Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

This connection between communication bandwidth and systems architecture was first discussed by Melvin Conway, who said, “organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” (Conway 1968). Our research lends support to what is sometimes called the “inverse Conway Maneuver,” which states that organizations should evolve their team and organizational structure to achieve the desired architecture.