A visual summary for tech leaders navigating Conway's Law.
In 1967, Melvin Conway observed that organizations are destined to produce software that mirrors their own communication structures.
How your teams communicate.
How your software is structured.
"If your Slack channels look like a tangled spaghetti bowl, expect your codebase to taste the same."
A modern strategy: intentionally redesign your teams to achieve your desired software architecture. Get the team right, and the code will follow.
Clear ownership reduces coordination overhead.
When things break, everyone knows who's on call.
Desired Outcome: A clean, microservices-style architecture.
Unintended Consequence: Well-defined, disconnected silos.
Obsessing over team boundaries can lead to silos, slow communication, and a focus on local metrics over the global customer goal.
Teams protect their boundaries instead of collaborating.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The highest-performing teams are not built on perfect org charts. They are built on a foundation of trust and psychological safety, where people feel safe to:
Use team structure as a surgical tool, not a blunt instrument. Ask these questions first:
Mature architecture maps well to teams. Evolving architecture needs flexible, cross-functional teams.
Consider guilds or shared ownership contracts over permanent, bottleneck teams.
If trust is low, any re-org will likely fail. Pause and invest in building trust first.
Reframe the conversation around genuine business impact, not just gaming KPIs.
If you see a mess in your architecture, don't just redraw the org chart. First, ask: "What does this tell me about how we communicate?" The solution is likely in fostering better conversations, not just drawing new boxes and lines.