Introduction
In the second part of this blog series inspired by Team Topologies, I explore how teams communicate and interact with one another. Effective team communication is a cornerstone of organizational success, but it’s often easier said than done. This post dives into key interaction modes and practices that can help teams strike the right balance between autonomy and collaboration, ultimately improving flow and reducing friction.
1. The Challenge of Team Communication
A team may have been told it is autonomous and self-organizing, but team members often find they have to interact with many other teams to complete their work. This creates a tension between autonomy and dependency. If not managed carefully, it can lead to inefficiencies, misaligned responsibilities, and frustration.
The key challenge, as Team Topologies highlights, is to avoid a situation where all teams need to communicate with all other teams to achieve their goals. Similar to how a jazz band carefully coordinates its music, organizations must curate team communication to ensure clarity, focus, and purpose.
2. Modes of Team Interaction
Team Topologies outlines three primary modes of team interaction:
Collaboration: Teams work closely together to achieve a shared objective. This mode is suited to situations where teams need to pool expertise and responsibilities for a specific goal. However, collaboration often blurs responsibility boundaries and increases communication overhead. While this can reduce apparent effectiveness at the team level, it fosters rapid discovery and innovation at the ensemble level.
Example: Two teams with distinct expertise and responsibilities collaborate on a shared feature, temporarily functioning as a single unit. Collaboration can also benefit from temporary shifts in interaction modes, which refresh team dynamics and increase empathy between teams.
X-as-a-Service: One team provides a code library, API, or platform as a service to another team, with minimal collaboration required. This mode works well when the service is well-implemented and fit for purpose, enabling consuming teams to use it without much effort. However, if the consuming team spends excessive time trying to use the service, this signals a problem with the service boundary or implementation.
Example: A platform team provides a CI/CD pipeline as a service, allowing development teams to deploy their code without needing to know the underlying infrastructure. Proper service boundaries ensure low-friction interactions and limited communication needs.
Facilitating: One team helps another team clear impediments or adopt new practices. Facilitating teams typically work across multiple teams, identifying cross-team problems and coaching teams to improve capabilities.
Example: An enabling team helps a stream-aligned team adopt test-first development practices.
3. Tailoring Interaction Modes
Interaction modes should not be static but instead become habitual patterns tailored to the needs of the teams involved. A single team might use two different interaction modes for two different teams it works with. This flexibility allows organizations to address the unique challenges of each interaction, improving team engagement, clarity of purpose, and trust.
By deliberately curating interaction modes, teams can:
- Reduce the frustration of misaligned expectations.
- Increase engagement and collaboration effectiveness.
- Maintain clarity of responsibilities and avoid blurred boundaries.
If the current interaction mode has become stale or ineffective, temporarily changing it can provide fresh perspectives and foster greater empathy between teams.
4. The Risks of Poor Communication Patterns
When team interactions are not consciously designed, anti-patterns emerge:
Over-collaboration: High communication overhead results from teams working too closely together without clear boundaries. This can reduce individual team effectiveness and lead to burnout.
Ill-defined Service Boundaries: X-as-a-Service interactions fail when the service is not well-implemented or lacks proper management practices. Teams become frustrated with services that require significant effort to use. As the book notes, if a stream-aligned team spends hours struggling to use a component, it’s a signal that something is amiss.
Lack of Facilitation: Without effective facilitating teams, cross-team problems persist, slowing down progress and innovation.
To address these issues, Team Topologies suggests using temporary but explicit collaboration modes between teams building software, supported by facilitating teams where necessary.
5. Applying Interaction Modes in Practice
When considering the relationship between any teams, a key decision is whether to collaborate, consume a service, or facilitate. Here are some principles to guide these decisions:
- Teams interacting in collaboration mode should expect high interaction and mutual respect, with shared responsibilities.
- Teams in X-as-a-Service mode should emphasize the user experience of the provided service, ensuring it is intuitive and fit for purpose.
- Teams in facilitating mode should expect to help and be helped, fostering an open-minded approach to improvement and shared learning.
These modes should align with the reverse Conway maneuver—designing team structures and interactions to influence software architecture deliberately.
Final Reflections
How teams communicate and interact has a profound impact on organizational success. By understanding and applying the interaction modes from Team Topologies, organizations can curate team dynamics to foster clarity, reduce frustration, and enhance overall flow. Whether through collaboration, X-as-a-Service, or facilitation, consciously designed team interactions help teams thrive and deliver exceptional results.