The design of a product can often reflect, and not often in a good way, the nature and structure of the team(s) which made it.

The end result is essentially a two-level application of Conway’s Law: a collaborative extended community of technologists that creates not simply a collection of disparate tools but rather chainable tools that leverage crowdsourced architectural principles to facilitate a level of coordination and interactivity we’ve never seen before.

This coordinated technology environment, in turn, facilitates the reorganization within companies, as they now have the tools they need to break down organizational silos, and people within those companies self-organize along horizontal lines

The causality question behind Conway’s Law, therefore, is less about how changing software organizations can lead to better software, but rather how companies can best leverage changing technology in order to transform their organizations.

Hints at how to answer this question surprisingly come from the world of devops – surprising because the focus of devops is ostensibly on building and deploying better software more quickly. Be that as it may, there’s no question that technology change is a primary facilitator and driving force for the devops cultural and organizational shifts.

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