Red tape, slow approvals, and developer frustration. It’s fair to say the stereotypical image of API governance doesn’t have a lot going for it. Good governance creates space for momentum. The right guardrails keep teams moving fast without drifting off course and without getting buried in approval layers. With the right team structures and collaboration modes, your API governance can enable secure and consistent delivery at pace, all without stifling developer creativity.
How do you achieve this holy grail of API governance, where it becomes a powerful flow enabler, rather than a blocker? Enter Team Topologies.
What is Team Topologies?
Team Topologies is a framework outlined by authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It’s an approach that is proven to help organizations optimize their team structures for fast flow and safe delivery.
You can apply Team Topologies to API governance. Doing so reveals how people, platforms, and policies can align to support both autonomy and assurance, making API governance both scalable and developer-friendly. Let us show you how engineering leaders can use Team Topologies to achieve this.
The four team types in API governance
Team Topologies defines four fundamental team types. You can map these to API governance:
1. Stream-aligned teams = API developers
Your developers can deliver business value by aligning APIs with domain capabilities. To do so, they need autonomy, clarity, and seamless governance embedded in workflows, not for governance to make things harder. Achieving this involves providing self-service tools that integrate standards and validation directly into their flow, so that governance becomes invisible and seamless. Think CI checks, IDE plugins, GitHub actions, and the like.
2. Platform teams = API platform engineers
Your platform engineers provide API scaffolding, gateways, CI/CD integration, templates, and automation. This means they are responsible for embedding governance into development workflows. Manual enforcement won’t work here, at least not at scale. As such, it’s time to treat governance as a product, building reusable tools and templates that bake standards into the developer lifecycle.
3. Enabling teams = governance coaches, domain architects
Your governance coaches and domain architects are crucial to helping teams adopt standards and improve maturity. They can clarify API boundaries, review implementations, promote shared practices, and more. By coaching through hands-on workshops, reviews, and collaborative sessions to guide teams through applying governance to their APIs, they ensure standards are embraced rather than ignored or misunderstood.
4. Complicated subsystem teams = security, compliance, enterprise architects
Teams that own deep domain knowledge and non-functional policies can provide essential automation and secure-by-default services. They need developers to apply their guidelines to reduce risk. Achieving this means building policy-as-code, compliance scans, and security reviews into automated workflows. When this team offers services, instead of just documents, the power of your API governance accelerates significantly.
Embedding governance through team interactions
Team structures are important. So is the way in which your teams interact. This determines whether governance becomes empowering or exhausting.
Team Topologies outlines three powerful interaction modes that support scalable, flow-aligned governance:
- Collaboration for co-creating standards and exploring domain boundaries. An example is when architects and developers pair during early API design sessions to define maturity models and validate patterns.
- X-as-a-service for delivering reusable governance capabilities. For example, platform teams building CI-integrated tooling for API linting, documentation validation, and policy enforcement.
- Facilitating coaching for leveling up governance maturity. An example is when governance coaches facilitate reviews or domain-specific clinics for teams to improve their practice.
These interaction patterns foster a network of shared responsibility. It’s not about top-down enforcement and control but about enabling governance to scale without central bottlenecks.
The diagram below provides an example of this, showing how different API governance responsibilities are distributed across team types using Team Topologies.
In this diagrammatic example, the governance and architecture teams support stream-aligned teams through coaching and design collaboration, while the platform team delivers governance as a service via CI/CD-integrated tools. The security team contributes reusable “policy-as-code” services that embed compliance automatically. Overall, the structure promotes shared responsibility, reduces friction, and enables scalable governance that aligns with fast delivery.
Governance anti-patterns to avoid
Even with good intentions, governance implementations can go awry. Poor structure and misaligned interactions that cause friction are often at the root of this. Avoiding these four common governance anti-patterns should help you stay on track:
- The approval bottleneck: This is where a central governance team reviews everything, creating long queues and resentment. Linear workflows with no automation or delegation are often to blame for this. Enable stream-aligned teams with self-service checks and automated reviews to avoid it.
- The invisible standard: When developers don’t know what “good” looks like, perhaps because standards exist only in PDFs or wikis, unlinked from tools, they’re unlikely to achieve it. Counter this issue by embedding standards into the developer lifecycle via linters, templates, and feedback loops.
- The governance bypass: Introduce high-friction processes, unclear roles, or misaligned tools and teams will ignore governance altogether. Build governance into existing workflows, focusing on enablement (not obstruction) to avoid this happening.
- The disconnected platform: Developers will avoid platform tooling if it’s out of sync with real workflows. This is a real risk if your tools aren’t integrated with GitHub, CI/CD, or design pipelines. To counter this, bring governance where teams already are – to GitHub PRs, IDEs, and CI checks – instead of where you want them to be.
A practical playbook for engineering leaders
If you’re ready to start redesigning governance around flow and turn it into a strategic enabler, follow these steps to success:
- Map your current team structures using the Team Topologies model.
- Identify how your teams interact. Is it collaborative, service-based, facilitating, or are they simply working in silos? Consider whether a different interaction mode could improve flow.
- Spot friction points where developers face blockers or bypass governance.
- Evolve your platform so it guides (not enforces) using templates, linters, and validations.
- Support enabling roles. This means investing in architects and coaches who teach and unblock.
- Automate compliance by integrating policy validation into CI/CD, GitHub, and IDEs.
- Celebrate self-service. This is the gold standard of sustainable, scalable governance, so when you achieve it, shout about it. Then do it some more.
Design principles for scalable governance
Great governance design goes beyond tooling. It’s about optimizing team experience and flow. To achieve it and embed that mindset, keep in mind the power of reducing cognitive load. Stream-aligned teams can focus on delivering value, instead of interpreting static docs. You can enable this by embedding standards and checks into everyday tools like IDEs, CI pipelines, and PR feedback.
Starting small can also help. Don’t build a bloated governance monolith. Instead, deliver just enough to accelerate adoption: reusable templates, API scaffolding, and automated validation are ideal starting points.
Supporting flexible team boundaries is another important principle underpinning scalable governance. Team structures aren’t static. As domains evolve, governance responsibility might shift. By encouraging shared ownership and avoiding rigid handoffs, you can prevent this from turning into an issue.
Finally, remember that governance isn’t a one-time setup. You’ll need to evolve rules, team interactions, and tooling based on feedback. Your system should learn and adapt as teams grow, founded on a culture of continuous evolution.
From bottleneck to catalyst
Team Topologies shows us the impact of team structures and interaction styles. These can either constrain or accelerate software delivery. When you embed API governance into team topologies, through reusable tools, collaborative coaching, and in-context automation, compliance becomes intuitive. It happens by design, not by accident. Instead of fighting to get people to follow your governance process, you can design teams, platforms and workflows so that good governance happens by default, becoming not a barrier but an invaluable flow enabler.
Tyk and governance at scale
At Tyk, we believe governance should be proactive, developer-friendly, and built into the way you already work. That’s why our Governance Hub integrates directly with your source systems and CI/CD pipelines. This empowers you to define standards once, then automatically apply them across your API estate.
Try the Governance Hub or talk to us about mapping governance to your team topology.
