To prevent single points of failure, implement a "pilot/co-pilot" system. Regularly rotate employees, promoting the co-pilot to pilot and bringing in a new co-pilot. This develops well-rounded talent, breaks down knowledge silos, and makes the company anti-fragile, despite initial employee resistance to change.

The need for a Solution Architect often signals a failure in organizational design. It's a workaround for teams not communicating effectively, a problem better solved by applying principles from frameworks like Team Topologies to foster cross-team collaboration directly.

To understand an architect's true function, analyze their calendar. If it's dominated by "reviewing and approving" meetings, they are a gatekeeper. If it's filled with "enabling and teaching" activities like participating in backlog refinements, they are a valuable enabler helping teams move faster.

A valuable architect enables teams by coaching them through decisions, providing self-serve documentation, and offering multiple solutions. A detrimental architect becomes a gatekeeper, creating a bottleneck where all decisions require their personal approval, stifling team autonomy and speed.

A project's success equals its technical quality multiplied by team acceptance. Technologists often fail by engineering perfect solutions that nobody buys into or owns. An 80%-correct solution fiercely defended by the team will always outperform a "perfect" one that is ignored.

To gauge if an engineering team can move faster, listen for specific 'smells.' Constant complaints about broken builds, flaky tests, overly long processes for provisioning environments, and high friction when switching projects are clear signals of significant, addressable bottlenecks.

The biggest blind spot for new managers is the temptation to fix individual problems themselves (e.g., a piece of bad code). This doesn't scale. They must elevate their thinking to solve the system that creates the problems (e.g., why bad code is being written in the first place).

An architect's ultimate goal should be to work themselves out of a job. Success isn't being the indispensable decision-maker. It's creating systems, documentation, and team knowledge so robust that the teams no longer require their constant vigilance or approval.

PMs who complain about architect bottlenecks are often the cause. By failing to invite architects into the discovery phase and customer conversations, they prevent proactive collaboration. This forces architects to reactively gatekeep later, rather than co-creating solutions from the start.