Navigating the autonomy spectrum: tailoring Product Ownership with Team Topologies

Blog

8 May

Team autonomy is a cornerstone of modern ways of working, especially within Agile and DevOps. Yet, discussions often polarize between ideals of complete self-direction ("teams decide everything!") and business accountability realities ("but who owns the risk and budget?"). This tension isn't a simple problem to solve, but a paradox to manage. The crucial point: autonomy isn't a binary switch, but a spectrum.

Applying a single level of autonomy, especially concerning what teams work on and when, across an entire organization is often ineffective and can even be detrimental. The goal shouldn't be maximum autonomy for all, but rather the right fit – the appropriate level of decision-making mandate and corresponding accountability suited to each team's specific purpose within the organizational system.

How, then, do we determine that "right fit"? The Team Topologies approach offers a powerful lens for understanding different team types, their interactions, and crucially, how to navigate the autonomy spectrum by defining appropriate levels of mandate – often embodied by the Product Owner role – for each.

While factors like team maturity and specific domain context will influence a team's precise position and effectiveness, using Team Topologies helps establish the appropriate starting point and boundaries for autonomy based on the team's fundamental purpose.

MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE: TEAM TOPOLOGIES DEFINES THE TERRAIN

Before diving into autonomy levels, let's briefly revisit the four fundamental team topologies, focusing on their purpose:

Stream-Aligned Teams: Focused on a single, valuable stream of work, aligned to a business domain or organizational capability. They are the primary value-delivery units, closest to the customer or end-user.
Platform Teams: Provide internal services or tools that accelerate Stream-Aligned teams by reducing their cognitive load. They offer a curated, reliable foundation.
Enabling Teams: Help other teams acquire missing capabilities, typically through coaching and advice, often for a limited time. They are specialists in a technical or practice area.
Complicated Subsystem Teams: Manage a component or subsystem that requires deep, specialized knowledge, abstracting its complexity away from other teams.

Understanding these distinct purposes is key to seeing why their autonomy needs differ. Forcing an Enabling Team to operate with the same product ownership mandate as a Stream-Aligned Team ignores their fundamentally different roles in the flow of value.

THE "HOW" VS. "WHAT/WHEN" AUTONOMY DISTINCTION

It's useful to distinguish between two facets of autonomy:

Autonomy of "How": Freedom to choose internal working methods, tools, and technical implementation details—the realm of Product Delivery, operating within established organizational guardrails. There's broad consensus that capable teams benefit significantly from high autonomy in how they work.
Autonomy of "What/When": The mandate to decide which problems to solve, what features to build, and the prioritization. This spans both Product Strategy (translating business objectives into product direction) and Product Discovery (determining the specific solutions), and is deeply intertwined with Product Ownership.

While "how" autonomy is crucial across the board, it's the variation in "what/when" autonomy that requires careful consideration based on team type.

PLACING TEAMS ON THE "WHAT/WHEN" AUTONOMY SPECTRUM

Using Team Topologies, we can position the different team types along this "what/when" decision-making spectrum:

Stream-Aligned Teams (High End):

Position: These teams occupy the highest position on the "what/when" autonomy spectrum for their slice of the value stream.
Rationale: As direct owners of customer value delivery, they require significant freedom to respond to feedback, run experiments, and prioritize work that drives business outcomes. While their autonomy operates within organizational strategy boundaries, their mandate should be substantial.
Product Ownership: A dedicated Product Owner is essential, focusing externally on customer and market needs, defining value, and guiding the team's backlog toward desired outcomes.

Platform Teams (Mid-High):

Position: Platform teams maintain significant autonomy over their internal product roadmap while being guided by the needs of their internal consumers (primarily Stream-Aligned Teams).
Rationale: To effectively enable other teams, platforms require the authority to evolve their offerings, improve usability (Developer Experience, or DX), ensure reliability, and make technical choices that best serve internal users. Their autonomy is specifically directed toward this enabling purpose.
Product Ownership: A Platform Product Owner plays a crucial role, focusing internally on understanding user needs, defining platform capabilities as products, managing APIs/interfaces, and reducing cognitive load for consumers.

Complicated Subsystem Teams (Mid-Low):

Position: These teams exercise high autonomy regarding the internals of their complex subsystem but lower autonomy concerning the broader "what/when" decisions of the products they support.
Rationale: Their focus centers on managing complexity and providing stable, well-defined interfaces (e.g., a specific algorithm, a legacy component). Their decisions are often constrained by the needs of the teams consuming their subsystem and by non-functional requirements like performance or reliability.
Product Ownership: A formal Product Owner may exist, typically focusing on technical capabilities, service level agreements (SLAs), and interface contracts rather than market-facing product strategy. In some organizations, a senior Technical Lead fulfills this ownership role.

Enabling Teams (Low End - for Product Decisions):

Position: Enabling teams have minimal "what/when" autonomy in the traditional product sense.
Rationale: Their purpose is explicitly facilitative: transferring knowledge and skills to other teams. Their backlog and priorities are driven by the capability gaps identified in the teams they support, not by an independent product vision. Their autonomy primarily lies in how they achieve these enablement goals (e.g., coaching techniques, workshops, pairing strategies), not in defining a product direction.
Product Ownership: The traditional Product Owner role generally doesn't apply here. These teams need strong leadership, coaching skills, and objectives defined collaboratively with the teams they assist, rather than conventional product ownership.

ALIGNING FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY ALONG THE SPECTRUM

This differentiation in "what/when" mandate naturally correlates with different models for financial accountability, aiming to create clearer alignment and transparency:

Stream-Aligned Teams (High Autonomy): Often have the clearest link to direct Profit & Loss (P&L) impact (revenue generation, cost reduction for specific value streams). Their performance is measured against business outcomes.
Platform Teams (Mid-High Autonomy): Typically focus on cost efficiency, investment justification, and internal user adoption. Chargeback or showback models can provide financial transparency and incentivize effective platform use.

An important evolution: Some Platform Teams might move beyond this typical model. Highly mature platforms—perhaps serving external customers alongside internal ones, or those operating as distinct internal business units—could potentially operate with their own P&L responsibility. This represents greater financial accountability and aligns with increased "what/when" autonomy. Such a setup strongly encourages treating the "platform as a product". It also aligns closely with organizational models like Boundaryless's Micro-Enterprises (MEs), defined as autonomous P&L units focused on delivering a specific value proposition. When a Platform Team takes on P&L, it effectively starts functioning more like an ME within the broader organizational ecosystem.

Complicated Subsystem Teams (Mid-Low Autonomy): Usually funded as a cost center or shared service, with justification based on strategic necessity versus cost, and performance measured by reliability and SLAs.
Enabling Teams (Low Product Autonomy): Funded as a strategic investment in organizational capability, with success measured by the improved performance and autonomy of the teams they enable.

Matching the financial model to the team's topology and position on the autonomy spectrum creates clearer expectations and accountability.

THE ROLE OF THE PRODUCT OWNER ACROSS THE SPECTRUM

Clearly, the product ownership function—defining direction, prioritizing value—manifests differently across team types. The ubiquitous "Product Owner" title shouldn't imply a uniform role or mandate. Applying a Team Topologies lens reveals how this ownership function varies:

Necessity Varies: Essential for Stream-Aligned and Platform teams; potentially useful (though different) for Complicated Subsystem teams; generally not applicable for Enabling teams.
Focus Varies: External customer/market focus (Stream-Aligned) vs. Internal user/DX focus (Platform) vs. Technical capability/SLA focus (Complicated Subsystem).
Authority Varies: The scope of the Product Owner's decision-making mandate ("what/when" autonomy) directly reflects the team's position on the spectrum.

Organizations should beware the "Product Owner everywhere" anti-pattern or assigning the title without the corresponding product context and mandate appropriate for the team's topology. Misaligned roles lead to confusion, frustration, and ineffective ownership.

FOUNDATIONS FOR EFFECTIVE AUTONOMY

Successfully implementing this tailored approach to autonomy requires foundational elements:

Clear Alignment: Well-communicated organizational strategy and vision providing necessary boundaries.
Knowledge and Capability: Understanding the business context and domain, plus skills to act effectively.
Mandate and Responsibility: Explicit decision-making authority matched with corresponding accountability.

Team Topologies strongly advises mapping value streams before defining team boundaries. This ensures proper business context knowledge, forming the foundation for appropriate autonomy.

CONCLUSION: TAILORED AUTONOMY IS SMART AUTONOMY

The debate around team autonomy often lacks nuance. Different teams require different levels of decision-making mandate based on their purpose and position in the value stream.

Instead of striving for universal "full autonomy," organizations should aim for purposeful autonomy, intelligently configured using insights from Team Topologies. This tailored approach—combining clear structure with intentional trust-building—is key to creating effective, adaptable socio-technical systems that deliver sustained value.

By placing teams appropriately on the autonomy spectrum, organizations can tailor the Product Ownership role, align financial accountability, and provide the clear boundaries necessary to foster genuine ownership where it matters most.

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