X-as-a-Service (Xaas): effective self-service non-blocking dependencies
Team Topologies
Organize for fast flow of value - we help leaders design high-impact team-of-teams organizations.
In our last newsletter, we explored effective team collaboration. Now, we’re shifting our focus to X-as-a-Service (XaaS), which shouldn’t be seen as a one-time solution but as an ongoing process that continuously proves its value.
This edition was curated by?Eduardo da Silva.
The ability to scale effectively while maintaining speed and quality often seems like an impossible triangle to square. As organizations and their teams grow, direct communication and dependencies tend to emerge and become increasingly complex and time-consuming. This impacts the ability of the organization to achieve “fast flow of value”.
The X-as-a-Service (XaaS) interaction mode from Team Topologies offers a fundamental pattern to help organizations avoid the trap of creating unnecessary “blocking dependencies” between their teams. This is essential to support organizations to scale while achieving a fast flow of value.?
As we can see in the following diagram, when organizations have undefined interactions and have handovers in the way to create value for their customers, things take a long time to happen (long and complex “value stream maps” and “slow flow of value”). However, when we start aligning teams to clear streams of value and allow teams to leverage platform capabilities in a self-service manner (via XaaS interaction mode), we create conditions for each team to achieve a fast flow of value.
In a nutshell, and as the name says, XaaS allows teams (typically stream-aligned teams) to consume capabilities from other (platform) teams in a self-service manner, without the overhead of constant coordination (meetings, aligning on release plans, etc.). The essential idea of this interaction is “self-service”, i.e., the consuming teams can use the provider team’s capabilities via an API,? self-servicing documentation, etc.
It is important to highlight that effective XaaS isn't just about creating APIs or platforms – it's about fundamentally changing how teams understand the needs of the teams they will be serving. This is fundamental to provide effective self-service capabilities, clear service-level expectations, and well-defined interfaces - which when done right, help reduce the necessary cognitive load of the consuming team when trying to get the value of offered service. Learn more about XaaS prerequisites.
Before transitioning to XaaS mode, assess your Team Topologies Readiness.
Platforms ?? XaaS - Platforms should strive for effective XaaS
New Zealand's largest marketplace and classifieds site, Trade Me, adopted the Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) approach to streamline interactions between platform and stream-aligned teams. The majority of these interactions occur through "X-as-a-Service", allowing teams to access necessary services without the need for direct collaboration, thus reducing dependencies and enhancing scalability.
The success of X-as-a-Service mode hinges on treating internal platforms and services as products. This means focusing on user experience, maintaining clear documentation, providing reliable support channels, and continuously evolving the service based on user feedback. Platform teams must think like product teams, considering their consumers as customers and designing intuitive and self-service services. To achieve this, service providers should continuously understand the needs of their users. If, for some reason, the XaaS is not anymore properly satisfying and supporting its users, then it is essential that platforms understand - typically by leveraging collaboration- what changes may be needed to address the challenges at hand, as visualized in the following diagram. For example, it may be the case that the teams now require a new version of a certain platform or an updated compliance check needs to be added to the platform. This highlights the importance of leveraging collaboration as a way to evolve XaaS interactions effectively.
If you want to dive deeper into Team Topologies interaction modes and understand their critical role in enabling fast flow, Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton explore this topic in depth in their video-based course, Team Topologies Distilled. In this course, they dedicate an entire chapter to explaining how the right interaction modes—Collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and Facilitating—can help teams work together effectively while minimizing cognitive load. Check out Team Topologies Distilled to gain practical insights and real-world examples of applying these modes in your organization.
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