adding new people to a team doesn’t immediately increase its capacity (this became known as Brooks’s law).10 In fact, it quite possibly reduces capacity during an initial stage. There’s a ramp-up period necessary to bring people up to speed, but the communication lines inside the team also increase significantly with every new member. Not only that

Organizations that rely too heavily on org charts and matrixes to split and control work often fail to create the necessary conditions to embrace innovation while still delivering at a fast pace. In

These teams take ownership of discrete slices of functionality or certain user outcomes, building strong and lasting relationships with business representatives and other delivery teams.

We can’t expect to embed the necessary specialists in all the stream-aligned teams that make use of the subsystem; it would not be feasible, cost-effective, or in line with the stream-aligned team’s goals.

For a fast flow of change to software systems, we need to remove hand-offs and

Helping stream-aligned teams achieve this high rate of flow are enabling teams (which identify impediments and cross-team challenges, and simplify the adoption of new approaches), complicated-subsystem teams (if needed, to bring deep specialist expertise to specific parts of the system), and platform teams (which

Team structures must match the required software architecture or risk producing unintended designs.

In teams which score highly on architectural capabilities [which directly lead to higher performance], little communication is required between delivery teams to get their work done, and the architecture of the system is designed to enable teams to test, deploy, and change their systems without dependencies on other teams. In other words, architect

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