How to Structure a Platform Team with Team Topologies

Overview

• The Rise of Platform Engineering: Dedicated platform teams are increasingly drawing attention within software organizations.
• The Challenge of Structure: Effectively structuring platform teams is a pain point.
• Team Topologies as a Solution: Team topologies may be the key to overcome these structuring issues.

Platform engineering is now a critical function in modern software organizations, with Gartner predicting that 80% of large engineering organizations will have dedicated platform teams by 2026. However, simply having a platform team isn’t enough; the real challenge lies in structuring it successfully. Many engineering teams struggle with balancing autonomy and alignment, often becoming either isolated silos or overloaded bottlenecks that slow down development instead of accelerating it.

As these organizations scale, the complexity of their internal platforms grows exponentially. Without a well-defined structure, platform teams risk becoming reactive support functions rather than proactive enablers. This misalignment leads to inefficiencies, frustrated developers, and slower software delivery.

This is where team topologies come in. Team topologies are a strategic approach to designing platform teams that ensures they integrate smoothly with engineering workflows and maximize their impact.

This article explores what team topologies are, including the team types and how they interact. We’ll discuss the role of platform teams and why they are essential in modern software organizations. We’ll also explore some best practices to structure and optimize a platform team that empowers developers, reduces cognitive load, and accelerates software delivery.

What are Team Topologies?

Team topologies is a conceptual framework to evolve organizational structures and achieve software team interactions for fast, reliable, and adaptive delivery. It eliminates the silos existing in software development, enhancing productivity, optimizing resource allocation, and increasing time-to-market. 

This approach was originally introduced by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in their book Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, which identifies four fundamental team types and interaction modes to optimize product and service delivery. The team topologies framework follows a team-first approach and provides a systematic way to design teams that optimize collaboration, reduce friction, and accelerate software development.

Traditional platform engineering teams are typically structured around specific functions like infrastructure, security, and operations. While this approach provides specialization, it often leads to siloed work and communication barriers, slowing down collaboration and innovation. 

Team topologies, on the other hand, introduce a more dynamic and integrated structure with clearly defined roles and interactions. If contextualized to platform engineering, team topologies are designed to help organizations structure their product and platform teams to best support business goals and impact the organization’s agility, developer productivity, and architectural requirements, scaling initiatives like DevOps, cloud adoption, or microservices delivery.

The Four Main Team Types

There are four fundamental team topologies organizations should consider when forming teams or trying to enhance developer productivity and software delivery, each with a specific purpose:

• Stream-aligned teams

This team is dedicated to a single product, offering end-to-end value to customers while maintaining a continuous flow of software updates. They are the foundation of software development and are directly aligned with a specific business domain, delivering customer-facing or business-critical functionality. As a result, other team types are typically structured around them. This team often owns the entire development lifecycle, from design to deployment, and works independently to minimize dependencies on other teams.

While many software companies have adopted stream-aligned teams, some still organize their teams by function, such as engineering, design, and QA, rather than prioritizing end-to-end delivery. To improve both speed and quality, these teams can collaborate with supporting teams, such as complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform teams, to enhance delivery and efficiency.

• Enabling teams

This team helps stream-aligned teams adopt new technologies, tools, or best practices without taking over their work. They act as mentors and consultants, reducing knowledge gaps, helping them overcome obstacles, and ensuring that product teams can leverage complex technologies effectively. In other words, this team functions as a bridge to fill competency gaps by sharing their expertise through training, coaching, and mentoring.

They are often composed of specialists in specific technical or product domains and focus on research and experimentation. The enabling teams provide informed recommendations about tooling, frameworks, and ecosystem choices that impact the tool stack. Their primary aim is to increase the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by helping them grow their capabilities, focusing on addressing problems rather than providing solutions.

• Complicated subsystem teams

This team handles highly specialized and computationally complex areas of the system that need deep technical expertise, such as machine learning models, advanced algorithms, or legacy system maintenance. Members of this team often have specialized knowledge in areas like microservices, algorithms, or artificial intelligence. Their work is too complex for stream-aligned teams to manage independently. 

With the expertise and capabilities of the complicated subsystem team, stream-aligned teams don’t need to build complex functionalities outside their core responsibilities, thus reducing their cognitive load. While essential, embedding specialists within every stream-aligned team that interacts with these subsystems is neither cost-effective nor aligned with their primary objectives.

• Platform teams

This dedicated, cross-functional team develops, builds, maintains, and supports internal tools, services, and infrastructure that assist stream-aligned teams to operate with ease and autonomously. While stream-aligned teams retain full autonomy of building, running, and maintaining applications in production, platform teams provide internal services for the stream-aligned teams to abstract any underlying complexity. This optimization not only enhances developer productivity by optimizing DevEx, but also benefits end-users by ensuring a cohesive experience across different products and user interactions, thus speeding up product teams’ delivery of customer value.

Why You Need Platform Teams

One of the most significant hidden costs of cloud adoption is cognitive load. In the past, operations teams managed networking, databases, and security while developers focused on writing application code. With modern infrastructure becoming increasingly complex, developers are expected to manage infrastructure, deployment pipelines, security, compliance, and observability stacks—all while delivering new features. This cognitive burden slows development, increases the risk of errors, and ultimately impacts business outcomes.

Many companies have attempted to solve this by forming DevOps teams, but as application teams take on more responsibilities for infrastructure code, the traditional boundaries between roles have blurred. Like Manuel Pais explains in his book: 

“The real challenge isn’t just about shifting left or making teams more autonomous—it’s about providing the right guardrails so developers aren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of things they need to manage.”

Platform teams help solve this by offloading complexity, providing standardized solutions and paved roads, and making best practices easy to adopt. Instead of every developer becoming a cloud architect, they can rely on platform teams to abstract complexity by building highly curated Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) with access to self-service tools, reusable components, knowledge, and reliable pre-configured environments.

The role of platform teams goes beyond managing infrastructure to acting as internal product teams that build and maintain developer-facing services. They focus on delivering the platform as a product, ensuring that their internal customers and engineering teams have everything they need to deploy and run software optimally.

Best Practices for Structuring a Platform Team

A well-structured platform team doesn’t just provide infrastructure; it creates a smooth developer experience, and allows engineering teams to build and ship software faster, with fewer obstacles. 

Basically, a platform team should act as connective tissue between software delivery and infrastructure organizations, establishing shared accountability. It should include people with software engineering, infrastructure, and operations/automation expertise. 

Let’s discuss some best practices to take into consideration when structuring a platform team:

Designating a Platform Owner

A platform owner who has solid product management skills helps define the platform’s vision, understand user needs, and prioritize development.

Treat the platform as a product

Most organizations treat platform engineering as a behind-the-scenes support function rather than an internal service. A successful platform team adopts a product mindset, prioritizing developer needs, gathering feedback, iterating on solutions, and continuously improving their offerings. 

This means applying the same principles used in customer-facing products, i.e., user research, roadmaps, versioning, and usability testing to the internal developer platform. The goal is to build reusable, secure, and well-abstracted building blocks that simplify development while maintaining necessary guardrails for security, compliance, and reliability. Additionally, the platform team should adjust its capacity, skills, size, and scope as the product life cycle evolves.

Starting and staying small with MVP and TVP

There’s no point in trying to build the perfect platform from scratch. Since there could be features that devs neither want nor need, it’s much more advisable to start with a minimal, well-focused, iterative version that delivers early value based on continuous feedback: this is the way of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Similarly, the Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) approach assures not wasting useful internal resources by allocating them properly throughout the platform lifecycle.

Focus on developer experience and self-service capabilities

A well-structured platform team optimizes for developer experience (DevEx) by reducing friction in the development process. Instead of forcing teams to interact with complex infrastructure layers, platform teams provide self-service capabilities, aiding developers to get what they need on demand without waiting for manual approvals or interventions. 

They provide standardized test, staging, and production environments that help developers spin up and manage resources without waiting for manual operations. Using internal developer portals, platform teams offer a unified approach to logging, monitoring, authentication, and service discovery.

Fostering collaboration and a learning culture

Encouraging communication and feedback between the platform team and its users is essential for continuous improvement. Communities of Practice (CoPs) may represent a prominent gateway to access this type of learning culture.

Define clear metrics to measure success

Like any product-focused team, platform teams must define and track key performance metrics to measure their impact and ensure continuous improvement. Without clear indicators of success, teams may struggle to demonstrate their value or identify areas that need optimization. Hence, platform teams should be able to observe the time it takes for new engineers to go from setup to their first deployment to help gauge the usability and impact of platform tooling in reducing onboarding friction. 

They should understand the impact of platform-related incidents on development teams and highlight areas for improvement in system uptime, resilience, and fault tolerance. 

Other valuable metrics may include adoption rate, reliability, development speed, ease of use, and satisfaction. By continuously monitoring these metrics, platform teams can make data-driven improvements, address pain points, and create an internal platform that enhances developer productivity and software delivery.

In summary

Platform engineering is no longer just about managing infrastructure—it’s about helping developers to build and ship software efficiently while maintaining security, reliability, and compliance. By applying the team topologies approach, organizations can structure platform teams to minimize cognitive load, foster collaboration, accelerate business outcomes, and deliver high-impact internal tooling. Viewing platform engineering through the lens of team topologies provides a structured way to assess whether teams are set up for success and aligned with the organization’s goals.

To dive deeper into setting up a well-structured platform team and aligning it with your organization’s needs, download this paper and learn how to build a scalable, developer-friendly platform that accelerates software delivery while maintaining operational excellence.