The DIY Framework Delusion: Why Cherry-Picking Agile Practices Without an Org Topologies Lens Is Risky Business
Use a framework-agnostic, visual approach to design your studio organisation and keep it aligned with your strategy.
Deep Dive by NotebookLM.
Mixing agile frameworks without a straightforward organisational design creates short-term wins but leads to long-term fragmentation and costly misalignment.
Org Topologies offers a visual map to understand your studio’s structure, helping you choose agile practices that support your goals.
By mapping skills and work mandates, leaders gain clarity to guide teams effectively, avoiding the chaos of DIY frameworks and building towards deliberate, scalable success.
There’s a dangerous trend sneaking into LiveOps studios. Teams and leaders, fed up with off-the-shelf frameworks, are stitching together their own ad hoc Agile setups. Scrum here, Kanban there, sprinkle in some SAFe terminology, add a dash of Spotify, and it's done. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Flexible, tailored, and empowered.
Until it isn’t.
What starts as freedom quickly turns into a mess of local optimisations. Teams run well on their own, but the organisation as a whole begins to creak. Dependencies pile up. Priorities clash, and then flow stalls. And before you know it, you’re holding a patchwork of methods that were never designed to work together, at least not in your specific context.
The problem isn’t the frameworks themselves. It’s the lack of a map. When you cherry-pick practices without understanding your studio’s shape, structure, and goals, you play agile roulette. Some bets land, but most don’t.
I’ll be honest — I’ve done this too. I’ve been part of teams that cherry-picked practices because it felt like the bright, adaptable thing to do. It seemed we were in control at the time, building something perfectly suited to our needs. But without a clear view of the whole system, we ended up precisely the kind of fragmented setup I’m warning about here. Lessons learned the hard way.
That’s where Org Topologies comes in. It’s not another framework to add to your pile. It’s the lens to see the system clearly before bolting things together. With Org Topologies, you stop guessing and start designing. Your choices become deliberate, not desperate.
Let’s break down why DIY frameworks, done blindly, are risky business — and how Org Topologies helps you build something that works.
The Era of DIY Frameworks: When Choice Becomes Chaos
It’s not hard to see why teams are tempted. The bookshelves and conference talks overflowed with frameworks, models, and playbooks. Most of them promise the same thing: flexibility, faster delivery, and happier teams. I admit that this newsletter is filled with such advice. And honestly, they work, at least in isolation.
So what do people do? They skip the standard framework and build their own.
Take a bit of Scrum for planning, Kanban for flow, and a touch of SAFe vocabulary to sound serious in leadership meetings. Maybe sprinkle in something from Team Topologies because everyone’s talking about it.
It feels smart and tailored. It's like you’re making Agile fit your business, not the other way around.
But there’s a catch.
When you mix and match without understanding how your studio actually operates as a whole, you’re not building flexibility; you’re building fragmentation. Each team runs its playbook. What works for one part of the business ends up clashing with another. Decisions made at the team level don’t align with the bigger picture. You get fast local wins but lose the cohesion that makes real progress possible.
This is the era of DIY frameworks, and while they feel good in the short term, they set up long-term pain.
The Hidden Cost of Cherry-Picking: Local Wins, Systemic Losses
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: local wins don’t guarantee global success. They often hide more prominent problems.
When teams cherry-pick their way through agile practices, they usually solve their immediate pains. Fair enough; who doesn’t want smoother sprints or faster releases? But while they’re fixing their flow, they unintentionally create bottlenecks elsewhere.
One team races ahead, while another gets buried in dependencies.
Priorities collide because no one’s checking alignment across the whole studio.
Teams duplicate work without realising, wasting effort on parallel solutions to the same problem.
Leaders lose visibility. When you zoom out, what’s flowing smoothly at the team level feels like sludge.
And the kicker? No amount of sprint velocity, burndown charts or event flow metrics can fix a system that’s misaligned at its core.
This happens when you treat frameworks like a shopping basket instead of part of a connected, deliberate design. Without a clear view of how your organisation is structured to deliver value, you’re just layering methods on top of cracks in the foundation. Sooner or later, those cracks widen.
The cost isn’t just operational; it’s cultural, too. People get frustrated, teams start pointing fingers, and leaders scramble for answers. And just like that, your DIY agile setup turns from “empowered teams” to organisational chaos.
Enter Org Topologies: The Missing Map
This is where Org Topologies changes the game.
While your teams are busy picking and mixing agile practices, Org Topologies steps back and asks a much bigger, much better question: What shape should your organisation take actually to reach its goals?
It’s not another framework to toss into the mix. It’s the map you use before you choose your route.
Org Topologies isn’t about pushing a fixed method. It’s a human-friendly way to see your studio’s strengths, gaps, dependencies, and hidden traps. You stop tinkering blindly at the team level and start designing intentionally at the system level.
Org Topologies helps you map two things that are often invisible:
Skills Mandate (Horizontal Axis): How capable are your units? Can they deliver value end-to-end, or are they stuck passing the baton between silos?
From “Org Topologies Strategic Org Design: The Primer” Work Mandate (Vertical Axis): How broad is their scope? Are they working on small isolated tasks or tackling whole business problems?
From ”Org Topologies Strategic Org Design: The Primer”
This mapping reveals exactly where you sit today — whether you’re operating in a Resource Topology (where the focus is on squeezing out every drop of utilisation), a Delivery Topology (speedy but limited to outputs), or an Adaptive Topology (designed for learning, flexibility, and actual outcomes).
But it doesn’t stop at theory.
Org Topologies helps you go further by showing the archetypes at play in your organisation. These are patterns of how teams and units behave, like:
Directing archetypes — making plans and writing specs but not delivering value directly. i.e. Game Design, Product Management
Doing archetypes — task specialists, reliant on external coordination. i.e. Art, Data Science
Delivering archetypes — producing outputs in a focused area but often stuck in silos. i.e. Developers, Core Tech, Infrastructure
Driving archetypes — the gold standard: teams or groups that understand the whole and own the delivery of customer value end-to-end.
It even gives you a shared language. No more fuzzy conversations about “alignment” or “efficiency”. Now you can describe your current and future state clearly, in terms everyone understands.
And here’s the kicker. With this clarity, stop playing with surface-level tools and start designing your organisation correctly. When you pick agile practices, you’re doing it with full awareness of how they fit into your broader structure. You’ll spot conflicts and dependencies before they create headaches.
Org Topologies doesn’t tell you which framework to use. It helps you understand your system well enough to pick and combine frameworks intelligently, which is a huge difference.
It’s about owning your change, not renting it.
Don’t Confuse Org Topologies with Team Topologies
Let’s clear this up because it catches a lot of people out.
Team Topologies and Org Topologies are not the same thing. Yes, both help you think about structure. But they work at very different levels.
Team Topologies is about teams. Specifically, how you design them for better flow, lower cognitive load, and smoother interactions. It gives you smart categories like:
Stream-aligned teams
Enabling teams
Platform teams
Complicated subsystem teams
It also shows you how these teams should interact to stay effective.
But here’s the thing — Team Topologies stays focused at the team level. It’s like choosing the right type of brick for your house.
Org Topologies, on the other hand, is about the whole construction plan.
It’s the complete map of your organisation. It shows you:
Where your teams (and everything else) sit in the bigger system
How well-equipped they are (skills mandate)
How much of the business they own (work mandate)
And how all of it connects to your strategy
Org Topologies is so broad and flexible that you can use it to map your Team Topologies decisions. You can see if you’re building strong foundations or accidentally creating gaps between your teams and your broader organisational goals.
In short:
Team Topologies give you better team building blocks.
Org Topologies shows you how to design the whole structure so your blocks fit together and support the house you’re trying to build.
Org Topologies in Practice: Avoiding the DIY Trap
So, how do you use Org Topologies to avoid the DIY mess?
Good news. This isn’t about torching everything and starting from scratch. It’s about finally seeing your organisation for what it is and making smart, connected moves to get where you want to go.
The method is simple on paper but powerful in practice. It’s called MADE:
Map
Assess
Design
Elevate
Map
You can start by laying out your current organisation on the Org Topologies map.
This isn’t just a theoretical exercise. It’s hands-on and visual, a proper way to see how your divisions, groups, teams, and even individuals are structured.
Here’s how it works.
The Org Topologies map is a simple but powerful grid. Think of it as a 4x4 matrix with 16 clear archetypes.
The horizontal axis shows the scope of skills inside a unit — from narrow specialists to full end-to-end capabilities.
The vertical axis shows how much of the work they own — from narrow tasks to whole-business responsibility.
You can bring this to life with tools like Miro. There’s a ready-made template you can use to map out your setup. Place your teams, individuals, and departments onto the grid based on their skills and the slice of the business they handle.
What you’ll get is instant clarity:
Are your teams task-focused or stuck in dependency chains?
Are you operating with scattered skill sets, forcing endless handovers?
Where are the strong dependencies? Where’s the flow being killed?
This mapping exercise gives you an accurate picture, not the one you wish you had.
Best of all, it quickly gets your whole team on the same page. There are no fuzzy conversations, no blind spots, just shared understanding.
Assess
Now, ask the hard questions:
Does your current design support your business goals?
Are you chasing speed while stuck in a Resource Topology?
Are you pushing for innovation but trapped in a narrow Delivery setup?
The map makes these misalignments obvious. You’ll immediately notice if your teams are too specialised, too dependent, or lack the mandate to truly own outcomes.
And here’s the critical bit. You’ll see if your organisational shape fits the purpose.
Not just for today but for where you want to go.
Design
This is where you get deliberate.
Use Org Topologies to design a future state that supports your goals. Maybe you need to shift toward an Adaptive Topology to handle constant market changes. Maybe you double down on Delivery Topology for fast, predictable flow.
This isn’t guesswork. You’re using proven patterns and archetypes that match your ambitions. And because the map is clear, your whole leadership team can get adequately aligned on what "good" looks like.
You don’t have to apply one topology across the whole business. Depending on their goals, different parts of your organisation can operate in different topologies. Stable areas might stay in Delivery while your innovation hubs push towards Adaptive.
Elevate
Finally, you move from where you are to where you need to be.
Org Topologies gives you a safe, step-by-step way to do this. You’ll use Elevating Katas, small, repeatable experiments designed to nudge your organisation toward your target state.
No big-bang reorganisations. No culture shocks. Just precise, incremental shifts backed by a solid understanding of your system.
This means:
Less risk of failed change.
More buy-in from your teams (because they’re part of the design, not victims of it).
And crucially, you keep your operational momentum while making meaningful progress.
You can even re-map as you go, checking progress and adjusting your course.
Change isn’t a one-off — it’s a living process, and Org Topologies helps you keep the learning loop alive.
And the real beauty? You don’t have to give up the agile practices you love. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and Team Topologies still have their place.
But with Org Topologies, you’ll know exactly where they fit and, more importantly, where they don’t. No more guessing. No more agile-by-hope. Just clear, confident design choices that serve your business.
Real Talk: Why Teams Love DIY (and Why Leaders Should Worry)
Let’s be honest. Teams love the DIY approach. And it’s not hard to see why.
When you let teams cherry-pick their agile practices, they feel in control. They get to shape their ways of working, solve immediate problems, and see quick wins. It feels empowering because, at their level, it is empowering.
Leaders tend to back it, too. It looks like ownership. It sounds like agility. From a distance, it feels like progress.
But here’s the danger: while teams fine-tune their local world, no one is steering the whole ship. The more significant questions go unanswered:
Are we moving towards our strategic goals?
Are these local optimisations helping the broader studio or just the team?
Are we quietly locking ourselves into silos that will be painful to break later?
The uncomfortable bit? Teams can’t answer these questions on their own. And they shouldn’t have to. This is leadership work.
DIY feels good because it offers fast feedback and visible progress. But if leaders don’t step in with a system-wide perspective, they’ll be cheering from the sidelines while the organisation drifts off course.
Org Topologies fills that gap. It gives leaders the clarity to guide local decisions without crushing team autonomy. It’s not about central control; it’s about system alignment. You still let teams shape their workflows but do it within a design that works at scale.
So yes, let teams enjoy their DIY experiments. But make sure they’re building towards something tangible. Without that, you’re just giving them tools to dig deeper holes.
Stop Playing Agile Roulette
Here’s the bottom line. If you cherry-pick agile practices without a straightforward, studio-wide design, you're gambling with your future.
Sure, you might get lucky here and there. A team speeds up. A delivery gets smoother. Leadership breathes a small sigh of relief. But without alignment, it’s all just agile roulette, spinning the wheel and hoping things land in your favour.
That’s no way to run a business.
Org Topologies doesn’t stop you from picking the practices you like. It just makes sure you understand the game you’re playing. It gives you the entire map before you set off choosing routes. It helps you see:
Where your studio stands today
Where do you need to go
And how to get there without leaving a trail of silos and frustration behind
Frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and Team Topologies still matter. But they need context. You're just throwing methods at symptoms without the bigger picture of how your organisation is wired to deliver value.
Org Topologies gives you that context. It’s your way of moving from desperate fixes to deliberate design, from hoping for alignment to creating it.
So stop spinning the wheel. Step back, get the full view, and build an organisation that’s fit for purpose — not just fashionable.
Attribution and Credits:
Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm created Org Topologies with contributions from Craig Larman (co-author of the primer and forthcoming book)
Published by: Org Topologies™
The Primer available under: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Further information: Available on the Org Topologies website