Overview of the team shapes library

Since the publication of the Team Topologies book in September 2019 there has been a significant evolution of the team shapes from those originally shown in the book. With the help of the wider community the team shapes library is now available in many common diagramming tools including Miro, Lucid Chart, Figma, Diagrams.net, Google Draw, Google Slides and PowerPoint. Also, working closely with the people at Team Form a new “unclassified team type” shape has been added to the library allowing teams to be represented on a diagram before they have been classified as one of the fundamental team types.

A brief history of the team shape evolution

When the Team Topologies book was first published in September 2019 there were no resources available for companies wanting to do their own team interaction modelling using the team shapes suggested in the book. At that time, organisations needed to craft their own versions of the shapes which resulted in a number of subtle differences and deviations from the original shapes from the book.

Initially, the team interaction diagrams were crafted to be visually appealing within print media without any particular consideration for how the shapes might be recreated using common diagramming tools. When organisations began asking for a set of shapes to use for their team interaction diagrams it was necessary to create a shared repository and make them available. In June 2020, the first team shape template library was created and initially supported a few core tools Google Draw, Google Slides and Diagrams.net, however, the shapes did not match the originals from the book (see images to the right).

The core differences were the depiction of the X-as-a-service, Collaboration and Facilitation shapes::

• The X-as-a-Service interaction is a grey triangle instead of two white bars joining the two teams. The reason for the difference here is two-fold. First, the shape defined in the book does not indicate the direction of the interaction being provided; the point of the triangle now determines this (the triangle points towards the "customer" in the relationship). Second, the shape representing the X-as-a-Service interaction in the book was very difficult to re-create in a number of different diagramming tools; using a simple triangle makes this much easier.

• The Collaboration interaction is a dashed parallelogram instead of a hatched square. Recreating the hatching in different diagramming tools was problematic so this was changed to use a parallelogram.

• The Facilitation interaction mode is a dashed circle instead of a circle with a dotted pattern. Recreating the dotted pattern in different diagramming tools was problematic so this was changed to use a circle.

Contributions from the community

Since March 2021, we’ve been working with a number of other members of the wider community to further develop the team shapes. Since that time we have received contributions from a variety of contributors including:

• conjurer-rich from Conjurer Solutions : Added templates to support PowerPoint, Diagrams.net and Miro.

• KaranAtTeamForm from Team Form: Introduced a new “Unclassified team type” shape to help create diagrams with teams when you are yet to classify them as one of the fundamental team types.

• danmizziharris from GitLab: Added a community supported Figma template

• mattkoch614: Added a community supported Lucid Chart template

Another great addition is the Miro board plugin that was created by malparty which is really awesome and well worth checking out if you use Miro, here is a sneak peak:

The team shape template library will continue to evolve and we welcome any further contributions or feedback, if you are interested in helping out or contributing, head on over to the Team Shape Templates GitHub repository.