Introduction

In enterprise systems, software never exists in isolation. The structure of the teams building a system inevitably shapes the system itself. This idea is central to Team Topologies, and it becomes clearer the more experience you gain in large organizations:
products mirror the organizations that create them.

Why Team Structure Matters

Large organizations often depend on many interacting services—and changes in one team can immediately affect many others. Even a small update may require other teams to adjust their APIs, workflows, or deployment timelines.

When a dependent service fails, your own system becomes unstable. And when another team changes something unexpectedly, you may suddenly be forced to update your system under pressure. In these moments, blaming other teams does nothing; engineering discipline is what protects you.

Patterns like Feature Toggles, Circuit Breakers, and Graceful Degradation exist precisely because teams rarely move at the same speed and systems rarely behave perfectly.

A Real-World Example

In one project, our payment module relied on a PSP service. We assumed occasional outages and added a simple retry mechanism. After the PSP changed part of its behavior, our API call broke, and retries turned into a storm of repeated calls—effectively a small DoS attack.
Several of their services became unavailable for a short period.

Our first question afterward was clear:

Wouldn’t a circuit breaker have prevented all of this?

This is the essence of engineering in enterprise environments: designing for uncertainty rather than assuming ideal conditions.

Conclusion

Team structure, service dependencies, and organizational dynamics directly influence the reliability of your system. By anticipating these realities—rather than resisting them—you build software that remains stable even when everything around it changes.

If you enjoy examples like this and want to dive deeper into real enterprise lessons,
read my upcoming book: Building Enterprise Projects with Go.