A common counter-example is when we start seeing (some) bugs and incidents as symptoms of organizational issues. This seems to get more visible with experience (less experience: "I screwed up" vs more experience: "this happened in a certain context, how can we prevent it from happening again?").
Conway's law is a brilliant observation but I think it's a much wider pattern: we build organizations and software at the same time, and they're inextricably linked.
In parallel to software design patterns, we have a bunch of organizational patterns and anti-patterns as well. SRE, agile methods, DevOps. Silos, CYA-ism, 10x developers, ...
Some examples of properties of an organization that directly impacts the properties of software:
- How well the organization embraces risk [0]
- Psychological safety[1]
- Hiring practices and diversity
- The ability of the individuals, teams, departments, etc in an organization to align and work towards the same goal
I'd love to hear some anecdotes of how code and products are directly impacted by these.
0: Risk-driven architecture seems like one attempt at making this explicit https://www.georgefairbanks.com/book/