Newsletter ( august 2025): Why Agile Isn’t Enough (And What’s Really Slowing You Down) - Part 2
This is part 2 of a 3-part newsletter series on ‘Why Agile Isn’t Enough’.
This newsletter was written by Rich Allen.
While Agile has improved how teams plan and collaborate, it hasn’t always addressed the deeper structures and interactions that shape how work actually flows. In this follow-up to ‘Why Agile isn’t enough (and what’s really slowing you down) - Part 1', I explore 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.
Platform Paralysis: when your enablers become blockers
When delivery slows, the conversation often turns to team velocity, backlog prioritisation, or developer tooling. However, in many organisations, the real constraint isn’t within the product team, but rather upstream or alongside it. Platform teams, infrastructure teams, and shared services —the groups meant to enable delivery — quietly become the thing that holds it back. It’s not because they’re underperforming. It's because they’re overwhelmed.
As teams adopt Agile and increase their delivery cadence, the number of changes, deployments, and dependencies multiplies. This means more requests for support, access, provisioning, environments, APIs, data and reviews. Platform teams often absorb the weight of this change, but they rarely scale in parallel. So what starts as enablement quickly turns into reactive support.
The symptoms are familiar: developers waiting on infrastructure or tooling, tickets bouncing between queues, platform teams juggling urgent tasks and long-term roadmap work, a growing backlog of technical debt, just out of reach. No single request is unreasonable, but the system isn’t designed to absorb them all at once. Without clear boundaries or internal product thinking, the work just keeps piling up.
Shifting the role of the platform
Throwing more people at a platform team won’t solve this on its own, because the root issue is often how teams interact; the platform team isn’t treated like a product team, interfaces are informal or undefined, ownership is unclear, and expectations vary by stakeholder. The result is friction, both for the teams who rely on the platform and for the people inside it who are trying to keep up.
To move from bottleneck to enabler, platform teams need the same clarity and support we give to any other product team; a clear purpose and defined user groups, time to invest in foundational capabilities, not just handle tickets, well-designed interaction modes with the teams they serve and autonomy to build reusable, scalable services, not just respond to one-off asks. Done well, the platform becomes an accelerator of flow. Done poorly, it becomes a fragile single point of failure, despite everyone’s best intentions.
Organisations should focus on structural conversations rather than delivery conversations to move towards enablement. Helpful questions to ask might include: “What work is our platform team doing that others expect, but no one has explicitly agreed to?” “Are our interfaces service-oriented, or just social contracts?” “What would it look like if the platform were a product, with users, feedback, and measurable outcomes?”
These hidden frictions—overloaded platform teams and overly collaborative operating models—often stem from unclear boundaries and misaligned team responsibilities. In this video course from the Team Topologies Academy, Platform as a Product, we dive into how platform teams can move beyond being reactive support functions to becoming intentional enablers of delivery, with well-defined interfaces and customer-centric mindsets. When we treat platform work as a product, not a catch-all for complexity, we enable clarity and autonomy across the organisation. It’s not about adding more Agile rituals—it’s about designing for flow, reducing cognitive load, and ensuring teams can deliver with confidence and speed.
The Coordination Tax
As delivery scales, so does coordination, and in many organisations, what begins as healthy collaboration across a few teams can quickly turn into a web of meetings, approvals, dependencies, and shared decisions. Before long, the organisation can feel like it’s spending more time aligning around the work than actually doing it.
Most teams don’t set out to over-coordinate, but when ownership is distributed and boundaries are unclear, coordination becomes the default safety net. We set up syncs “just to stay aligned.” We create shared documents, shared roadmaps, and shared backlogs. We try to keep everyone in the loop, because no one’s quite sure who’s responsible for what. The intent is good, but the outcome often results in friction or awkward team interactions. Every conversation becomes a checkpoint. Every small change requires consensus. The cost of making a decision grows until momentum disappears entirely.
Agile encourages collaboration, shared understanding, and regular feedback. However, without clearly defined team responsibilities and intentional interaction modes, those practices scale horizontally across every team connected to the work. Instead of improving flow, you get process inflation. More refinement sessions, more cross-team planning, and more meetings to coordinate everything. All the time, trying to manage dependencies rather than minimise them.
Working with clearer boundaries
You can’t resolve systemic coordination issues through willpower or goodwill. You need to revisit the structure, clarifying who owns what, what needs to be decided jointly, and what doesn’t, and where the number of interaction points can be reduced through better team design. Team Topologies offers useful language here by framing what we mean by Collaboration, Facilitating, and X-as-a-service interactions. Collaboration and facilitation should be short-lived and purposeful, with a clear intent to achieve the desired outcome, often resulting in an X-as-a-service interaction. X-as-a-service should be a longer-lived interaction that enables self-service from consuming teams without needing handovers. However, these should be monitored over time to ensure they are still relevant. We don't want every relationship to be collaborative all the time: collaboration is expensive after all.
Reducing the coordination tax isn’t about doing less together. It’s about doing the right things together and creating the conditions for others to move independently, with confidence. Questions to ask might include “What decisions regularly stall while we wait for alignment?” “Which teams are in too many meetings, and why?” “Are we collaborating because we need to, or because we haven’t agreed how not to?”
Creating an environment for change
Recognising these structural and interactional frictions is critical to improving flow, but awareness alone isn’t enough. Making meaningful progress requires more than new insights. It calls for an environment where change is possible, safe, and supported. In the next article, I’ll explore what it takes to create those conditions—and how organisations can build the foundations for sustainable, structural evolution.
Team Topologies is one powerful slice of what organizations need. Real transformation comes from understanding the holistic picture that goes beyond team structures. Conflux’s fast flow benchmark helps you pinpoint exactly where flow is constrained. As a Team Topologies Advanced Partner with years of implementation experience, Conflux has codified what actually works.
What’s coming up next?
We are gathering all Team Topologies events on our Events page and would love to hear your feedback about the ones you have attended or the ones that we have missed.
LIVE in London, Gartner Summit, Sep 08 Team Topologies as the ‘Infrastructure For Agency’ With Humans and AI + book signing with Matthew Skelton (Firechat)
Online, Sep 10 Loosely Coupled - Understanding Cognitive Load with Aleix Morgadas (Live stream)
Online, Agilists4Planet - Value Beyond Money – Mapping Ecosystems for Collective Action with Luke McManus (Talk)
Online, Sep 25 Book launch: Team Topologies Second Edition - meet the authors and discover success stories
LIVE in London, Oct 14-15 Fast Flow Conf 2025 - Everything about Team Topologies (Talks)
LIVE in Paris, NewCrafts Conferences - Team Topologies in Practice: A Journey of Re-Teaming Using Architecture for Flow with Nina Siessegger & Susanne Kaiser (Talk)
Online, The Summit Brazil - How AI impacts team cognitive load with Manuel Pais (Keynote)
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