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Organize business and technology teams for fast flow using Skelton & Pais's "Team Topologies".
Passed 21 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 19 of 22 without it.
2 fixed19 passed either way1 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 2 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
When Project Mobile Refresh reaches completion next month, HR plans to disband the 6-person mobile development group and reassign individual engineers to newly created feature project groups. Is this approach recommended?
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Rejects disbanding the team upon project completion | Passed | Passed |
| Recommends routing new work streams to long-lived gelled teams | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
A team-first approach to organization design from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais's Team Topologies: four fundamental team types, three interaction modes, and deliberate attention to Conway's law and team cognitive load. Use it to structure engineering organizations for fast flow of change — and to keep evolving them as the system, technology, and market shift.
The team is the unit of delivery, and organizations ship their communication structure. Conway's law guarantees that system architecture mirrors how teams actually communicate, so team boundaries and interactions must be designed as deliberately as the software itself. Size each team's responsibilities to its cognitive load, align most teams to streams of business change, declare how teams interact, and treat the resulting topology as a living architecture decision that optimizes for fast flow.
Goal: 10/10. Rate org and team designs 0-10 against the principles below. Report the current score and the specific changes needed to reach 10/10.
Core concept: "Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure" (Mel Conway). Org communication and system architecture are homomorphic — they mirror each other by force, not by metaphor. The inverse Conway maneuver exploits this: decide the architecture you want, then shape teams and their communication paths so that architecture becomes the natural outcome.
Why it works: Teams can only build interfaces they can coordinate, so the space of designs an org can discover is constrained by its communication paths. Reshaping the org reshapes the system; fighting Conway's law instead produces permanent friction and architecture erosion.
Key insights:
Applications:
| Context | Application | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Target architecture | Shape teams first; expect the architecture to follow | Want decoupled services → small decoupled teams with independent deploys |
| Reorg proposal | Review it as an architecture change | Tech lead/architect signs off on a team merge, not only HR |
test cases passed, vs 19 / 22 without
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