[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Conway’s Law comes from Melvin Conway’s 1968 paper “How Do Committees Invent?”: “any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” A three-team compiler project builds a three-pass compiler; a system’s module boundaries end up tracing the org chart’s boundaries. The practical consequence is the inverse Conway maneuver: if you want a particular architecture, restructure the teams to match it first, because the software will follow the communication paths whether you plan it or not. This is the foundation Team Topologies builds on, and it connects to Systems Thinking and O-Ring Theory. Seeded from the developer-productivity metrics notes.