As you can see in the manifesto, Continuous Architecture is tighly linked to the product approach and it seemed natural to create the Product Architect role to anchor this paradigm change in architects' mindset.
Defining a role is always difficult as each company can have its own role / job definition or can have its perspective and specificities. We tried to describe the main activities we think a Product Architect should be doing. It’s perfectly fine if in your organization these activities are performed by another role.
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The product approach starts with understanding the end-user problems to solve them. The Product Architect should be working closely with Product Owners and Managers and be in touch with end users to learn and discover their day to day activities. Through this kwnowledge and intimacy, he/she will be able to design solutions to continuously add value for end users
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Understanding end user problems is definitively key but managing your product all along its life cycle (from ideation to end of life) is absolutely critical too. The way your product is used is going to guide its evolutions as the new features you need to integrate. The technical debt is also a good driver.
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Create and manage the Architecture Runway with the Fullstack architect: this runway will contain all the technical enablers you need to work on to support your product roadmap wether it’s to support your features, deal with a non functional requirements or simply to manage the product technical debt (obsolesence, attrition …). It’s absolutely vital that this runway is materialized in the product back log and that you, as a Product Architect, closely monitor how it’s being executed.
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System Engineering: consider the system in which your product is evolving as a whole and design your product accordingly with your Product Architect peers. It could mean contributing to “end to end” Architecture studies in which the integration strategy is defined between products. Special attention should be put on operability as failures from other products could have significant impacts on your product and specific measures have to be considered to protect the service availability.
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Architecture Decision: lead the collaboration between all actors in and external to the team to get consensus on architecture decisions.
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Product Architecture: Contribute to the architecture document describing among other thing the functional decisions, the applicative & data layer of your product.
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Promote Marketing Architecture: Support, explain, promote and communicate product evolutions and strategy.
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Skills and collaboration: Educate delivery teams in design and architecture consideration to develop their judgement and increase their autonomy.
We propose the below visual to recap these different activities and the other roles with which a product architect will be connected.
