The document discusses Conway's Law and approaches for organizing cross-functional teams to work on shared components. Conway's Law states that a system's structure will mirror the communication structure of the organization that designed it. The document recommends establishing feature teams and describes five key aspects for making feature teams work: 1) Ensuring teams have the necessary skills, 2) Learning to deliver work in a vertical, incremental manner, 3) Improving collaboration within and between teams, 4) Maintaining clean component ownership and structure, and 5) Collaborating on shared components through common standards and full lifecycle developer experience.

1. Wrestling with Conway’s Law
A L E X S C H W A R T Z , H E A D O F E N G I N E E R I N G , E M N I F Y
How to support cross-functional teams
working on shared components?

2. Categorization of this Topic

3. Conway’s Law

4. Conway’s Law
Any organization that
designs a system
(defined broadly) will
produce a design
whose structure is a
copy of the
organization's
communication
structure.
-- Melvin E. Conway, 1968
Source: Martin Fowler

5. Conway’s Law
Any organization that
designs a system
(defined broadly) will
produce a design
whose structure is a
copy of the
organization's
communication
structure.
-- Melvin E. Conway, 1968
Architecture
Team Setup
Source: Martin Fowler
Comm structure

6. How we do teams in the
2010, 2020s?

7. Approaches to Scale Agile suggest “Feature Teams”
Spotify “Model” Large Scale Scrum

8. 1 1 / 1 6 / 2 0 2 2
Spotify

10. Feature Teams

11. LeSS Feature Teams
1 1 / 1 6 / 2 0 2 2

12. How to make
feature teams
work?

13. How to make this work? – 5 pieces 🧩 of the puzzle
1. Have the skilled people
2. Learn to deliver vertical increments
3. Learn to work together …
a) inside the team
b) with people in same specialization,
e.g. DB (guilds)
c) with non-neighboring teams
d) with the ”neighboring teams”, on the
shared components (next slide)

14. How to make this work? – 5 pieces 🧩 of the puzzle
4. Keep components clean and have
ownership
5. Learn to work together on components
• common standards
• Decision making together
• Ease of Use DevEx (Developer Experience)
thru full lifecylce

15. DevEx thru the full lifecyle
Have a high maturity level regarding development practices (XP)

16. Another Approach:
Business Capability + MicroFrontends
SIM Management
Team
Example
from
UI
API
Batch services
Whatever…
UI
API
The UI Customers
Business Capability:
Managing lifecycle of SIM cards