Small, decoupled teams with clear business boundaries and stable communication pathways reduce cognitive load and let organizations behave like a living organism, aligning architecture with people first.
The piece argues that you must treat the organization as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, putting people before technology. By adopting a team-sized architecture, you design boundaries around business context and user needs instead of letting the code dictate structure.
Small, decoupled teams keep intrinsic cognitive load low and eliminate extraneous load. When services need to be deployed independently, the article says you must decouple them and give each team clear ownership of a bounded context, which simplifies testing and reduces coordination overhead.
Stable, well-defined communication pathways between teams turn the organization into an organism that can sense signals across its parts. This enables rapid feedback loops, quicker detection of emerging problems, and more effective alignment with market demands.
The author warns against the hidden distributed monolith-multiple services that still require coordinated changes. By shrinking teams and aligning them with clear business boundaries, you avoid that trap and create a truly modular architecture that scales.
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