Understanding the requirements is crucial for the success of any project. It involves gathering and analyzing the needs, goals, and constraints of stakeholders, including clients, end-users, and team members. By understanding the requirements, you can ensure that the project meets its objectives, delivers value to stakeholders, and aligns with business goals. It also helps in making informed decisions, setting realistic expectations, and managing risks effectively.

During requirements, knowing the long-term strategic (a.k.a future-state architecture) is also important. So that teams can begin (or know when to begin) making progress towards implementing that future state solution. Otherwise things can get messy as the design drifts way off from the desired future state. Most companies have a need to deliver something early/quickly to deliver the business value. And that can involve short-term tactical solutions which can sometimes work for a short while, but not long-term. So know your current requirements, with an idea of your future state vision.

Choosing the appropriate architecture style is critical for the success of a project. It involves selecting the best-suited architectural pattern to meet the project's requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, and performance. Common architecture styles include monolithic, microservices, serverless, and event-driven. Each style has its own advantages and trade-offs, and the choice depends on factors like the project's complexity, team's expertise, and future scalability needs. By choosing the right architecture style, you can ensure that the project is well-structured, scalable, and meets the desired performance goals.

understand the project's structure, dependencies, and how the various parts of the system work together. It involves identifying the key components of the project, such as databases, APIs, servers, and client applications, and defining the roles and responsibilities of each component. It also involves defining how these components interact with each other, including how data flows through the system, how components communicate with each other, and how they support business processes. By clearly defining the components and interactions of a project's technical architecture, you can ensure that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of the project's structure and how it supports business goals.

When selecting technologies and tools for a project, it's essential to evaluate their suitability, compatibility, and availability. Technologies, such as Java or AWS, provide the functionality and standards for your system, while tools, like IDEs or CI/CD pipelines, support its development, testing, deployment, and monitoring. By choosing the right technologies and tools, you can ensure that your project is efficient, scalable, and aligned with your business goals.

I have had tremendous success in this space by creating a "technology vision" presentation within PPT. The goal of this is to speak to the requirements, stories, technology, and implementation in very simple terms. The key to this is to break down (or summarize; depending on the complexity) the initiative into components that make sense to the stakeholders using language that is easy to follow for any audience. For example: Initiative: Use "AI" as a to determine the optimal flow of material. Vision: FIRST speak to the human interaction, what they see and a roll-up (again in simple terms) of what the system is evaluating. Have deeper backup slides, but for the sake of the stakeholder, keep the vision focused on tangible elements ...

Align architecture with organizational structure (Conway's Law) Plan for evolutionary architecture, design for replaceability Practice continuous architecture - evolve decisions as you learn Automate compliance with architecture principles/standards (e.g. via fitness functions, chaos engineering) Foster an architecture guild/chapter to share knowledge and best practices across teams Conduct regular architecture reviews to identify risks, improvements, and simplifications