Products, organizations and Conway’s Law
People get the causality wrong all the time
As a change agent in a big company, one important piece of advice to be flexible is: Simplify how you create value. Eliminate people-in-the-middle who make communication lines too long. Let enabled teams take the tactical decisions.
A common counter-argument is: “We cannot do that here. Because or product is complex, our org structure has to be complex as well.”
In reality, it is the other way around: Because of the overly complex organizational structure, the resulting product is also more complex than necessary. This is also known as Conway’s Law:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
— Melvin E. Conway
Technical Debt has a lesser known twin brother: Organizational Debt. This is organizational structure that once might have served well but is no longer a good fit for reality.
The Bobby Fuller Four: I Fought The Law
