Comparison
Platform teamvsStream-aligned team
Platform team
another team's product is your deploy pipeline, and you are their customer rather than their ticket queue.
A team whose users are other engineers, providing self-service capabilities that reduce what a product team must know. The distinction that matters is self-service: a platform team that must be involved in every use of its platform is a bottleneck with a nicer name. It succeeds when product teams choose to use it because it is easier than the alternative, not because it is mandated.
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 →