Conway's Law and Cross-Hatching
3 days ago
- #Engineering Culture
- #Product Development
- #Organizational Structure
- The strong form of Conway's law suggests that an organization's structure is reflected in its system designs.
- Organizational culture and early team personality quirks shape a company's outputs, exemplified by Palantir's decentralized trust culture.
- Cross-hatching organizational structures, like splitting Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and Software Engineers (SWEs), internalize tension to align with customer outcomes.
- Another cross-hatching example involves separate people leads and project leads, creating healthy tension and decoupling leadership from management.
- At Spiral, challenges arise from context gaps between open-source Vortex and proprietary Spiral, requiring structures to internalize tensions and push ownership to edges.
- AI tooling reduces coding bottlenecks, shifting constraints to consensus, design, and taste, and favoring smaller, faster pods of 3-4 people.
- Smaller pods require robust invisible scaffolding and cross-hatching to align mandates and internalize tension effectively.