Conway's Law — Your Org Is Your Architecture
Systems mirror the communication structure of the teams that build them — by accident if not by design.
When to use
- Before splitting a monolith (align team boundaries first)
- When services are tightly coupled despite being "separate"
- When planning a reorg
Tradeoffs
- Org changes are slow and political — harder than code changes
- No code can fix a broken org structure
| Team | Owns | Resulting service boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Orders | Order lifecycle, cart | order-service |
| Payments | Charging, refunds, ledger | payment-service |
| Inventory | Stock levels, reservations | inventory-service |
| Platform | Auth, gateway, observability | platform-service |
Gotcha: Inverse Conway Maneuver: design the org you want first, then build the system. Not the other way around.