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Organisation

An annotated collection of 3 books, papers & essays on organisation, spanning 1931 to 2019. Featuring works by Neil H. McElroy, Melvin E. Conway, Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

Brand Men (The McElroy Memo)

Neil H. McElroy, 1931 · Internal memorandum, Procter & Gamble

A three-page internal memo written in May 1931 by Neil McElroy at Procter & Gamble, proposing that each brand should have a dedicated team responsible for every aspect of its marketing. The memo is the closest thing prod…

How Do Committees Invent? (Conway's Law)

Melvin E. Conway, 1968 · Datamation, Vol. 14, No. 4

Conway's 1968 paper states a law that has turned out to apply to software, hardware, and almost every other designed system: "organisations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the…

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, 2019 · IT Revolution Press

Skelton and Pais take Conway's Law seriously and build an operating model from it: four fundamental team types (stream-aligned, enabling, complicated-subsystem, platform) and three interaction modes (collaboration, X-as-…