AME3 and Conway’s Law: Old Wisdom for the Enterprise of the Future

When Architecture Mirrors Organization

You might recognize this scenario: An enterprise decides to modernize its product architecture. The development teams start with great ambitions, creating clean designs on paper. Yet, months later, they find themselves with the same structural challenges they were trying to escape.

The new architecture eerily resembles the organizational chart. This is not a coincidence.

It’s a pattern so consistent that it was identified and articulated decades ago.

The Law That Never Ages

In 1967, Melvin E. Conway published a paper titled “How Do Committees Invent?” His conclusion was both simple and profound:

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

This observation, now known as Conway’s Law, carries a crucial implication: the product architecture is a reflection of the organizational structure that develops the product.

Conway didn’t stop there. He added a critical insight that many organizations still overlook today:

Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.

The Challenge in Practice

Consider a medium-sized enterprise developing a globally successful laser welding tool family. As the product grew in complexity, so did the organization. Multiple teams worked on different components, each developing their specialized knowledge and solutions.

However, a persistent challenge emerged: strong dependencies and necessary communication between the Teams. What was manageable with 30 employees became a real bottleneck with growth.

Teams developed isolated solutions that weren’t integrated into the common Product, rendering them unusable by customers. Despite growth in employee numbers, overall performance stagnated.

Why? The answer lies in Conway’s Law.

The product architecture mirrored the organizational structure—with all its communication barriers and silos intact.

Culture Follows Structure

Craig Larman, in his work on organizational behavior, formulated a complementary principle: Culture follows structure. This law reminds us that changing organizational culture requires changing organizational structure first.

The implications are clear: if you want to improve your product architecture, you cannot simply redraw diagrams. You must be willing to reshape how your organization communicates and collaborates.

The AME3 Response

AME3 recognizes Conway’s Law as a fundamental reality that enterprises must work with, not against. The framework provides structure for this challenge through several key elements:

Flexibility by Design

AME3 incorporates a leadership system built on three functions: Owners, System Leads, and Teams. This triangle of forces creates a stable yet adaptable system. When product architecture needs to evolve, the organizational structure can flex accordingly.

Empirical Control

Through the Match and Tournament cycles, AME3 provides regular opportunities to inspect and adapt both product and organizational structures. System Leads work closely with Owners and Teams to conduct experiments that promote new insights for product architecture, organizational structure, and practices.

Evolution Focus

The framework acknowledges that products and organizations must evolve together. As products move through different evolutionary phases—from Genesis through Custom Build to Product and eventually Commodity—both architecture and organization must adapt accordingly.

Practical Implications

In The System Lead, we explored two enterprises navigating organizational evolution. Their experiences illustrate how Conway’s Law plays out in practice.

For the start-up implementing AME3 from the beginning, Conway’s Law became a design principle. As the organization grew beyond a single Team, the System Lead faced the challenge head-on.

The solution? Design the Product architecture so that Teams have minimal overlapping activities while enhancing self-organization and engineering skills.

This wasn’t a one-time restructuring. The System Leads continuously worked with Owners and Teams to experiment and optimize the entire work system—what AME3 calls an Arena.

For the medium-sized enterprise, the recognition of Conway’s Law informed the selection of their first Arena. They chose the laser welding division partly because it could operate relatively independently without significant reorganization.

The dependencies on suppliers were already managed by the unit, so changes could be managed directly.

The Timeless Wisdom

Conway’s Law, formulated over half a century ago, remains profoundly relevant today. It reminds us that:

Product architecture cannot be separated from organizational structure. They are two sides of the same coin.

Flexibility in organization enables flexibility in design. Rigid hierarchies produce rigid architectures.

Communication patterns determine system boundaries. If teams don’t talk effectively, neither will their system components.

Evolution requires overall development. As products evolve, organizations must evolve alongside them.

Looking Forward

The enterprises of the future will face accelerating change and increasing complexity. Conway’s Law will not become less relevant—if anything, its importance will grow.

Organizations that recognize this reality and build flexibility into their structure will be better positioned to evolve their products and services.

AME3 doesn’t fight Conway’s Law. Instead, it embraces this wisdom as a design principle.

By providing a framework that makes organizational flexibility a core feature rather than an afterthought, AME3 helps enterprises align their structure with their architectural ambitions.

The old wisdom remains: if you want to change your systems, be prepared to change your organization. The question is not whether Conway’s Law applies to your enterprise—it’s whether you’ll acknowledge it and design accordingly.

The decisions for your product and services today are creating the challenges of tomorrow.

As we navigate an increasingly complex future, perhaps the most important insight is this: the flexibility of your organization determines the adaptability of your products.

Conway understood this in 1967. The question is: do we understand it now?