To be a successful architect, you must learn to communicate with business people as requirements come, directly or indirectly, from them. Whether they're from your company or a customer, you should get to know the context of their business. For instance, you must know the following:
- What drives the business?
- What goals does the company have?
- What specific objectives will your product help to achieve?
Once you are aware of this, it will be much easier to establish a common ground with many people coming from management or executives, as well as gathering more specific requirements regarding your software. If the company cares about the privacy of its users, for instance, it can have a requirement to store as little data about its users as possible and to encrypt it using a key stored only on a user's device. Often, if such requirements come from the company culture, it will be too obvious for some employees to even articulate them. Knowing the context...