Learning Soft Skills to Become a Better Solution Architect

In the previous chapters, you learned how a solution architect needs to accommodate all stakeholders' needs. Even if the solution architect's role is technical, they need to work across the organization, from senior management to the development team. To be a successful solution architect, soft skills are essential and critical factors.

Solution architects should keep themselves up to date with current technology trends, keep evolving their knowledge, and always be curious to learn new things. You can become a better solution architect by applying continuous learning. In this chapter, you will learn about methods to learn new technologies and how to share and contribute back to the technical community.

Solution architects need to define and present an overall technical strategy to address business concerns. They need to work across business and technical teams to negotiate the best solution, which requires...

Acquiring pre-sales skills

Pre-sales is a critical phase for complex technology procurement, whereby the customer collects detailed information to make a buying decision. In the customer organization, a solution architect is involved in the pre-sales cycle to validate technology and infrastructure resources from various vendors. In the vendor organization, the solution architect needs to respond to customers' requests for proposals (RFPs) and present a potential solution to acquire new business for an organization. Pre-sales requires a unique skill set that combines strong technical knowledge with soft skills, including the following:

• Communication and negotiation skills: Solution architects need to have excellent communication skills to engage the customer with the correct and latest details. Presenting precise details of the solution and industry relevance helps customers understand how your solution can address their business concerns. Solution architects work as...

Presenting to C-level executives

A solution architect needs to handle various challenges from a technical and business perspective. However, one of the most challenging tasks could be to get executive buy-in. Senior executives such as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and Chief Information Officer (CIO) are regarded as C-level as they have a tight schedule and need to make lots of high-impact decisions. As a solution architect, you may have lots of details to present, but your C-level meetings are very time-bound. Here, a solution architect needs to get the maximum value out of their meeting in the allotted time slot.

The primary question is: How do we get senior executives' attention and support in a limited time? Often, during any presentation, people tend to put a summary slide at the end, while, in the case of executive meetings, your time may further reduce as per their priority and agenda. The key to an...

Taking ownership and accountability

Taking ownership and positioning yourself as a leader helps you to win trust with accountability. Ownership doesn't mean that you need to execute things alone; it is more about taking new initiatives and holding on to them as it is your organization. You can have ideas that can benefit your organization in terms of productivity, agility, cost savings, and increasing the customer base. Sometimes, you may not have the time or resources to execute your idea, but you should always try to bring it forward as a new initiative and engage others for execution.

Accountability is about taking responsibility to drive the outcome. Ownership and accountability go hand in hand, where you are creating initiative and working on getting the result. People can trust you to execute any job and drive results. Accountability helps you build trust with your customers and team, which ultimately results in a better work environment and achieving a goal.

As...

Defining strategy execution with objectives and key results

Strategy execution is complex and challenging. Excelling in strategy execution is essential for realizing the organizational vision, mission, and goals. The idea needs to be converted into actionable elements to keep teams aligned and everyone moving in the same direction. Goal setting and managing goals are some of the best-established ways to get things done.

Objective Key Results (OKRs) are principles and practices (vision and execution) of goal setting. OKR is a strategy management system that focuses on strategy execution. It is a simple framework that lets you define the organization's primary strategy and its priorities. Objectives are the principles, and key results are the practice—it is a what and how of organizational vision. OKRs are based on four superpowers, as illustrated in the following diagram:

Figure 19.1: Superpowers of OKRs

OKRs' superpowers include the following:

...

Thinking big

Solution architects should have the ability to see the big picture and think ahead. A solution architect creates a foundation upon which the team puts building blocks and launches the product. Thinking big is one of the critical skills that solution architects should possess to think about the long-term sustainability of an application. Thinking big doesn't mean you need to make a very unrealistic goal. Your goal should be big enough to challenge you and bring you out of your comfort zone. Thinking big is critical for success at both a personal and an organizational level.

You should never doubt your capability while thinking big. Initially, it may seem challenging to achieve, but you will find the way as you start working toward the goal. Believe in yourself, and you will notice that others start supporting and believing in you. Thinking big helps to inspire people around you to become a part of your success. Set up long-term goals, such as where you want to...

Being flexible and adaptable

Adaptability and flexibility go hand in hand, and you need to be flexible to adapt to the new environment, working culture, and technology. Adaptability means you are always open to new ideas and to working with the team. Teams may adopt a process and technology that is best suited for them. As a solution architect, you need to be flexible in accommodating team requirements during solution design.

For example, in a microservices architecture, each service communicates via a standard RESTful API over the HTTP protocol. Different teams may choose to write code in a different language or tool of their choice, such as Python, Java, Node.js, or C#. The only requirement is that teams need to expose their APIs securely so that the entire system can build upon utilizing them.

You need a different mindset and perspective to look into the problem to get a more innovative solution. Encouraging teams to fail fast and innovate helps an organization to be competitive...

Design thinking

A solution architect has the primary role of system design, which makes design thinking an essential skill. Design thinking is one of the most successful approaches adopted across industries to solve a challenging and unclear problem. Design thinking helps you to look at problems and solutions from a different perspective, which you might not have considered in the first instance. Design thinking is more focused on delivering results by providing a solution-based approach to solve the problem. It helps to question the problem, solution, and associated risk, to come up with the most optimized strategy.

Design thinking helps you redefine problems in a more human-centric way by putting yourself in the place of end users and customers. The following diagram illustrates the primary principles of design thinking:

Figure 19.2: Principles of design thinking

The following points are some design-thinking principles:

• Emphasis on people: Collect feedback...

Being a builder by engaging in coding hands-on

A solution architect is a builder who learns by doing. A prototype is worth a thousand pictures. It helps to reduce miscommunication and ideate solutions. Presenting a POC and prototyping is an integral part of the solution architect's role.

Prototyping is the pre-solution phase, which helps to deepen your understanding of the application design and user. It helps you to think and build multiple solution paths. With the testing of the prototype, you can refine your solution and inspire others, such as teams, customers, and investors, by demoing your vision.

A solution architect is a technical leader who works closely with the development team. In the empowered agile team of developers, a solution architect needs to show a piece of code as a POC, in addition to a PowerPoint presentation. A solution architect doesn't need to be part of the development team, but works collaboratively to convey the solution to the dev team...

Becoming better with continuous learning

Solution architects need to continually absorb new knowledge and enhance their skill set to help the organization make better decisions. Continuous learning keeps your skill set relevant and builds confidence. It opens up your mind and changes prospects. Learning could be challenging with a full-time job and a busy family life. Continuous learning is about developing the habit of always learning something new, whereby you have to be motivated and disciplined. You first need to set up learning goals and apply effective time management to achieve them. This often slips through the net when you get busy with regular daily work.

Everyone has their style of learning. Some people may like formal education; some may read books; others may want to listen to and watch tutorials. You need to find the learning style that is most effective for you and suited to your lifestyle. For example, you can choose to listen to audiobooks and tutorials when commuting...

Being a mentor to others

Mentoring is about helping others and setting them up for success based on your learning and experience. It is an effective way to develop leaders by having one-to-one mentor/mentee relationships. To be a good mentor, you need to establish an informal communication style where the mentee can develop a comfort zone. The mentee can seek advice in multiple areas such as career development, or personal aspects such as work-life balance. You should do an informal needs assessment and set up mutual goals and expectations.

Mentorship is more about listening. Sometimes, people need someone to listen to them and advise as required. You should listen carefully first and understand their point of view.

Help them to make their own decisions as this will make them feel more accomplished. As a good mentor, when advising for a career, you need to be open to advise what the best fit for the mentee is, even if it may not necessarily be the best fit for the company...

Becoming a technology evangelist and thought leader

Technology evangelism is about being an expert to advocate technology and your product. Some organizations with an extensive product base roll out a separate technology evangelist role. Still, often, a solution architect needs to assume the role of an evangelist as part of their job. As a technology evangelist, you need to be aware of current technology trends to understand real-world problems and advocate your technology to solve their business concerns.

Technology evangelism involves participating in an industry conference as a public speaker and promoting your respective platform. It allows you to become a thought leader and an influencer, which can help the organization increase its platform and product adoption. Public speaking is one of the critical skills required for a solution architect to interreact on various public platforms and present in front of a large audience.

An evangelist also creates and publishes content...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the various soft skills required for a solution architect to be successful. A solution architect needs to have pre-sales skills such as negotiation, communication, problem solving, and listening, which help them support the organization's pre-sales cycle, such as with the RFP. You learned about the presentation skills required for executive conversations and buy-in.

You learned about the strategic understanding that a solution architect should define key objectives and results for an organization. To execute at various levels, solution architects should have the ability to think big and be flexible and adaptable. You learned details about solution architects taking ownership and being accountable for their actions.

A solution architect's role has the primary responsibility of architecture design. You learned about design thinking, with its principles and phases. You also learned about the importance of continuous learning...