Escaping the paradox of more

According to Don Norman, design is “an act of communication”: every object carries a message from the people who made it. Conway’s Law shows what shapes that message, as organizations inevitably design products that mirror their own communication structure.

Yorba has fallen victim to Conway’s Law in the past. Our product was designed to make less because we believe that less internet can make the internet more useful, more humane, and more fun for every one of our members. But our product doesn’t always communicate less and the reason is in our DNA.

The Built to Build Paradox

Yorba was bootstrapped out of a design cooperative called Ruca. We inherit many of our values and much of our talent from our parent, whose motto is “Built to Build.” We’re good at building. But do we have enough restraint to build less?

We have had plenty of situations this year where the same team is asked to both build more and build less simultaneously; as the CTO, I have pushed for fewer moving parts in the implementation as the design team comes up with another component. This is a team inconsistency.

I have also made sure to reduce the number of moving parts by pushing the work needed for complete functionality into the future phases (a.k.a. “technical debt”). This is an even worse internal inconsistency which creates the illusion of restraint. Making promises to do work in the future is easier than doing the work of creating smaller features today.

Our culture of building became the problem holding us back.

Build Small to Build Better

Yorba is a small startup with a sizable footprint across many dimensions. We have four distinct runtimes across three environments, our talent is spread across the world, and the product has a load of features.

These features help our members track the companies and organizations that ask for their time, money, and data. It took months to ship the components that surface, correlate, and display messy personal data. And in the end, our members have told us that the product is impressive but they don’t always know what to do next. In other words, we’re not communicating clearly enough.

We adopted the Shape Up process last year to help us lean into the strengths of our organization and mitigate our tendency to build more. If it’s showing up in the product, it’s because we’re shipping smaller features in smaller windows. For example, we recently started test driving a new data broker feature in production that took us three weeks to build. We did this through restraint coupled with the hard-earned knowledge about what’s really essential.

Melvin Conway might be right about how organizations tend to operate. But his law does not determine how organizations must operate.

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Image: Severin Roesen, Still Life: Flowers and Fruit, 1850-55, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 128 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain.