Conway's Law

A Cost-Savings Case for Team Topologies

May 6, 2024 • 7 min


Occasionally, I am asked to help out with technology due diligence. Recently, I was involved in a different kind of due diligence. We were asked how the technology organisation can save on costs. After some analysis and many interviews, we suggested a Team Topologies approach to organising teams that came with an impressive estimated cost reduction.

Shades of Conway's Law

Aug 26, 2022 • 2 min


In short, Conway’s Law says any organisation that designs a system will come up with a system design that copies the organisational communication structures.

Accidental Architects - how HR designs software systems

Feb 11, 2022 • 3 min


Who designs the architecture of your software systems? Conway’s Law suggests that HR may be strongly shaping software architecture by deciding how teams are composed and interrelate. Do you want HR designing your software architecture?

Continuous Delivery and Conway’s Law

May 13, 2021 • 26 min


This is a full transcript of Allan Kelly’s “Continuous Delivery and Conway’s Law” at the LondonCD Meetup. It gives an in-depth overview of what Conway’s Law is, how it impacts organisational and system design and how it relates to Continuous Delivery.

Conway’s three other laws

May 9, 2021 • 8 min


Most of us know about Conway’s adage “Any organization will produce a design which is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” But Conway coined four laws in his 1968 paper “How Do Committees Invent?” What are the other ones? Why are we not talking about them? And what do they tell us about optimizing teams in a distributed world? – Mike Amundsen

Shades of Conway's Law

May 7, 2021 • 12 min


Over time, different people have articulated Conway’s Law in various different ways. This is an overview of the variations I found when recently going over Conway’s Law literature.

How Do Committees Invent?

May 7, 2021 • 5 min


This is the paper behind Conway’s Law. I’ve assembled some snippets from the paper that triggered me and added some thoughts.