In 1968, computer scientist Melvin Conway made an observation that’s been shaping how we understand teams and technology ever since:
Any system’s design will reflect the communication structure of the organization that created it.
Engineers call this Conway’s Law.
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But it doesn’t just apply to system architecture. It applies to the feel of a product…its speed, its tone, its instincts.
Think about what that actually means:
The product you’re building right now isn’t primarily shaped by your strategy or your technology. It’s shaped by who talks to whom. Where information flows and where it stops. Which teams share language, and which ones operate in different vocabularies for the same concepts?
Conway arrived at this while working on some of the first large software systems in what would become Silicon Valley. He kept watching teams produce code that mirrored the way those teams were organized. Not the way they intended to organize the code. The way they actually communicated.
Not sometimes.
Every time.
That’s what makes it a law.
The pattern holds regardless of the industry, the technology, or the intentions of the people involved.
The boundaries of your system are held in the boundaries of your communication.
Three engineering groups that rarely talk to each other will produce three modules that don’t integrate well. A product team and a sales team that describe what you’re building in different language will produce a product that feels incoherent to the market. Leadership communicating in abstractions while the frontline operates in specifics will produce a gap between vision and execution that nobody planned.
These aren’t failures of talent. They’re structural outcomes. The product is doing exactly what the communication architecture told it to do.
The shorthand for this is simple: you ship your org chart.
Whether you mean to or not.
What makes Conway’s Law worth sitting with is what it reveals about where product problems actually live. When something feels off, the instinct is to fix the product. Redesign the feature. Rewrite the roadmap.
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Conway’s Law says look somewhere else entirely. The product isn’t the problem. It’s the evidence. The problem is upstream, in how the team communicates.
The strengths and limitations of any product reveal the strengths and limitations of the thinking behind it. We design systems that mirror the beliefs, assumptions, and constraints of the very culture that created them.
That’s not a metaphor. It’s a law.
And it has a practical implication that most teams never act on.
Pull up your org chart.
Look at where the boundaries sit between teams. Which groups talk regularly? Which ones don’t? Now look at how your company shows up. Your product. Your go-to-market. Your customer experience. The seams line up.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And once you see it, you can design for it.
H/T Manu Cornet for the visual
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Michael Margolis, CEO of Storied
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable at pivotal moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
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