Team types
Four kinds of team, from Team Topologies. Most of the work should sit in one of them.
Team Topologies names four team types. The point of the list is to stop inventing a fifth every time a meeting goes badly.
A stream-aligned team follows one flow of work: a product, a service, a journey. It is the default. Most people should be here, close to the work that actually reaches someone.
An enabling team exists to make a stream-aligned team better at something it does not yet know. It teaches, then it leaves. If it stays, it has become a dependency with a nicer name.
A complicated-subsystem team holds a part of the system that needs specialist depth the other teams should not all have to carry. The test is the knowledge, not the prestige of the people in the room.
A platform team offers an internal product the stream-aligned teams can use without asking permission for each use. If they have to negotiate every time, it is not a platform. It is a department that happens to build tools.
The types are not ranks. They are a way to say what a team is for, and therefore how it is allowed to meet the others: working together for a while, providing something as a service, or helping someone learn and then getting out of the way.