Case studies of Team Topologies applied in practice

“Our experience at Volkswagen Group Aftersales shows that Team Topologies is not merely a theoretical framework; it provides the decisive language and robust thinking framework required to ensure that architecture, team boundaries, and ownership are deliberately co-designed.”

Through key engagements with the National Health Service (NHS), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), and the Home Office, we have demonstrated that Team Topologies is a powerful catalyst for a better society. This case study details our journey, contrasting past failures with pandemic-era breakthroughs, analyzing how Team Topologies was operationalised across vaccination booking, testing, UKHSA threat responses, and immigration systems, and outlining recommendations for UK public sector leaders.

Founded in 2012, Creditas, a Brazilian fintech, is a consumer lending startup that operates a digital platform providing secured loans and low interest rates. By 2022, Creditas had over 3.000 employees and was serving a broad range of products related to consumer loans, with B2C and B2B2C models.

In this case study, we will deep drive into how we evolved from a single team with multiple products, to a full product tribe with a platform team to support internal stream-aligned teams for fast flow of value.

In just three years, Yassir scaled from 50 engineers to 400, serving 8 million customers across 45 cities. This rapid growth came with a price: tangled team structures, misaligned priorities, and mounting delivery bottlenecks. In this case study we show how Team Topologies helped turn chaos into clarity and faster flow.

This case highlights how applying Team Topologies principles can evolve an organization into a high-performing, empowered ecosystem capable of delivering value faster, with greater sustainability and team well-being. REA Group’s Financial Services division undertook a major transformation to address slow delivery, high cognitive load, and inefficiencies caused by large, monolithic teams. By adopting Team Topologies, the organization restructured into small, autonomous, stream-aligned teams and introduced a strong focus on flow efficiency, intentional ways of working, and cognitive load management.

In this case study, Alfa Financial Software, a leading provider of asset finance SaaS, addressed the scaling challenges of its organically grown engineering structure by implementing the Alfa Development Model (ADM). By adopting principles from Team Topologies, the company restructured its teams to reduce cognitive load and optimise workflow. This strategic shift allowed Alfa to maintain its collaborative culture while ensuring sustainable, long-term software delivery for its global clients, including major institutions like Mercedes-Benz and Santander.

EBSCO Information Services, a leading provider of research databases, leveraged Team Topologies with Conflux's support, Team Topologies Solution Partner, to optimize its organizational dynamics for software delivery.

This case study, Reteaming for Fast Flow, outlines how Pirate Ship Software GmbH, a cloud-based shipping software company, successfully reorganized its Hamburg development team to support significant growth. Faced with scaling limits, unclear domain ownership, and excessive cognitive load across three overloaded feature teams, the company sought a new structure that could integrate 10 additional developers effectively

Capra Consulting, a Norwegian IT consultancy, underwent a reorganization to address challenges in communication and decision-making brought about by growth. At 50 employees and a hierarchical organizational model, we wanted to mitigate the risks of reduced employee participation in our operation and reduced autonomy that might come with growth. We sought inspiration from the Team Topologies book to create a networked organizational structure that emphasized employee engagement, autonomy, and flexibility. By dissolving the Top Management Group and introducing specialized teams, we fostered distributed decision-making and collaborative problem-solving. 

The following case study explains what led Trade Me to introduce the concept of the Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) from the book Team Topologies. We will explore what sparked our need to change the way we previously had been working, what we did, and the lessons we learned.

Flo Health is the world’s most popular app for female health, with 350 million downloads, 70 million active monthly users and close to 5 million paid subscribers globally. After achieving a market fit, Flo embraced the super-app strategy for growth.

In 2023, Flo added more than 10 million active monthly users. With growth, one of our main challenges was building holistic user journeys across domains. Delivering user value demands orchestration across multiple teams, which brings a lot of cognitive load due to the large number of team interactions.

We rethought our approach by introducing product platforms for personalization and explicit interaction strategy. Team Topologies helped shape our journey by providing a framework for structuring teams and optimizing their interactions.

How the Belgian telecom provider Telenet applied Team Topologies at enterprise level to increase business agility

Telenet, a Belgian telecom provider, began implementing agile at scale in 2019, when the company implemented an agile way of working based on the Spotify model.

By 2022, three years into that journey, the company had embraced agile and the benefits it brought in terms of transparency, collaboration, and customer focus. The agile way of working had become part of the company’s DNA. However, structural friction in the way the company was organized inhibited true business agility.

To overcome this, inspired by Team Topologies thinking, the firm revamped and reinvigorated its entire operating model empowering teams and optimizing for fast flow,

Docker is a technology company that has popularized containerization in the software industry. After reaching Series E status in 2017, we sold off our Docker Enterprise Edition product to Mirantis in November 2019, returning to our roots, and reinvesting in our end developer products, especially Docker Hub and Docker Desktop. With this refocus, we had to build new revenue streams as a Series A, 60 person company.

Our turnaround was swift, as we announced $50m in ARR on February 1, 2022, with a 4x increase in our previous fiscal year. We announced a Series C investment on March 31, 2022.

While this is building off our prior product adoption, success, and developer loyalty, we’ve also rebuilt our culture and organizational structure, including shaping our Product Development organization around concepts found in Team Topologies.

Founded in 2012, Improbable is a British technology company, dedicated to solving the challenges of building rich virtual worlds and pioneering the path to the metaverse. … In 2020 Improbable acquired Munich-based video games company Zeuz, a managed hosting service used by the makers of hit online games such as SCUM and Conan Exiles, to further the company’s mission to make online games development more efficient, effective and accessible for developers. …

Merging two companies that had significantly different approaches to software development was a daunting task. Using some of the key principles and practices defined in Team Topologies, Improbable were able to identify and execute on a plan to evolve the team structure in a way that would align with their future growth goals.

NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) is the largest public agency in Norway. Our mission is to assist people into work, and we provide a series of benefits related to pensions, disease, unemployment, and others. We provide services to over 5 million Norwegian citizens.

Over the past 3ish years, we have developed platform products which support our digital product teams. … The next evolutionary step was to think of this set of features as one or more platform products, and develop them with the same mindset as any other digital product. A guiding principle has been to make the platform attractive to use through reducing the cognitive load for the product teams, as recommended by the book Team Topologies.

Learn how financial advice provider Wealth Wizards uses Team Topologies to guide and evolve their software and teams to respond to rapid growth and increasing domain complexity.

CROZ is a professional services company. This means that we do not build our own products. Instead, we use our technical, domain, and organizational expertise to help our clients build their products and achieve their business goals.

A year after introducing the platform team and establishing interactions with the rest of the organization, we found that the new team structure promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing in a better way, relieves cognitive load from existing teams enabling them to focus on delivering value to our clients, and serves as additional leverage for organizational improvement initiatives.

Using the ideas described in Team Topologies, PureGym was able to communicate how and why working practices needed to adapt using the core concepts to give team members more ownership and autonomy whilst reducing their cognitive load. This case study describes PureGym’s journey in the adoption of the Team Topologies principles and practices.

We spoke to Andy Norton, Software Development Manager at Footasylum, about the ways in which Team Topologies has helped to shape teams and software delivery within Footasylum.

We spoke with Paul Ingles, CTO at RVU which operates the UK’s leading home services price comparison site Uswitch, to understand their approach to teams and practices for accelerating the flow of software delivery and operations across a growing number of internal engineering teams.

We spoke to T. Alexander Lystad, Chief Cloud Architect at Visma, about the ways in which Team Topologies has helped to shape teams and software delivery within Visma.

We sat down to speak with Christian Rorholt Moe, Chief Digital Officer at Gjensidige Insurance, a leading Nordic insurance company with 4000 employees and business in the Nordic and Baltic countries, to understand their approaches to teams and practices for effective digitization.