Comparison
Stream-aligned teamvsX-as-a-service
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 →X-as-a-service
you consumed their API and never spoke to them, which was the point.
One of the three ways teams interact in the Team Topologies vocabulary: consuming something with minimal collaboration, as opposed to collaborating closely or facilitating. The mode should be chosen deliberately and be temporary where it is collaboration, because sustained close collaboration between two teams is a sign that the boundary is in the wrong place. Naming the mode out loud is what turns 'they are slow to respond' into a solvable structural question.
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