I’m not an architect, but used to closely work with one and it was a pleasure.
The key role that our architect played that brought immense value to us was being the integrator of teams. Teams had a high level of autonomy when it comes to implementation details which meant there could easily be “reinventions”, incompatibilities, and even narrow minded choices. Our Architect always had the big picture view across teams, almost always sat in our feature grooming sessions with valuable inputs, worked closely with product owners who bring in feature requests that may need integration of multiple services etc.
Above all, he was very active, and approachable to all teams instead of hiding behind barriers and occasionally bringing out UML diagrams. Several times, when we were debating which technical choice to make, held chime in with valuable points about what would be better if we were to integrate with another service, or something like “that team did this because blah, which might be relevant to you”.
The key role that our architect played that brought immense value to us was being the integrator of teams. Teams had a high level of autonomy when it comes to implementation details which meant there could easily be “reinventions”, incompatibilities, and even narrow minded choices. Our Architect always had the big picture view across teams, almost always sat in our feature grooming sessions with valuable inputs, worked closely with product owners who bring in feature requests that may need integration of multiple services etc.
Above all, he was very active, and approachable to all teams instead of hiding behind barriers and occasionally bringing out UML diagrams. Several times, when we were debating which technical choice to make, held chime in with valuable points about what would be better if we were to integrate with another service, or something like “that team did this because blah, which might be relevant to you”.