Le blog d'Archiloque

Alternate Conway' laws

If you work in IT there’s a chance you have heard about Conway’s law:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

And especially a catchy way to summarize its consequence:

What you ship to your users is your org chart.

But after a few years in various organization taught me a few alternate ways to see this mechanism.

  • What you ship to your users is your org chart.

  • What you ship to your users is your incentive structure.

  • What you ship to your users is the 8th secret cabal that is taking over your org.

  • What you ship to your users is a poorly understood version of a hyped new management structure that never really happened outside some thoughtleades' slides.

  • What you ship to your users is what enabled the burndown chart to look good.

  • What you ship to your users is your Jira workflow.

  • What you ship to your users is the Jira workflow that is used by some “agilist” to wage war against project managers and developers.

  • What you ship to your users is what enabled the team to reach the number of story points, with a story point being equal to a half day of work.

  • What you ship to your users is what your highest paying customer is asking for.

  • What you ship to your users is what you understand of what your highest paying customer is asking for.

  • What you ship to your users is your highest paying customer' org chart.

  • What you ship to your users becomes their org chart.

  • What you ship to your users is what the Java-3-based legacy system you rely on allowed you to do.

  • What you ship to your users is the pricing structure of the enterprise tool that shape everything your do.

  • What you ship to your users is what is required to increase the subscription price to your enterprise tool.

  • What you ship to your users is a call for help.

  • What you ship to your users is a memetic infohazard.

  • What you ship to your users put the fear of creation into the hearts of men.

  • What you ship to your users is the best you could do, please close your corporate laptop’s lip and return to real life.