In this post (and its predecessor) David J Anderson speculates (in his Agile Management blog) on how Lean ideas and product architecture play against each other.
It's pretty obvious I think, that when you have a team of organistions working on a product, some of the decisions about the architecture and interfaces of the product are determined by the organisational structure of the team, and that a different set of partners working on the same problem would develop a different architecture, for management rather than technical reasons. This is entirely legitimate by the way, and working out the best route is part of the function of all technical managers. Sometimes the organisation will be shaped by the product, and sometimes vice versa.
Anderson's thoughts are directed toward Lean, or Agile development, and how that imparts further gradients onto the decision space.
