What is Conway’s Law?

Shipping the organizational chart

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” — M. Conway

The above statement is generally referred to as Conway’s Law. I’ve become fascinated with the idea and examining teams and products through that lens. I’ve heard others refer to this phenomenon as “Shipping the org. chart.”

My experience has always been that this statement is true, but I find it to be relatively among other startups/business leaders.

Example

For example, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers almost always work in separate teams. The results are obvious, there are very few products where the electrical system and mechanical systems seem to work well together. Even the world’s most profitable companies seem to fall prey to this conundrum and produce products where the interaction between the electronics and mechanical systems is so bad that it renders the product useless while charging (Looking at you Apple Magic Mouse).

Disjoint teams work separately and often have for so long that it’s almost impossible to get them to work fluidly together to create products that are designed around solving the customer’s problems instead of the internal team’s problems. Their tools and jargon have diverged so sharply, that they are barely understandable by the other group. This leaves huge gaps in the products and services these teams produce that can decrease the effectiveness of the organization as a whole.

Awareness

Like most emergent trends or behaviors of people, I think the first step towards solutions is awareness. Take a look at your team and try to see if and how your team’s structure is reflected in the products or services you provide? Does that structure serve the goals of your customers and team? Where are places where the constraints of the team structure leave gaps in the realization of the shared collective goals?

Solutions

For many of you, you might become aware of some things that aren’t quite optimal in your team after a period of reflective observation through the lens of Conway’s law. Your mind is probably wandering towards solution space as you process this new information.

I hesitate to suggest any general strategies for broad organizational change, as I have generally seen those go badly when implemented without proper organizational context and experimentation.

Instead, I will suggest a few small experiments for you to try which might be enlightening. I’m a big fan of small experiments, as they tell you the most information quickly and are easily reversed if the experiment goes badly.

Experiments

If you are an individual contributor (meaning you don’t manage anyone), try to accomplish something small (that won’t get you in trouble with your manager) outside of the normal process and structure you might normally follow. Go buy someone on another team a coffee and ask that question you’ve been wondering about. See if you can identify something to work on together that might be outside the normal system, but address some gap you might see.

If you are a manager, you have an outsized ability to affect this problem. Consider structuring a new small project in a different way than you have previously. Pay attention to how the small project goes, how did the end result differ from work your team might normally produce?

In Closing

Hopefully this was an interesting and enlightening read for you. Perhaps it gave you some interesting ideas to reflect upon as you go about the great work that you are doing. Even more exciting, would be seeing you start to run some tiny experiments in your team to figure out how to continuously improve your offerings.

As always, let me know how it goes! There are comments below or you can always shoot me a message directly.