Organizing Your Team with Team Topologies - Part 3 - Evaluation Guide
As your product grows, you need a way to routinely check whether your teams are still structured for flow, speed, and clarity. This guide gives founders and CTOs a practical, repeatable framework for evaluating team health using the four pillars of Team Topologies: alignment, trust, cognitive load, and flow.
1. Start With the Value Stream
Every evaluation begins by asking:
Is the team aligned to the flow of value?
The simplest way to identify your value streams is to look at what customers directly pay for. A value stream starts with an idea and ends when the customer is using that value in production.
Ask:
How many teams does an idea pass through before reaching customers?
Can a single team take an idea from concept to delivery?
Does any team need outside approval before they can start or ship work?
If an idea bounces between multiple teams or gets stuck behind approvals, you’re looking at a structural bottleneck, not a performance issue.
Red flag: More than 1 external team required to ship anything meaningful.
Green flag: A single team owns the concept → build → deploy → feedback loop.
2. Evaluate Trust
If value stream alignment points to what a team owns, trust tells you how fast they can move.
Check whether:
Team members trust each other
Leadership trusts the team
The team trusts other teams
Other teams trust this team
The team can talk directly to customers
The team can release without external approval
Is the team afraid to make decisions
The goal is high organizational trust, paired with zero-trust security practices for systems, not people.
Trust determines speed.
3. Assess Skills and Support
Great teams fail when they’re forced to carry skills that should be centralized or temporarily borrowed.
Ask:
Do we need a platform to reduce cognitive load?
Which platforms actually help, and which create friction?
Is there temporary expertise (DevOps, AI, domain specialists) missing from the team?
Would an enabling team unstick a stalled initiative?
Enablement at the right moment often saves months of churn and burnout.
4. Check for Cognitive Overload
This is the silent killer
If you see:
Work slowing down without an obvious reason
Teams keep escalating decisions
Changes feel risky
Decreased quality or reliability
Slow decision-making
Hesitation to change code
don’t push harder.
Reduce the cognitive load.
Establish a new stream aligned team. Create a platform. Give the team some breathing room and ask them what they think would solve the problem.
5. Encourage Boundary Evaluation
Teams should be allowed to question whether their responsibilities still make sense.
This isn’t about adding or removing types of tasks. It’s about:
Reducing friction
Aligning ownership with expertise
Allowing teams to stretch as they learn
Align skills with value
A team that never revisits boundaries will be frustrated and stall on innovation and performance
6. Preserve Room for Discovery
Give teams time to explore, experiment, and think.
Innovation comes from:
Deep team knowledge
Deep customer knowledge
Deep product knowledge
Have freedom and flexibility to try new approaches
You cannot cram innovation between back-to-back sprints.
The best ideas often originate from the teams closest to the work, not from leadership offsites.
The Goal: Early Correction Over Late Crisis
Healthy organizations continuously evaluates these areas and adjusts early before friction turns into dysfunction. The goal is simple:
Teams should be aligned to the value stream and capable of delivering it autonomously.
Everything else, structure, roles, platforms, leadership, exists to support that outcome
Need Help?
If this feels overwhelming or you’re navigating a specific organizational challenge, I can help.
I work directly with founders and CTOs to build cleaner, healthier, more scalable engineering orgs. Whether you need a single strategy session or a long-term advisory partner, I help teams:
Improving team structure and flow
Reducing delivery bottlenecks
Strengthening engineering practices
Navigate growth and organizational change
If you want clarity, stability, and a stronger path forward for your teams, I’m here.
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.
