Couple items that stood out to me today from Team Topologies, chapter 2:

Communication paths (along formal reporting lines or not) within an organization effectively restrict the kinds of solutions that the organization can devise.

This was an interesting chapter. When I think about lines of communication between engineering teams that I work with currently, you can see Conway’s law played out brilliantly. Inter-team comms are strong, our two coupled team comms are moderate, and we barely talk to anyone else. Our architecture is unique in the org and limited to only our use.

The same holds true for our product lines. I am strongly coupled with another product manager and we work on the same product. We have limited capacity to tackle problems that lay outside the immediate area of control of our engineering teams – every product/engineer team coupling is fairly siloed, building their own architecture, and prioritizing what they can build within their silo instead of thinking across the organization to solve problems.

How do we combat that, at least at the product level? If lines of communication reflect the solutions built, perhaps that’s a good place to start.