Fighting Conway’s Law: The Reality of Feature Teams

A company Org structure creates communication channels that are reflected in the system design, which results in a situation that the system design is clearly not aligned with the problem domain and with the needs of the business. In other words, you have an org structure that instead of helping you achieve your goals is just adding massive accidental complexity to every project, and is surely counterproductive in terms of building new products and features.

Not all problems are born equal, hence not all solutions should look alike. Feature teams are probably the right structure for 90% of your org. But there are product areas and problem domains where it’s worth considering other structures.

It can be an area in your product where the risk of faults is super high. It can be an area in your platform that requires a different development life cycle. It can be a core product capability that recently came out of a research project and is still evolving to its desired shape.

• UCMDB is a product that provides Ops people a near real-time picture of the topology of the infrastructure and applications they are operating.
• Perfecto offers a cloud-based test lab for mobile and web applications.
• WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) improves the interaction between people and applications.