An architect's guiding principles for leadership

Architects are leaders. We need to understand our business, our users, and our ecosystem. We need to effectively interact with our stakeholders, productively collaborate with design and product teams, and give direction and motivate our development teams. Achieving these goals requires much more than technical excellence.

Seth Dobbs (Bounteous) shares a primer on leadership for architects, focusing on guiding principles that are easy to learn and put into practice. Principles cover both inward focus (personal mastery) and external focus (effective interactions) and include topics such as vision, problem solving, ownership, and conflict.

Seth explores material he’s used to train team members ranging from developers and designers up into the executive level but focuses on core guiding principles specific to helping architects be more effective in their roles. Each principle will be presented first with a problem or anti-pattern, then the principle, and then examples of the principle in practice. This approach should be valuable whether you are new in a leadership role and looking to understand the “soft” skills required or have been leading for a while and want to formalize your thinking on leadership.

This session was recorded at the 2019 O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference in San Jose.