Forget the so called “Perfect Architecture"… Start with How You Work

If you’ve ever come across Conway’s Law, you know it’s not just some abstract theory. It hits home: “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

In plain easy words? Your team structure shapes your software. Which means chasing the perfect architecture—microservices, monoliths, or whatever’s trending, is kind of missing the point.

The more useful question to ask is: How do we actually want to work together?

Because sometimes, splitting things into separate services makes total sense. Maybe you’ve got autonomous teams, and everyone needs to move fast without waiting on each other. Cool—microservices can help with that.

Other times, trying to break everything apart just adds overhead. If your team is small and tightly knit, a monolith might be the simplest and most effective way to go.

The key idea? Team dynamics and software design reflect (and affect) each other. If communication is clunky or teams are misaligned, you’ll feel it in your architecture—and vice versa.

So instead of obsessing over the “right” technical setup, maybe start by thinking about collaboration. How do your teams talk? Make decisions? Share ownership? Because the smoother that goes, the better your systems will evolve. Naturally.