Conway’s Law

Conway’s Law is the observation that organizations tend to design systems that mirror their communication structure. A product designed by a three-person organization will likely have three components. If it is designed by a single team, it will likely all be built within a single large service.

A media company with separate teams for video encoding, recommendation algorithms, and user interfaces might build a streaming platform where these components are loosely coupled, reflecting the team’s structure. Hospitals and insurance companies have separate IT systems due to distinct legal and compliance teams. This results in fragmented medical records across different providers, forcing patients to manually transfer records or redo tests.

There are three primary stakeholders in the data management value chain:

1. Producers: The teams generating the data

2. Platforms: The teams maintaining the data infrastructure

3. Consumers: The teams leveraging the data to accomplish tasks