> Aka don't fall prey to Conway's law
You can't not fall prey to Conway's law. You can only choose how you organize your people and their interfaces.
You can't not fall prey to Conway's law. You can only choose how you organize your people and their interfaces.
This is natural and even beneficial: it reduces communication and coordination costs, which is the costliest and hardest part of any organization or system. Perhaps that sometimes lands you in a suboptimal local minimum, but escaping that is usually quite costly in the short term. Think about how often top-down reorgs actually generate value.
A long time ago I remember hearing a good bit of advice that for a new project you should innovate the product or the tech stack but not both. I think this is similar: unless you have a lot of resources (people + political clout), don’t buck the existing org chart in more than one area if you can avoid it.
You’ll constantly be dealing with all the problems because nobody else will care.
The only counterexample to Conway that I have seen working is “away teams”:
https://pedrodelgallego.github.io/blog/amazon/operating-mode...