The Myth of Conway's Law
TL;DR:Conway's Law is treated as destiny — your org must mirror your architecture. Twenty years of LeSS adoptions prove otherwise. Cross-team code ownership works and is surprisingly easy once you actually try it. The common interpretation limits thinking; the original paper does not say what people think it says.
Myth of Conways Law
A big part of LeSS is to have teams work on entire customer problems, across the product, and that leads to cross-team code ownership (which we refer to as feature teams — what I'd call whole product focus teams). I've been working in cross-team code ownership organisations now for more than 20 years and consider that to be hugely advantageous over mapping teams to part of the system. Of course, there are problems you'll need to figure out, such as code standards, dealing with production issues, regular maintenance upgrade, and more. Most of these problems have multiple known solutions. In fact, I'm always amused how relatively easy it is to have cross-team shared code ownership relative to the amount of arguments people, who never experienced it, have about it.
One of the consistent myths is the common interpretation of "Conways Law." Your organisation and your architecture must map/mirror. In LeSS adoption, this is just not happening, it is not true, not a law. It has been frustrating me for 20 years that people limit their thinking about problems in product development because they "must adhere to Conway's Law". Really, it doesn't have to be like that. If you free your mind from the limitations that Conway's Law gives you then you can find wonderful alternatives to structure product development. For a real example of this, see the LeSS adoption at Poster POS — where component teams became feature teams working across the entire codebase.
The architecture-follows-org argument also fuels premature decisions like splitting into microservices — which I argue is technical debt, not architectural progress. In recent LeSS Conference, Craig had a talk about Conway's Law itself and how people interpreted it. He dived into the original paper and point out that the common interpretations are not actually what it says in the original paper. The video of the talk is now online.