In this 2nd part of the newsletter series ‘Why Agile isn’t enough (and what’s really slowing you down), Rich Allen explores two less visible frictions, overloaded platform teams and overly collaborative operating models, that quietly slow delivery. Instead of more process, we may need better questions about how our teams are structured, how they interact, and whether we’ve designed the organisation for clarity, autonomy, and flow.

The second edition of the book Team Topologies provides vital success stories, analysis, commentary, and clarifications to help leaders plan and execute transformations in every industry sector and geography. 

Many teams adopt Agile in the hope of moving faster. They introduce sprints and stand-ups, visualise the work, and improve discipline at the team level. The process brings rhythm, visibility, and a sense of progress, and yet, delivery is still slow. Work gets done, but the value takes too long to reach users. Dependencies multiply, coordination becomes a constant effort, and every step forward seems to rely on waiting for someone else. "We're doing Agile", but are we really being agile?

For many organisations, introducing Agile helps make the work more visible. Teams are more aligned in how they plan, estimate, and reflect. But visibility doesn’t equal flow, and progress on the board doesn’t always mean progress in the system. You can have well-run teams, but still struggle to deliver value end-to-end. At some point, you have to ask where the work is getting stuck, and why, what slows things down between teams, not just within them, and how are team structures within the organisation shaping the way value flows.

CTOs and engineering leaders can build Michelin-starred organizations by combining three key frameworks like master chefs: VSRA (the menu) aligns customer needs with business architecture, Team Topologies (the ingredients) ensures optimal team balance and interactions, and Flow Engineering (the recipe) coordinates seamless execution. Success requires all three working together.

This article explores how combining Team Topologies principles with domain-driven platform engineering (DDPE) creates more scalable, adaptive, and developer-centric platform organizations. By applying domain thinking to the four fundamental team types and three interaction modes, organizations can achieve clearer team boundaries, optimized cognitive load, and dynamic evolution aligned with business domains.

Is your team suffering from size-related cognitive overload? Team Topologies offers practical solutions.

Redesigning teams, rethinking platforms, and reclaiming agility—how enterprises can turn friction into flow and fragmented IT Ops into scalable, service-oriented delivery.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face constant pressure to adapt and transform. Traditional hierarchical structures often prove inadequate in fostering agility and driving meaningful change. To address this challenge, leaders are increasingly exploring innovative approaches to team organization and collaboration. One such approach is leveraging the principles of Team Topologies, specifically the enabling team type and Facilitation mode.

Leadership teams do not see themselves as enabling team types. They often see the potential of enabling teams, but the default approach is to delegate the tasks to other teams, either by assembling new temporary enabling teams or asking a current team to behave as an enabling team to help other teams.

We have seen various types of enabling teams depending on the missing capability identified. Like agile coaches, SREs, testing specialists, you name it. Yet, we consider that leadership teams are in a unique position to behave as enabling teams to drive meaningful change in key strategic areas.

The true power of Team Topologies emerges not in academic discussion but in its practical application across diverse organizational contexts. In this newsletter series, we bring together the voices of several practitioners from the CNCF Platforms Working Group who have implemented Team Topologies principles in their organizations. Through their experiences—ranging from Bryan Ross' restaurant analogy for platform teams to Matt Menzenski's connection with Deep Work philosophy—a comprehensive picture emerges of how Team Topologies transforms organizational effectiveness by focusing on team cognitive load, clear interaction patterns, and service-oriented platforms. These complementary perspectives demonstrate that whether you're restructuring platform teams, mapping team interactions, or connecting individual and organizational productivity, Team Topologies provides a cohesive framework for driving meaningful improvement in how technology organizations deliver value.

As organizations, we want to minimize inter-team dependencies. However, there are specific moments where strategic temporary interactions are essential to help teams learn faster and more effectively from each other to address capability gaps and other blockers to flow.. In this issue, we will explore the facilitating interaction mode, which can support such situations.

The X-as-a-Service (XaaS) interaction mode from Team Topologies offers a fundamental pattern to help organizations avoid the trap of creating unnecessary “blocking dependencies” between their teams. This is essential to support organizations to scale while achieving a fast flow of value.

Team Topologies - the leading approach to organization dynamics for fast flow - is entering a new phase of operations to better support its core mission, opening the door to wider participation from the ecosystem of partners, sponsors, supporters, and the community at large.  As part of this new phase,  the core operations of Team Topologies will move to a not-for-profit approach. This transition marks an exciting new phase in the Team Topologies journey as we deepen our commitment to making work more humane and effective for everyone.