Case Study: from Component Teams to Team Topologies to FaST Agile

This article is a detailed analysis of James Shore’s talk at the AgeofProduct. We recommend watching the full video of the talk.

We’re looking at this case study from the viewpoint of Org Topologies™ to understand better the chain of transformations he is describing in this talk. The story he is sharing spans several years while he was helping a company to move away from a rigid multi-team constellation of component teams to an org design based on mainly stream-aligned teams of Team Topologies® and later on to a more fluid FaST-ecosystem.

The meta-level goal of this article is to demonstrate the power of Org Topologies™ as an approach to visualizing and communicating org design and org change ideas. Thus, this article contrasts three different organizational designs showing their significant differences.

First Org Design: Component Teams

In the video, James Shore first shares his definition of component teams:

In the Org Topologies™ language, we are trying to avoid the black-and-white definitions like ‘component teams’. That’s why we have a map of 16 archetypes, with 7 of them being the most recognizable.

If we map the ‘component teams’ as James describes them, they will be represented…