Team structures

In April 1968 Melvin Conway argued in Datamation that “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” Fred Brooks later named it Conway’s law in The Mythical Man-Month. Two years after Conway, Jo Freeman’s talk “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (published 1972) warned from the women’s movement that “there is no such thing as a structureless group”: removing formal structure leaves informal structure, which “becomes a way of masking power.”

In 2012 two documents made software companies rethink management. In March, Valve published its Handbook for New Employees: Valve is flat, “we don’t have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else,” desks have wheels, and people join whatever project they think matters most. In October, Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson described Spotify’s squads (small teams like mini-startups), tribes of up to about 100 people, and chapters whose leads were line managers. Many companies copied both. Zappos began rolling out Holacracy in 2013, and in March 2015 Tony Hsieh announced that from 30 April there would be no more people managers, offering at least three months’ severance to anyone who preferred to leave; about 210 of 1,500 employees, 14%, took it.

The reversals followed. Medium dropped Holacracy in March 2016, saying it was “difficult to coordinate efforts at scale” and that writing down every responsibility “hindered a proactive attitude and sense of communal ownership.” GitHub, which like Valve had let people choose their own projects, abandoned that structure for something much more traditional, a reversal organization scientists later studied as a case. In 2020 a former Spotify engineer wrote that the squad model had been “only ever aspirational and never fully implemented.” Meanwhile Skelton and Pais’s Team Topologies (2019) moved the debate from “managers or not” to how teams are shaped and how they interact.