Why it matters
Assess whether development, platform, and operations teams share goals, rituals, and ownership for production outcomes.
Discovery Questions
- •Are development and operations teams aligned around shared objectives?
- •How frequently do cross-functional retros or incident reviews occur?
- •Do developers participate in on-call or operational reviews?
- •How are feedback loops between product and platform teams facilitated?
- •Are teams organized around services or functional silos?
- •How much autonomy do product teams have over deployment and operations?
Evidence to Collect
- •Org charts and team responsibility matrices.
- •Retro/postmortem documentation.
- •Communication workflows.
What good looks like
Stream-aligned teams own build, deployment, and production outcomes for their services, with explicit platform interfaces, on-call responsibilities, and recurring cross-functional reviews of delivery and reliability evidence.
Implementation Patterns
Team Topologies Alignment
Apply Team Topologies patterns to reduce cognitive load and improve flow.
Stream-Aligned TeamsPlatform TeamsEnabling Teams
Steps
- Organize stream-aligned teams that own services end-to-end (build, deploy, operate).
- Establish platform teams that provide paved paths and self-service capabilities.
- Form enabling teams to coach others in adopting new practices and tooling.
- Limit team interaction modes to reduce coordination overhead.
- Define clear service ownership and on-call responsibilities for every team.
You Build It, You Run It
Shift operational accountability closer to the teams shipping code.
Steps
- Transition on-call rotation for services to the teams that develop them.
- Provide platform guardrails, runbooks, and paved paths so teams can operate safely.
- Run joint incident reviews and retrospectives to maintain shared empathy.