Building High-Performing Teams with Team Topologies

To achieve success and rise above competitors in 2025, organizations must focus on building high-performance teams. One strategy to do this is to empower small, long-lived teams as the fundamental building blocks of your organization’s design. 

As we looked at in the previous blog in our series on high-performing teams, building high-performance teams has less to do with where your teams sit and more with how you build the social circuitry between and within teams. The Team Topologies approach provides a proven framework for designing and evolving these teams to maximize flow and adaptability.

Limit Team Cognitive Load

A core tenet of Team Topologies is that teams should minimize cognitive load to increase flow. This can be achieved by ensuring a team is only responsible for a limited number of domains, projects, software subsystems, products, etc. that match their cognitive capacity. By restricting teams to a maximum of 2-3 “simple” domains or 1 “complicated” domain, organizations can ensure teams have the focus and autonomy to truly master their areas of responsibility. 

This team-first approach to organizational boundaries stands in contrast to the traditional practice of aligning teams to organizational silos or technical specialties. Instead, work is divided into pieces that fit the team’s cognitive load, creating a natural correspondence between the team structure and the larger system or organization architecture.

Establish Clear Team Interactions

Beyond structuring teams, Team Topologies also emphasize defining well-bounded interactions between teams. Clear and effective communication has long been a differentiator in high-performing organizations, but it can be challenging to achieve in sprawling enterprises. 

One way to build effective communications is to establish “team APIs” that establish clearly and visibly how other teams can interact with a given team’s code, documentation, and working practices. This also means consciously designing the physical and virtual spaces that enable appropriate levels of collaboration, from high bandwidth within teams to low bandwidth between most teams.

By creating these structured team interactions, organizations can reduce cognitive load, promote autonomy, and ensure smooth handoffs between dependent teams. This paves the way for sustainable, high-velocity flow of value to the customer.

Evolve Team Topologies over Time

Of course, projects and organizational contexts are constantly shifting. Perhaps at no time has that been more true than now. How many times in the past week have you seen or read the phrase “in these rapidly changing times”? The Team Topologies approach embraces this by providing guidance on evolving team structures and interactions in response to changing requirements. This is also a key differentiator of the highest-performing teams and organizations: the ability to adapt to changing situations quickly and confidently.

This can be achieved by splitting a team responsible for too many domains or projects, merging teams with overlapping responsibilities, or introducing new team types like “enabling” or “platform” teams to support the core “stream-aligned” delivery teams.

The key is maintaining a dynamic, adaptive organizational design that keeps pace with the business. Just a year ago, implementing AI in daily operations was still a rarity. But today, organizations are adopting AI into their work at a dizzying pace. Teams and organizations that can adjust and adapt to this new context with skill and confidence will surely outperform those that are built more rigid.

The Human Element

Ultimately, the Team Topologies approach recognizes that knowledge work, like software delivery, is a deeply human endeavor. By optimizing team size, boundaries, and interactions, organizations can create the conditions for small, autonomous groups to thrive and deliver exceptional results, even in the face of exceptional change. This team-centric focus is the foundation for sustainable, high-performing teams in 2025 and beyond.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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