Conway's law, and the shape of your teams
2026-11-02 · The Scrums team
In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that organizations build systems that mirror how they communicate. If he's right, how your teams are set up, and how they talk to each other, matters as much as any process.
In 1968, the programmer Melvin Conway published a short article called "How Do Committees Invent?". Its central observation became known as Conway's law: organizations that design systems end up producing designs that copy their own communication structures. Put four teams on a compiler, as the old joke goes, and you get a four-pass compiler.
More than half a century later, the law still holds up, and it cuts both ways. If your teams can't talk to each other, the seams in your product will show it. And if you want a different shape of product, you may need a different shape of teams.
What that means day to day
- Team boundaries are design decisions. Who's on which team decides which conversations are easy and which need a meeting.
- The space between teams matters. Most problems in large systems show up at the joins, where one team's work meets another's.
- Shared practices help. Teams that run their retros, estimates and health checks in similar ways can compare notes and learn from each other.
- Visibility helps more. Leaders need to see how every team is doing without making each team write a report.
Organizations in Scrums
Scrums is built around organizations that hold many teams:
- Teams within an organization. People can be on several teams, and joining a team means joining its organization. Owners and admins manage people and teams; members see the organization's teams and people and join by invitation.
- Open teams. A team lead can open a team so anyone in the organization can join it without an invite, which suits guilds and communities of practice.
- Shared templates. An organization's admins can share retro templates with every team in it, next to the built-in ones.
- Talking across teams. Every organization has a #general channel everyone is in, and anyone can make more.
- Insights. The organization's Insights tab charts the last six months across its teams: sessions held, action items created and done, and average health. Owners and admins also see every team's latest health check beside the one before.
Many teams, one organization, one place to see how they're doing.
Conway's law says your system will look like your organization. It helps to be able to see your organization clearly. Sign up and set yours up.