Comment by maccard

Those roles exist but they’re really senior staff+ into director level roles (at a smaller org). The problem is that they’re really two roles bundled into one - discovery and development . You need to be aware of business impact, pain points, upcoming tech, your competitors, and you need to be able to execute to just the right level of finish.

The bad ones identify solutions that work for huge orgs and try to apply them to everyone and don’t implement them. This is your typical architecture astronaut. Or, they get bogged down in perfection and are massively hands on when they should have stopped long ago. Also your typical micromanaging vp of engineering.

But one or two good ones can be utterly enormous force multipliers.