Your org chart is your architecture diagram whether you like it or not. This is how to design team boundaries on purpose instead of letting Conway's Law design them for you.
About the book
Skelton and Pais start from Conway's Law as a fact, not a warning: system architecture will mirror however teams actually communicate, so team boundaries have to be designed as deliberately as the software itself. Their model gives four fundamental team types (stream-aligned, platform, enabling, complicated-subsystem) and three interaction modes, sized against each team's cognitive load rather than an org chart drawn for headcount reasons. The goal throughout is fast flow of change, with the topology treated as a living decision that keeps evolving as the system and market shift.
Best used for
—Deciding whether a new team should be stream-aligned, platform, enabling, or complicated-subsystem
—Reducing cross-team handoffs by matching team boundaries to service boundaries
—Running an inverse Conway maneuver deliberately, before a reorg forces it
“After reading this book, I fundamentally don't have the assumption that more collaboration and communication is 'good.'”
— Willy Xiao, Goodreads
Install this skill
Run this command in your terminal. The skill will be available in all your Claude Code projects.