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Engineering Economics8 min read

Conway's Law and Its Economic Impact on Engineering Organizations

Your architecture mirrors your org chart. The cost implications are enormous.

By Richard Ewing·

Architecture = Organization

Conway's Law: organizations design systems that mirror their communication structure. Economic impact: a siloed org creates a siloed architecture, which creates coordination costs that grow quadratically with team size.

Every additional team boundary adds ~20% communication overhead. A 10-team organization spends 30-40% of engineering capacity on cross-team coordination. Team topology reorganization can reduce this to 15-20%.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.