Team Topologies with its four team types and three interaction modes have become ubiquitous in the IT industry in record time and the book is a best-seller. Many organizations default to these patterns when creating new teams or restructuring the existing ones as part of a digital transformation. The main issue though is that it is often done top-down, by managers and leaders who often have the least knowledge about the domain and the work done, leading to many suboptimal team designs that struggle to adapt and adjust as they should.

In this talk, we will bring in an age-old and well-proven approach to team redesign founded on good social sciences and employing participative design. The core idea is that the people doing the work know best how to create a design that suits them, creating a team topology where people are more committed, the technology operates closer to its potential and the organization performs better overall while adapting more readily to change in its environment.

This is a short talk that shows how participative design from Open Systems Theory is a necessary approach to a sustainable Team Topologies-based design.