Structural Friction: A metric for human coordination cost

I was leading a team and everything felt slow. Everyone was busy, but shipping features was still very slow. We tracked velocity and story points, but those metrics don't even care about how good a business is doing or the cost of development, so I realized they were useless to me.

We had a clean architecture (in theory), but it was strangling us with coordination requirements. Every minor feature change required a sync meeting across multiple teams and changes usually propagated to other teams as well. We were spending more time on the communication and architectural overhead than the actual engineering work.

I stopped measuring velocity and started measuring Structural Friction. I defined it as the total human hours spent on coordination tasks (namely meetings, design, development in foreign modules) relative to the actual hours spent on high-impact code. The number was horrifying.

I had to modularize every module so domain data was no longer leaked. This was essential so changes within that module would never require coordination meetings or work in other modules.

My team’s output tripled in three months. Structural friction is an architectural feature that you must actively optimize to keep low. If your architecture forces you to coordinate (either in tech, in meetings, or both), it's flawed. Eliminate the need for coordination, and you eliminate the waste.