A cross-functional feature team can bring high value to an organization by delivering cross-component, customer-centric features much faster than multiple component teams making their own changes and synchronizing into a single release. But this can only happen when the feature team is self-sufficient, meaning they are able to deliver features into

A stream-aligned team aims to produce a steady flow of feature delivery. A stream-aligned team is quick to course correct based on feedback from the latest changes. A stream-aligned team uses an experimental approach to product evolution, expecting to constantly learn and adapt. A stream-aligned team has minimal (ideally zero) hand-offs of work to

We consider the team to be the smallest entity of delivery within the organization.

A further benefit of taking a team-first approach to software boundaries is that the team tends to easily develop a shared mental model of the software being worked on.

“The Spotify Model,” technical staff at Spotify are arranged into small, autonomous, cross-functional squads, each with a long-term mission and comprised of around five to nine people. Several squads that work on similar areas are collected into a tribe, a sort of affinity grouping of squads. The squads within a tribe are familiar with the work of

In a platform, the streams relate to services and products within the platform, which could be things like logging and monitoring services,

Generally speaking, teams composed only of people with a single functional expertise should be avoided if we want to deliver software rapidly and safely. Traditionally,

Knowledge transfer between an enabling and a stream-aligned team can take shape on a temporary basis (when a stream-aligned team adopts a new technology, like containerization, for instance) or on a long-term basis (for continuously improving aspects, such as faster builds or faster test execution). Pairing

Typically, a team can take from two weeks to three months or more to become a cohesive unit.