Many work in organizations where the leaders have not had a chance to see how good product teams work up close.

Another common problem is that adding engineers often adds significant coordination challenges. These challenges create a net drag on productivity. Unless you have a superior manager, a team of three to four excellent engineers is often more productive than that same team with an additional three to four average engineers.

A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi