Borrowing from Team Topologies to Make Sense of Claude Agent Teams

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a habit I can’t turn off. Whenever I’m working on something — whether it’s organizing a project, structuring a team, or just figuring out how to approach a problem — my brain immediately goes to: what’s the optimal shape for this? What information needs to flow, and between whom? Where are the boundaries?

It’s the kind of thinking that Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais gave a name and a framework to with Team Topologies. If you haven’t read it, the short version is that it offers a set of mental models for how engineering teams should be structured — and not around org charts, but around the flow of value. How teams communicate, where cognitive load sits, what interaction modes make sense for a given type of work. It fundamentally changed how I think about engineering organizations, and honestly, it’s one of those frameworks that keeps paying dividends years after you first encounter it.

Team-Topologies on Eric Irwin

Borrowing from Team Topologies to Make Sense of Claude Agent Teams