Team & Operations

Team Topologies

Org design for fast flow: four team types, three interaction modes

Organize business and technology teams for fast flow using Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais's Team Topologies. This skill equips your AI agent with the four fundamental team types, three interaction modes, cognitive load limits, and the inverse Conway maneuver for aligning team and software boundaries.

Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

Team Topologies

by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

npx skills add wondelai/skills/team-topologies

What your agent learns

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.

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.

View Book →

Try these with the skill installed

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

Install Team Topologies

Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.

npx skills add wondelai/skills/team-topologies

MIT Licensed · Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Cowork & OpenClaw · No account needed