I think this has to be one of the most insightful observations of all time: it really does seem to apply to so many things.

Consumer products which are designed by separate teams working on individual parts or subsystems end up having just as much integration as would be expected by the communication between the teams. (To some extent it’s Alec Issigonis’s “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” observation, but generalised to look at any communication structure.)

Government agencies which try to delegate as much as possible to other agencies end up creating systems where the end-user has to deal with multiple agencies to get anywhere. Organisations where groups jealously guard knowledge of their processes end up with other groups duplicating the work, without knowing.

A while ago I thought about writing a book trying to apply Conway’s Law, and other similar ideas (Parkinson’s Law, the Peter Principle, Dilbert Principle, etc) to product design and technology, showing example products and trying to deduce truths about the design team and organisational structure from them. It would be difficult to do the research, but I’m sure there’s something in it.

[...] This stuck with me at the back of my mind; I’ve since found out it’s (sometimes) attributed as Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm (presumably after Richard Wexelblat?), though also apparently an ‘old designer’s adage’ (Jason Kottke) and an ‘old Hollywood maxim‘. The impossible triangle used to illustrate it here is cleverer than what I’ve drawn above, but the principle is the same. (As with so many principles and maxims popularised through software development, it also seems to apply very well to design and physical product development.) [...]