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Engineering Leadership Handbook

Conway's Law

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

Systems mirror the communication structures of the teams that build them.

Origin

Section titled “Origin”

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

Originally published in How do Committees Invent? by Melvin E. Conway. Later dubbed Conway’s Law by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month.

Still Applicable?

Section titled “Still Applicable?”

Yes. Stronger than ever in distributed teams.

Context Notes

Section titled “Context Notes”

Conway’s Law reminds us that technical architecture and organizational structure are deeply intertwined. If your teams are siloed, your architecture will reflect those silos — often with painful consequences. This law is especially relevant when adopting microservices, distributed systems, or platform teams. To avoid unnecessary friction, leaders must intentionally shape team boundaries, communication paths, and incentives to reflect — or influence — the system architecture they want to see.

This law also underpins the value of cross-functional teams and platform consistency efforts. The inverse is also true: poorly aligned team structures will often sabotage even the best technical intentions.

Conway’s Corollary

Section titled “Conway’s Corollary”

Multiple people have pointed out that Conway’s Law has at least one corollary:

“People will adapt the explicit systems they got to fit the implicit real-world business concepts.” - Sven Balnojan1

“If a system is designed in a manner that is the antithesis to the structure of its supporting teams, the system will fail.” - Keith Chester2

Section titled “Related Principles”

The Inverse Conway Maneuver is an organizational design strategy that intentionally flips Conway’s Law on its head. The term was first coined by Johnny LeRoy and Matt Simons in December 2010 and was further popularized by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in their book Team Topologies in 2019.

Citations

Section titled “Citations”
Section titled “Related Community Articles”

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. How Conways Corollary Wrecks Your Data Organization by Sven Balnojan ↩

  2. Conway’s Corollary by Keith Chester ↩