Shape the Organization

Understand existing structures and culture before changing them. Work with managers and individual contributors to improve the system together.

Principles

• Shape, don’t dictate.
• The organization shapes the software (Conway’s Law).
• Organizational changes have migration costs.

In practice

Our iOS and Android apps needed to deliver nearly identical experiences, but separate Scrum teams created barriers between the engineers. I brought them into one Scrum team with shared planning, reviews, and demos, while retaining separate platform managers. Later, we reduced full-team standups to twice a week to keep coordination useful without unnecessary meetings.

This was Conway’s Law in practice: change the communication structure to better support the product. Read the engineering organizations case study.

The Remote Control turnaround was a different kind of organizational change. I formed UI-Platform around shared Core library responsibilities, brought experienced Qt engineers into the Remote Control effort, and later transitioned UI-Platform under the Senior Manager overseeing mobile. The reporting structure evolved alongside the technical responsibilities. The case study covers those decisions in more detail.

Further writing

• Shape, Don’t Dictate (planned article)
• Conway’s Law Is a Leadership Problem (planned article)