Pulling an Inverse Conway Maneuver at Netflix (2023)

Summary

Pulling an Inverse Conway Maneuver at Netflix When I first joined the Netflix Platform team circa 2020, the Observability offering was composed of a series of tools serving different purposes. There was Atlas for metrics, Edgar for distributed tracing, Radar for Logs and Alerts, Lumen for dashboards, Telltale for app health, etc. It was a portfolio of about 20 different apps. Big and small, ranging from business-specific tools to analyze playback sessions to low-level tools for CPU profiling. The Observability org was composed of three different teams. Each team had a mix of front-end, back-end and full-stack engineers. We also had one designer and one PM shared across the three teams. Each team was further subdivided into sub-teams of two to four engineers working on a specific sub-domain. It was no coincidence that this org structure produced a set of independent apps. That’s the kind of architecture we’d expect based on Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. Melvin E. Conway Simply put, the system’s architecture will be shaped like the org that produced it. This is because, to build a complex system, people must communicate to ensure the different pieces fit well together. Therefore, the design that emerges will be a map of the communications paths in the organization. Netflix’s approach to building software further intensified this. Netflix embraces the Full Cycle Development; this means teams are fully responsible for all the stages of the software lifecycle, from Design to Operate and Support. We were organized as highly aligned, loosely coupled teams with a high level of independence. ICs wholly owned every aspect of their work, from tech stack choices to which ticketing platform to use to track bugs. Netflix provides a recommended set of tools (known as “paved path”) but doesn’t mandate their adoption. Each team is free to pick whate...