I picked up Team Topologies the other day and am reading it with the product team mindset – trying to parse some of the example applications of Conway’s law for engineering teams to product teams.

Conway’s law, as a refresher:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

Melvin Conway

You ship your org chart. And it makes sense – what you build will align with the team’s area of responsibility, ownership, and lines of communication.

But is the same true for product teams? In my current org, the “team” is a collection of individuals that are shared across several products with the exception of the product manager. The person responsible for marketing my product has obligations across several products and reports up to a marketing org. Same for data, user research, operations… We’re not even adjacent on the org chart in some instances. So does what we ship from a product perspective follow Conway’s law?

I’m not sure yet. But I’m intrigued by the question.