# Team Topologies > Org design for fast flow: four team types, three interaction modes — an AI agent skill based on *Team Topologies* by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais. Published 2026-06-11 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Team & Operations · Free and MIT-licensed Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/team-topologies/ Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/team-topologies **Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/team-topologies --global` ## What is the Team Topologies skill? When work keeps getting stuck between teams rather than inside them, Team Topologies is the skill to load. It brings Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’s book to your AI agent, which classifies every team as stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem, or platform, declares the interaction mode for each pair, and trims scope until cognitive load fits. ## Key concepts from Team Topologies your agent applies - **Four Team Types** — Stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem, and platform — every team reduces to one type, and stream-aligned is the default. - **Three Interaction Modes** — Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating — declare one mode per team pair and evolve it deliberately. - **Conway's Law** — Organizations ship their communication structure — use the inverse Conway maneuver: shape teams so your target architecture becomes the natural outcome. - **Team Cognitive Load** — Size software to the team, never the reverse — one complicated domain per team, and split the software when it exceeds team capacity. - **Platform as a Product** — Run internal platforms with product discipline — optional adoption, user research, and success measured by cognitive load removed. ## When to use Team Topologies — and when not to Reach for it when: - A routine change needs three teams to coordinate and spends more time waiting than being worked on. - There is a shared-services queue everyone files tickets into, and no team feels it owns the outcome. - Teams are split by function — frontend, backend, QA — so nobody owns a change end to end. - Your internal platform team is a bottleneck people route around rather than a product they choose. Reach for something else when: - The teams are shaped fine and one manager’s habits are the constraint — High Output Management fits better. - Structure is settled and you need a cadence to run it — Traction EOS supplies the weekly rhythm. - The tangle is inside one codebase rather than between teams — Clean Architecture draws those boundaries. - People are disengaged rather than mis-organized — a reorg won’t reach that, but Drive Motivation will. ## About Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais Creators of the Team Topologies org design framework. Matthew Skelton is the founder of Conflux, a consultancy for fast flow in software organizations. Manuel Pais is an independent IT organizational consultant specializing in team interactions and delivery practices. Their book defined the modern vocabulary for engineering org design. The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL28745421M/Team_Topologies ## Example prompts - Classify our teams into the four types and flag the misfits using team-topologies skill _(Org design)_ - Plan an inverse Conway maneuver for our target microservices architecture using team-topologies skill _(Architecture alignment)_ - Assess our platform team against platform-as-a-product principles using team-topologies skill _(Platform review)_ - Find the fracture planes to split our monolith for team ownership using team-topologies skill _(Monolith decomposition)_ ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I install the Team Topologies skill? Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/team-topologies --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Team Topologies skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills. ### Which book is the Team Topologies skill based on? It packages *Team Topologies* by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais — creators of the Team Topologies org design framework. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering four team types, three interaction modes and conway's law. It sits in the Team & Operations part of the library. ### What is a stream-aligned team? A team aligned to a single flow of work — one product, one service, one user journey, one customer segment — that can take a typical change from idea to production without handing it off. It is the default type and should be most of your teams. The other three exist to serve it: enabling teams raise its capability then leave, complicated-subsystem teams absorb specialist depth, and platforms remove work it should never have to do. ### How does this differ from the accountability chart in Traction EOS? The accountability chart asks who is responsible for each function and puts one name in each seat. Team Topologies asks something else: whether a change can travel from request to production without crossing a boundary, and whether any team is holding more domains than it can hold. One is about clear ownership across the whole company; this one is about flow, and it will happily tell you a perfectly staffed structure is still wrong. ### Is the Team Topologies book still worth buying? The skill carries the taxonomy and applies it to your actual teams, which is the hard part of a first pass. The book earns its place on the fracture planes — the seams along which a monolith or a department can genuinely be split — and on team sizing grounded in Dunbar’s limits. It also gives your leadership a shared vocabulary, and this framework only works when more than one person is using it. ### What are the limits of applying this? Reorganising is expensive and disruptive, and the book’s own counsel is to change boundaries deliberately and rarely — so only reach for it when the evidence points at structure, such as handoffs dominating lead time. The four types were built for software delivery and map awkwardly onto finance, legal, or field sales. And the cheapest fix is usually removing extraneous load with better tooling, no reorg required. ## Related - All Team & Operations skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/team/ - Traction EOS: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/traction-eos/ - Drive Motivation: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/drive-motivation/ - High Output Management: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/high-output-management/