Conway’s law and content design systems
Should your content design system reflect your org chart? Conway’s law tells us that organizations typically design systems that reproduce the org structure and siloes of the teams that created them. Obviously we don’t want to ship products that mirror our org charts, but what are the implications of Conway’s law for internal tools like content design systems?
If your org has structural problems, it’s difficult to keep them out of your design system (whether that’s a standard design system, content design system, or an amalgam of both). If your teams are highly siloed and structured in ways that reinforce arbitrary boundaries (for example, between UX Design and Content), cross-functional communication and collaboration are inefficient, and there are redundancies in product design roles, the system you build will inevitably reflect these issues. It will include inefficiencies, documentation intended only for one audience (for example, content guidance that’s only useful for content designers), and redundant documentation (for example, separate and conflicting documentation produced by UX Design and Content for the same component).
But when viewed from another angle, Conway’s law provides a model for how to build a robust and sustainable design system. How we structure our design systems can help determine (and ideally improve) how we communicate with our design partners. It can also help us better understand how they work and what challenges they’re facing in the design and development process.
Design systems are about people. We often view them as tools that individual designers use to design products, but they have an equally important role as a means of enabling collaboration between UX designers, content designers, engineers, and other cross-functional partners. Even if our systems are prone to reflecting breakdowns in cross-functional communication, we can remedy this by intentionally designing our systems in ways that strengthen cross-functional working relationships and break down arbitrary team-based siloes. The best design systems include components and documentation created through collaboration between systems designers, UX designers, visual designers, content designers, and engineering, and they support all of these partners in working together more effectively as they design and develop products.
