CTO Diaries #4: On not shipping your org chart
2023-08-09
You’ve probably heard of the warning “Don’t ship the org chart” common among product development circles. I always thought of this as synonymous to Conway’s Law which states that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. In my experience, I’ve come to believe that this is true. Whether you like it or not, it is an eventuality. At some point I thought that to be an effective solutions architect, you have to be an “org architect”. Or in order to achieve a certain system architecture, you’re better off rearranging your org structure than influence cross-functional architects or senior engineering leadership to agree with you. It may work for a time, especially during the start, but eventually, as engineers come and go, the org-mirrored design will out. But I think there’s more nuance to this than what’s obvious.
Conways-Law · Cto · Cto-Diaries · Diaries · Tech
3 minutes