention and implementation widens quickly. It can be overwhelming when trying to organize large, overprovisioned teams. Knowing where to start is challenging. Companies that scale well are the ones whose leaders bring in the right expertise at the right moments. As a board-level advisor, I partner with founders and CTOs to:
align team structure with business goals
eliminate organizational drag
accelerate delivery
If you’re preparing for your next stage of growth, or want to diagnose friction before it becomes costly, I invite you to reach out.
Next, in Part 2, we’ll look at the six structural patterns that help teams reduce friction, eliminate bottlenecks, and scale with confidence.
Attribution
This article draws on concepts from Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.
Original source materials can be found at the official Team Topologies website: https://teamtopologies.com/key-concepts
Team Topologies is a registered trademark of Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd. all credit for the original framework belongs to the authors.
