Team Topologies provides a combination of principles and practices that can help structure and evolve an organization for effective collaboration, autonomy, delivery focus, and product alignment. Using the Team Topologies shapes and diagramming principles, it is possible to create a series of snapshots of your organization at various points in time that help you understand why the teams within your organization communicate and interact.

The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product. The ISH approach is a “rapid results” approach, and complementary to the approaches from Domain-driven Design (DDD). In particular, ISH is very suitable for conversations with people without an engineering or software background, enabling important discussion and alignment across organisational boundaries.