Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    Software architecture IS Conway's Law

    Can you even have architecture before there's a team?

    I've been thinking about this lately. Reflecting on how writing code goes when you work as a team of soloists vs a team that works together. Code is cleaner when you work together. But why?

    Conway's Law

    Conway's law says that companies ship their org structure. If 3 people build a compiler, you will have a 3-pass compiler.

    [O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

    That's why you want vertical teams aligned with business goals and product areas. Anywhere you split the teams, you'll get a rift in the product.

    Architecture when you're soloing

    When you solo a new feature or project, you can try to keep your code clean. But it's hard. You have to think about it. Consciously decide to maintain arbitrary boundaries between components. It feels silly.

    After all why not, why shouldn't you smoosh the state management logic together with the UI rendering? Who cares if interfaces leak between components?

    You're building all parts of the feature. Do what feels easiest!

    Want to prop-drill a value through 5 layers of components? Sure why not, nobody's reusing those components anywhere else. Why even build 5 layers of components in the first place. Make a big fat 500 line component instead.

    You get a muddy architecture with high architectural complexity and code that's hard to re-use. Maybe that's okay. At least it works.

    You come back 3 months later to add new functionality and oh no what is this code??

    Architecture when you work as a team

    Compare that to working as a collaborative team.

    You have 3 to 5 people who need to work together on a new feature. You work together on 1 thing at a time because that makes the work go faster.

    How do you do that without stepping on each other's toes?

    You have to talk before the work starts. Get together and:

    • identify all the moving pieces
    • split those into components
    • define clear interfaces
    • agree on the contracts

    Then you each go build the individual pieces. Good code structure and clean architecture happen automatically as a function of splitting up the work.

    The code becomes more maintainable and easier to work with. You get the work done faster too. Code review is easier, you have fewer whack-a-mole bugs, fixing a bug in 1 component doesn't break 3 other components. It's great.

    Break down the work

    I think the trick is to break down the work. With or without a team.

    You have a goal, how do you get there in a series of steps?

    After each step the code should work, be shippable, do something valuable, and get you closer to the goal. The smaller the steps, the cleaner your architecture will be.

    You can Conway's Law with yourself.

    Cheers,
    ~Swizec

    PS: small steps are also easier to test and make you more resilient to disruption

    Published on May 31st, 2025 in Architecture, Software Engineering, Teamwork, Scaling Fast Book

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about Software architecture IS Conway's Law

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️