How Do Committees Invent? (Conway's Law)

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 communication structures of these organisations." The paper is short and the claim is empirical — Conway studied committees and their outputs. For product direction it is foundational: the shape of the team determines the shape of the product, and any attempt to produce a product shape that does not match the team shape is fighting the system. Pair with Skelton and Pais's Team Topologies for the modern operational treatment. The original is short; read it in the original because the paraphrases omit context.