What Skills are Need by a Technical Architect

By
Stephen Choo Quan
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0
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You’ll need to focus on technical and leadership skills to excel in a technical leadership role involving global engagement, mentorship, and driving innovation. Here’s a step-by-step guide to preparing for this type of role:

1. Understand Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

  • Prepare to work with global teams:
    • Understand cultural and timezone differences when coordinating with global teams.
    • Develop skills in clear, asynchronous communication (e.g., through documentation, wikis).
    • Familiarize yourself with tools for global collaboration (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, etc.).
  • Key preparation:
    • Learn how to align technical designs with business objectives. For example:
      • How does a streaming platform improve operational efficiency?
      • How does a knowledge graph help the company gain insights from disparate data sources?
    • Be ready to lead discussions to bridge gaps between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

2. Provide Mentorship and Technical Leadership

  • Effective mentorship:
    • Build a structured approach to mentorship:
      • Help junior team members set learning goals.
      • Regularly review code or designs and provide constructive feedback.
      • Pair programming or problem-solving sessions to upskill team members.
    • Focus on emotional intelligence and active listening to understand mentees’ challenges.
  • Lead by example:
    • Stay hands-on to remain credible, but know when to delegate.
    • Share knowledge through team-wide sessions on graph databases, streaming architectures, etc.
  • Key preparation:
    • Identify key skills junior team members need and how you’ll help them grow.
    • Practice providing feedback in a constructive, actionable manner.

3. Drive Innovation and Ensure Best Practices

  • Innovation in Streaming and Graph Technologies:
    • Stay updated with the latest trends in streaming (e.g., Kafka Flink, Debezium) and graph technologies (e.g., property graphs, semantic graphs).
    • Introduce proofs of concept (POCs) to evaluate new tools and approaches.
    • Encourage the team to adopt novel solutions while balancing risks.
  • Best practices:
    • Develop and promote coding standards, design patterns, and deployment strategies.
    • Set up regular knowledge-sharing sessions to keep the team aligned on best practices.
    • Use retrospectives and post-mortems to refine processes.
  • Key preparation:
    • Be ready to showcase examples of how you’ve driven innovation in the past.
    • Know how to pitch new ideas to leadership by linking them to ROI or risk mitigation.
  • Question:
    • Describe when you introduced an innovative technology and how it impacted the team.

4. Leadership Style and Conflict Resolution

  • Adopt an inclusive leadership style:
    • Foster a culture of openness where ideas are freely shared.
    • Be adaptable to different workstyles and personalities, especially in global teams.
    • Actively seek input from all team members, ensuring no one is overlooked.
  • Conflict resolution:
    • Learn techniques for mediating disagreements, especially in diverse teams.
    • Keep the focus on the company’s objectives when resolving disputes.
  • Key preparation:
    • Think of examples where you led a team through a difficult situation.
    • Practice articulating your leadership philosophy and how it benefits teams.

5. Communicate Technical and Strategic Vision

  • Explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences:
    • Use analogies or simple visuals to bridge knowledge gaps.
    • Highlight how technical designs achieve business goals.
  • Set a long-term vision:
    • Define goals for team adoption of streaming/graph technologies.
    • Create a roadmap that includes technical milestones and success metrics.
  • Key preparation:
    • Be ready to describe how you align team goals with broader company objectives.
    • Practice delivering elevator pitches on complex technical ideas.
  • Question:
    • How do you inspire a team to buy into your technical vision?

6. Additional Preparation Strategies

  • Build strong examples:
    • Be ready to share specific stories about:
      • Leading global teams.
      • Mentoring junior team members.
      • Solving tough technical challenges while balancing stakeholder needs.
  • Stay current on technology trends:
    • Prepare to discuss industry trends in real-time analytics, graph databases, and IIoT.
  • Show measurable impact:
    • Highlight metrics from past leadership roles (e.g., “Improved team productivity by 30% by introducing CI/CD pipelines”).

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