Architecture converges on the organization’s communication structure. Not advice but an observation: if you want a different architecture, restructure the teams first (the inverse Conway maneuver) — otherwise the old org chart will reassert itself in the interfaces.
The source is Melvin Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?” (Datamation, April 1968): organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of their communication structures. His argument is structural, not statistical: a design is split into parts before anyone knows the right split, each part goes to a group, and an interface between two parts can only be as good as the communication between the two groups. Fred Brooks named it “Conway’s law” in The Mythical Man-Month (1975). Later empirical work treats it as a hypothesis to test: Herbsleb and Grinter (ICSE 1999) found coordination breaking down exactly at cross-site interfaces, and MacCormack, Rusnak and Baldwin (Research Policy, 2012) found loosely coupled open-source organizations producing more modular code than tightly coupled commercial ones on matched products. Supportive, but correlational.
A data-platform example. Ingestion, transformation and serving belong to three teams; the result is three systems joined by two hand-offs — a raw bucket and a warehouse schema — and every change to an event needs three tickets. When the company reorganizes around domains (orders, payments) with one team owning an event from producer to served table, the pipeline gets cut the same way within a year, whether or not anyone redraws the architecture diagram. That is the inverse Conway maneuver, a name popularized by Thoughtworks and by Skelton and Pais’s Team Topologies (2019): pick the boundaries you want in the code (14), then give each boundary one owning team.
Limits. It is a tendency with friction, not a law of nature: a small team can build a well-modularized system, and a reorg does not refactor code by itself — it only changes which refactors become cheap. Misuse is reorganizing as a substitute for design: teams cut along the wrong seams produce the wrong seams faster. It trades against Brooks’s observations (76): every new team boundary is also a new communication cost. Not expressible in code; expressed in the org chart.