Saved by Brie Wolfson
Conway's law
Conway’s Law:
‘For any organization that builds systems, the systems they produce reflect the communication structures of that organization.’
If your organization is inefficient and disjointed, or dictatorial and myopic, it shows in your products.
‘For any organization that builds systems, the systems they produce reflect the communication structures of that organization.’
If your organization is inefficient and disjointed, or dictatorial and myopic, it shows in your products.
James Rosen-Birch • Tweet
Conway’s Law is a celebrated truism in software development: technical systems tend to resemble the communication structures of the organizations that create them.
Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
Conway’s Law doesn’t leave anyone guessing about how to make organizational communication structures work for the greater good. As the conclusion of Conway’s paper states: We have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
Vaughn Vernon • Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon))
Conway’s law tells us that an organization’s structure and the actual communication paths between teams persevere in the resulting architecture of the systems built.
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais • Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Conway’s Law is so commonly referenced in Silicon Valley at this point it’s almost a meme. But I still don’t think we take it seriously enough. Because your product will be a mirror of your teams. You will ship your org chart.