Products without a soul

Michael Jordan had a well-known line for summing up the importance of playing as a team.

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.

Working as a team is part of most of our activities. And managing to do it well is a task in itself. Some trades, like Jordan's basketball, took the problem on board a long time ago and therefore treat it as one more aspect they have to develop and improve. It is easy to glance at many other trades, professions and industries -construction, hospitality, cinema, and so on- and recognize in them specific patterns for solving the problem.

It is also a historical matter. As in almost everything, we have invented nothing here: we have carried on a whole series of efforts whose origin is our very origin as a species. A few months ago Richard Barber published a beautiful book, The Prince in Splendour: Court Festivals of Medieval Europe, explaining all the complexity and teamwork required to hold a celebration in the Middle Ages. In an anachronistic but fertile exercise, he asks us to imagine the challenges they faced back then.

Imagine that you are a master chef, working for a celebrity who wants to throw a wedding dinner for their daughter, with 200–300 guests. Next imagine that you have no electricity — no refrigerators, no freezers, no light — and no gas. Your suppliers have to get everything to you fresh, and you don't want to use salted meat for this important occasion. You are not sure exactly how much of any ingredient you will need until very close to the day. What's more, the guests may stay on for several days. Among them there will be vegetarians or people needing special diets. To top this all off, the only transport available is horse and cart, so nothing can be brought at the last minute.

From a formal, abstract point of view, any team task can be understood as the set of rules that organize the relationships between different elements in order to obtain a result. In 1967 Melvin Conway published an article, How Do Committees Invent?, that captured that formal proposal, putting forward as its main thesis the correspondence between that result, the whole, and its parts, the elements.

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

As Conway himself recounts, that idea was later taken up in Fred Brooks's classic The Mythical Man-Month, in what has been known ever since as Conway's Law. Everything sounds better dressed up as a law. Brooks drew attention to the need to keep in the organization of teams the same flexibility that the system itself had in the organization of its parts.

Conway goes on to point out that the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one. If the system design is to be free to change, the organization must be prepared to change.

Conway, in his article, pointed to the same problem in terms of communication, and hinted at a rule about size.

To the extent that an organization is not completely flexible in its communication structure, that organization will stamp out an image of itself in every design it produces. The larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and the more pronounced is the phenomenon.

Building digital products I have often heard expressions like it is a company without a soul, the product is fine, but it lacks a soul, and similar things. Conway's contribution offers context and a precise meaning for understanding that kind of expression. Following the homomorphism principle of his law, you can reach simple but very powerful conclusions that identify failures we tend to live with.

1. If building the product is divided or fragmented, the product will be fragmented too.

2. If the product is built following internal organizational rules, the product will offer an experience of what the internal organization is, not of what the product ought to be.

3. If the product is built with communication pointing inwards, the product will communicate with people through a form of communication they cannot quite understand.

Although these conclusions seem obvious, we constantly live in environments where either there is no organization of the elements at all, or it responds to criteria disconnected from the result. We tend to live in silos of frontend and backend, of design and marketing, of data and sales. And our products inevitably transmit that experience of blind caves.

It is undoubtedly worth paying attention to everything related to the organization and the communication of teamwork. And to considering it a fundamental part of digital product development itself.