When organisations hire for architecture roles they always look for extremely technical and knowledgeable people. While it is true that you need deep technical knowledge to set up large-scale architecture outlines, it’s all worthless if you can’t convince people to actually implement it.

Know your decision makers

Often when you are pitching ideas it’s not the higher-ups that fully decide. These people lean on the expertise of the more hands-on people. If you can convince these people, you also convince the higher ups. The nice thing about this approach is that you don’t have to wait 2 weeks for a meeting with them. They are typically easier approachable. The hard part is, however, figuring out who they are.

Understanding the needs

To do a decent proposal, you need to understand your playing field. Every project has their impacted groups. Some get less work, others might have to adapt their work. Some like it, others hate it. An important part of this is understanding what these groups find important.

Some project managers for example only care about the scope of the project. If you can make the work more predictable or create “gates” in the project, they will gladly support you.

Engineers, on the other hand will be very concerned for their environment. Introducing big rewrites and quick hacks to meet a deadline will not be appreciated. If you can however calculate in a rewrite of a messy part that you can maybe offload to a different system, you’ll have all the excitement you’re ever going to need.

As you can see, even on a project basis, you have different people looking at the same work in very different contexts. Keeping these contexts in mind is very important while drawing up your plans.

Preparing your arguments

When I work on architecture I always play devil’s advocate. Even if I’m 100% sure that an approach is the best one, I’ll always try to argue against it. My goal is to have better counterarguments than the opposition can think of.

Sometimes I also weave them into the conversation early. “I know this looks like I’m trying to slow down the sprint. I’m not. I’m trying to ensure we don’t have to rewrite this in Q4”.

The architect as a diplomat

A lot of architecture is actually more social and political than most people think. You often get further with having coffee with the right people than writing very deep design documents.

Many developers go for architecture roles because they don’t want to manage teams. They just want to focus on the technical stuff. Well, I personally think that you have to do way more managing of people in an architecture role compared to a team lead role.