How To Understand Your Team Type
Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula
Published in
7 min readOct 15, 2021
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I’ve been hearing people talk about hybrid remote teams. So far, every person I’ve talked to means something different.
When Mark Kilby and I wrote From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we differentiated between these types of teams:
- Collocated, as all the people are within eight to sixteen meters of each other. (See the following Allen Curve diagram.)
- Satellite, where most of the people are in one location (inside eight to sixteen meters) and a couple of people are outside that location.
- Cluster, where you might have pairs or triads in several locations.
- Nebula, which is totally dispersed.
In the interest of clarity, let me start with the Allen Curve, which describes the potential frequency of communication:
