Conway’s law is one of those, ‘Of course!’ concepts: a concept where, the first time you hear it, you say, ‘Of course!’ It reveals something which you always suspected about the world, but couldn’t quite put into words.

Conway’s law answers the question, ‘why are so many computer systems so strangely organised?’, with the idea that the structure of systems follows the structure of the teams that build them. Melvin Conway didn’t quite put it like that in 1967: he said, ‘Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure.’ (If you haven’t heard of Conway’s law before, but have encountered many strangely designed computer systems, you may be experiencing your own, ‘Of course!’ moment.)