Customer Obsession's for an Architect

 As an Architects I am always solving problems on everyday basis, little do I get a chance to think about this topic. Let's come to the basics who is the customer for the architect. If I am working on the website, it easy to identify. If I am UX person, I am already there. But who is the customer for an architect. Most times I am working on the internals like a mechanic and no one gets to see what has gone on the inside.

Like any projects there are many stakeholders, so for the architect, it is business or the product owner, then comes the technology team and there are other like project sponsor, project manager, etc. Most importantly the product is for someone or to solve some use case. I think that is the most important customer, the final user or the system that is going to be using it. This where the obsession needs to be.

I am currently working on a new user case that is going to implement a feature called ZRF, will add more details when the products is live. This feature does not have much impact from system point of view, I know the middleware that is going to make the call the vendor, the details of the Microservice integration needs to be worked out, but I know what the request and response is going to be and the details will be pass to the web application that is going to be consuming it. I was telling my product manager, the real win in this use case is for everyone in the team to buy into this idea and see how they can deliver the best experience to the customer.

The real challenge in this use case is how to present the information and this list is a constant that needs to be store on the device cache for 24 hours, if the user logs in again in 24 hours, just use the data that was already fetched. Another thing that adds to this complexity, the user can add new items or remove items that will impact my list and this has to be compared to data that was cached and that needs to be updated too. 

As an architect, my role would end once I work on the pipeline, and just provide the suggestion to the dev team on the standards and let them figure it out. If  I were a developer, I would have just wanted the architect to give me the API to call, and I would figure it out. Now the team has grown, there is no one lead to take charge. I being who I am needs to be there fully involved to see how I can make the customer experience better. I and my Product Manager, who is equally crazy as I am talk multiple hours on these, on how to present this information, how do we remain compliant and save additional call to the back end system or to the vendor for further information. At this moment the project is still evolving, so cannot add more details yet, but would love to someday. 

Another project there is lot of work happening on the middleware, not much on the web app, customer enters the application and submits. We store the data, nothing is processed at the moment. There are lot of steps that happen behind the scene, the idea is make sure these all are done seamlessly. For me customer obsession, is how finetuned can make these steps, If I can cut a SQL, or extra service call or a check, or add a step to remove a failure point that is a win here. I have work and rework these steps many times and have to do a multiple walk through with teams. I want them to be sold to the same vision and if everyone is comfortable and agrees that this the best we can do time, that would be a product that has come out of passion for customer.