How Do Committees Invent?

Melvin Conway’s 1968 paper established what we now call Conway’s Law: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that mirror their communication structures. The observation is deceptively simple but has profound implications for how we think about team topologies and the Inverse Conway Maneuver, which deliberately reshapes teams to get the system architecture you want.

Resources

• Melvin Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?” (Datamation, 1968)
• Conway’s Law — the concept page derived from this paper