Comparison
Data productvsStream-aligned team
Data product
the table has an owner, a documented schema, a freshness commitment and a stated audience, like an API rather than a by-product.
Treating a dataset as something built for consumers, with a contract, documentation, quality guarantees and someone accountable. The shift is from 'here is the output of our pipeline' to 'here is a thing you may depend on'. It is the unit of ownership that makes decentralised data teams workable, and adopting the phrase without the freshness commitment or the owner is the common way it becomes vocabulary rather than practice.
Full entry →Stream-aligned team
one team owns a slice of the product end to end and does not hand anything to another team to finish.
A team aligned to a single flow of work — a product, a customer segment, a journey — and able to deliver it without depending on others. It is the default team type in the Team Topologies vocabulary and every other type exists to support it. The test is the handover: if delivering a change requires a ticket to another team, the alignment is nominal.
Full entry →