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.

My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more