Conway's Law: Why does your organization decide your architecture (and not the other way around)?
- barbarela48
- Jul 7
- 2 min read
Have you ever heard of Conway's Law? Formulated in 1967 by computer scientist Melvin E. Conway, this theory states that IT systems designed by a company tend to replicate that company's communication structure. In other words, your technical architecture is always a reflection of your organization.
Conway's Law: Definition and Principle
Conway's Law posits that any organization that designs a system (IT or otherwise) will produce a design that is a copy of its communication structure. This principle applies to all software architectures: monoliths, microservices, distributed systems, cloud-native... regardless of the technology, it is the human organization that determines the final technical structure.
What we observe in the field
In practice, this phenomenon is observable in the majority of companies and IT projects:
Large, centralized teams produce rigid monoliths that are difficult to scale.
Complex organizations give rise to convoluted and tightly coupled technical systems.
Small, distributed teams more naturally design modular and flexible architectures.
