<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;ve been promoted to Architect. What do I need to learn/do to excel?</title><text>My company had some lateral movement which, somewhat surprisingly, resulted in me being promoted to &amp;quot;Lead Architect&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s just a fancy title because we don&amp;#x27;t have any other designated software architects. There was, in any case, technical responsibility that needed to be redistributed, so that&amp;#x27;s what happened, and titles shifted accordingly.&lt;p&gt;In the past, I had used my training budget for software architecture certifications, which was met positively by my team lead and management.&lt;p&gt;While I _wanted_ to take on that role _eventually_, I was surprised to have it happen so early. What are the things I need to learn ASAP? What things do I need to do? What should I study&amp;#x2F;read?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>KaiserPro</author><text>Congrats!&lt;p&gt;1) learn to say no&lt;p&gt;2) learn to make simple enforcable short, medium and longterm goals (ie, everyone must be on platform x by november)&lt;p&gt;3) learn to listen&lt;p&gt;4) learn to love small incremental changes rather than big bang&lt;p&gt;why say no? because you&amp;#x27;ll be bombarded by brilliant solutions. On their own will be great, but in your environment will be tech debt. Or you&amp;#x27;ll be asked to allow team x to use a new widget, instead of the old one. But then team z will want to use a different new widget to do the same thing.&lt;p&gt;Clear goals that we widely communicated allow normal people to make design decisions autonomously. It can really remove the need for constant daily updates and information overload (for you)&lt;p&gt;Some of the best insight into a product or thing will come from a junior whos only just joined. Make sure you have regular contact with all the teams, if only to steal ideas.&lt;p&gt;Large changes almost always fail. smaller incremental changes always feel less thrilling, but when you look back over a year, they will accomplish a lot more. Plus its far easier to course correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>To latch on to this comment, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;boringtechnology.club&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;boringtechnology.club&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; to be a really good resource; mostly the slides in the middle somewhere that explain that adding more technologies = cost. It&amp;#x27;s important to say no, to put a hold on people&amp;#x27;s enthusiasm for new tech in favor of sticking to a tech stack, and that adding more tech, or shifting tech, is very expensive. Rebuilding an application will likely cost more than the original application cost in the first place. Etc.&lt;p&gt;But I admit, it&amp;#x27;s a hard balance to find; you want to choose boring technology for your business, but for hiring you want to choose exciting, new technology because people generally don&amp;#x27;t want to work with boring tech when they&amp;#x27;re looking for a new job.&lt;p&gt;On that note, keep in mind that you will likely also be a project manager and responsible for hiring and &amp;#x2F; or indicating that your company needs to hire people. You have been empowered, it&amp;#x27;s up to you to push to your management to make investments in e.g. hiring, training, etc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;ve been promoted to Architect. What do I need to learn/do to excel?</title><text>My company had some lateral movement which, somewhat surprisingly, resulted in me being promoted to &amp;quot;Lead Architect&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s just a fancy title because we don&amp;#x27;t have any other designated software architects. There was, in any case, technical responsibility that needed to be redistributed, so that&amp;#x27;s what happened, and titles shifted accordingly.&lt;p&gt;In the past, I had used my training budget for software architecture certifications, which was met positively by my team lead and management.&lt;p&gt;While I _wanted_ to take on that role _eventually_, I was surprised to have it happen so early. What are the things I need to learn ASAP? What things do I need to do? What should I study&amp;#x2F;read?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>KaiserPro</author><text>Congrats!&lt;p&gt;1) learn to say no&lt;p&gt;2) learn to make simple enforcable short, medium and longterm goals (ie, everyone must be on platform x by november)&lt;p&gt;3) learn to listen&lt;p&gt;4) learn to love small incremental changes rather than big bang&lt;p&gt;why say no? because you&amp;#x27;ll be bombarded by brilliant solutions. On their own will be great, but in your environment will be tech debt. Or you&amp;#x27;ll be asked to allow team x to use a new widget, instead of the old one. But then team z will want to use a different new widget to do the same thing.&lt;p&gt;Clear goals that we widely communicated allow normal people to make design decisions autonomously. It can really remove the need for constant daily updates and information overload (for you)&lt;p&gt;Some of the best insight into a product or thing will come from a junior whos only just joined. Make sure you have regular contact with all the teams, if only to steal ideas.&lt;p&gt;Large changes almost always fail. smaller incremental changes always feel less thrilling, but when you look back over a year, they will accomplish a lot more. Plus its far easier to course correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>benjaminjosephw</author><text>Learning to love incremental change is great advice. The challenge that comes with that is being able to &amp;quot;sell&amp;quot; those changes.&lt;p&gt;Big Bang changes have obvious benefits but the individual incremental states often don&amp;#x27;t justify the change by themselves. You have to become really good at selling the overall vision while also keeping people focused on the short term objectives. Holding the two in balance is a really tricky thing to do but, I think, represents the core value of a good architect: they are the navigators who can describe the destination but can also describe the next turn to take to get us there.</text></comment>