Teams and organizational structure are other important aspects to consider when designing distributed systems, since, as of writing this book, software is developed by humans. Considering Conway's law, that the organization's communication structure will eventually leak into the constructed system, teams should be defined similarly to the applications in the system.

Or, in other words, it makes sense for a single application to be developed by only a single team. Depending on the responsibilities and sizes, a single team can potentially craft multiple applications.

Again, comparing to the project code structure, this is a similar approach as horizontal versus vertical module layering. Similar to business motivated module structures, teams are therefore organized vertically, representing the structure of the context map. For example, rather than having several expert teams on software architecture, development, or operations, there will be teams for car manufacture, assembly line, and order management.