I think it is generally true that teams in companies are named after the thing they are expected to deliver. Ideally, that is simply a product name. If this is the case, the goal definition is pretty much clear: The team delivers and maintains said product. As long as the product has users, chances are that it is not being discontinued. Success metrics are clear and measurable and will include e.g. user retention, user adoption, user satisfaction etc. The team succeeds if users are happy, which translates pretty much directly into it being able to keep its backlog at a constant size.

There can also be teams named after whole product areas. It feels like things get a bit more fuzzy here. But overall I would argue that it’s mostly about making the decision which products to include in the catalog for the area. After allocating resources appropriately things should in theory be comparable in lifestyle to the team named after the product. At the end of the day, it should be clear what falls inside or outside any given area, and areas in a company should have no overlap. Context switching will be a thing for the team members, though, with larger distances between the topics being the norm. For this reason, I would be somewhat skeptical of such a team setup, as it inherently signals a lack of focus.

And then there are the so-called “cross-functional” teams. Usually, they get named after dimensions of the software engineering process. In other words, aspects of software that are generally desirable in any software product. Concrete examples that would come to mind could be “QA”, “Observability”, “Performance”, “Analytics”… A mistake I have seen people making when they come across a team named after a certain aspect is that they believe they can out-source all the work in that perceived area to this team. “We have a performance team, so it’s their responsibility to solve performance in the application I have built”. “A user wants to gain some insights in the data they stored in our application? Let the analytics team handle that”. If you are setting up a team with a name that falls into this category, I implore you to make sure to inform everyone that the most they can expect from this team to deliver is time-capped, project-level support. As a simple fix, consider suffixing these team names with “Tooling” to bring it back into “named after a product” land.

Personally, I will take my own advice here and try from now on to make sure I do not end up in cross-functional teams any more. FWIW, the German version of “Toss Everything At Me” is “Toll Ein Anderer Macht’s”. This translates to “Great Another One Doesit”.