Most technology products today are large and complicated.
Though there are exceptions, it's rare that an entire product will be developed by a single product team. Most products require many teams working together—dozens or even hundreds.
This means that every product organization must deal with the question of how to structure their product teams in order to best divide the work.
I've written about this topic of structuring and scoping product teams before, including in INSPIRED.
However, because this topic relates so strongly to the level of empowerment, in this series of chapters I want to go deeper.
I've started referring to this topic of team scoping as team topology.1 I like this term because it captures the idea of an arrangement of constituent parts in a larger system.
A product organization's team topology answers questions such as:
How many product teams should our organization have?
What is the scope of responsibility of each team?
What are the skills required for each team, and how many of each skill?
What are the dependencies between the teams?
More generally, the topology helps answer the question of how a company should organize its product people into teams to best enable them to do great work.
If you are a product leader, establishing an effective team topology is one of your key responsibilities. It's also one of the most complex because ...
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