Satire
The Architecture Nobody Planned
The system diagram looks exactly like the org chart. Nobody drew it that way.
A retail company reorgs into four product teams: Platform, Commerce, Logistics, and Notifications. The CTO announces this will enable autonomous delivery. Conway's Law was not in the slide deck.
What Actually Happens
Checkout, which used to be a function call, now makes seven network hops across four team-owned services. Each team designed their service boundary around their own domain — which is to say, around their own team. The seams are perfect. They perfectly match the org chart.
Latency spikes. Nobody owns the cross-team flow. An Architecture Review Board forms to "align on integration contracts." It meets bi-weekly. It has a backlog.
The Platform team needs Commerce to change an API. Commerce is mid-sprint. The Logistics team has a dependency on Platform that Platform is not aware of. This information surfaces in the Architecture Review Board's third session.
A consultancy is engaged to assess the integration complexity. Their diagram looks exactly like the org chart. They charge £180,000 to produce it.
“You didn't design the architecture. You described the org chart in YAML.”
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
Treat the org structure as an architectural constraint before you draw a single box. Map team boundaries, ownership, and communication paths first. Design the system to match the communication structure you actually have, not the one you wish you had. If the architecture needs to change, change the org first — or accept that the architecture will change itself to match anyway.
This scenario illustrates Conway's Law. See all 13 laws →
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