Most of the useful insights in the Devops movement can be derived from knowing Conway's law and thinking about organizational patterns holistically. As usual the success stories get cargo culted by others without understanding the principles and thought processes that led there, and usually fail because every organization is different and has different needs. Change is hard. This will happen with every shiny new movement like Devops or Agile.

I'm sure we're due for a new one soon which will follow the same path, since people seem to be admitting that Devops has problems on here more and more. Will that cause deeper reflection? Probably not for many orgs, because soon some consultants will dream up a new brand of silver bullet to slay the immortal monster of organizational dysfunction and that's much more exciting.

Conway's Law is sorely overlooked. It really does have broad applicability in the industry, and sometimes you can use it to evaluate vendors better (read: this product is a bit haphazard...the vendor probably is also. Warning.)

Totally agree. The best succinct summary of Conway’s Law I've heard is “you ship your org chart.”

I like "the org chart is the asymptote," i.e. it's the best you could possibly do, and your reality will actually be worse. (see Casey Muratori)

Which is a good way to word it because if your org chart is screwy enough you won't ship at all.