How would you design teams for a growing product organisation?

Summary

Around the flow of work: mostly stream-aligned teams that own a customer journey end to end, with a platform team for shared capabilities and enabling or complicated-subsystem teams only where needed — sized at six to eight, with cognitive load as a constraint.

Longer Answer

Conway's law means team structure shapes system structure; layer teams create layered hand-offs. Team Topologies' four team types (stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem, platform) and three interaction modes (collaboration, X-as-a-Service, facilitating) give a shared language. I'd change in steps, measure lead time and hand-offs per feature, and revisit interaction modes as things stabilise.

Key Points

• Stream-aligned by default
• Team Topologies types and interaction modes
• Cognitive load and team size

Deep dive: Team Design and Cognitive Load

What interviewers look for

Organisational design thinking.

Red flags

• Organising by technical layer
• Reorganising without measuring