"You either die before Product Market Fit or live long enough to see the effects of Conway’s Law in your system architecture."

This is what I ended up saying to a colleague in one of my conversations.

This was in a context of refactoring a legacy system where we used Conway's Law as a lever instead of thinking of it as a constraint and inevitability. Without an external measure, software entropy will kick in and systems will succumb to it.

But if you're thrown into such a system or you inherit it, how do you navigate refactoring of such systems? You can't fight Conway's Law, instead use it as a lever to refactor legacy systems.

I finally ended up writing about this. Have a read.