People like to say Position XYZ don’t belong in Agile but they’re actually (and most of the time, unknowingly) talking about Scrum and how it has only Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team.
However, that is a misconception even withing Scrum. The Scrum Team itself define three specific accountabilities but not job titles. This means that any job title, regardless of how waterfall-ish that tile might sounds, can take any of the accountabilities (one at a time, of course).
Product Owner can be anyone who has expertise in the field of that product: sales executives, marketing leads, chef, music producer etc. As long as they can provide visions and maintain product backlog then they can be Product Owner.
Scrum Master can also be a Project Manager. There, I said it. As long as this Project Manager understand Scrum and can coach the team to adopt it then why not?
And the most popular one, the Developers. This Scrum term in addition to “cross-functional” unintentionally caused a lot of confusion throughout the years to the point that some people believe developers should train themselves until they’re able to do almost everything is the way to go. Actually these developers just need to be able to build the increment from start to finish by themselves without dependencies and that’s it. You can add people with any job title as long as they can cover that as a team.
With the above in mind, we can easily specify what architect will do in Scrum:
- As a Developer - This one is too easy. Skip.
- As a Product Owner - Architects are very fitting as Product Owners for tech enablement products like Cloud Services, Databases, PaaS etc.
- As a Stakeholder - These architects are not part of the Scrum Team and they are the source of non-functional requirements given to the Product Owner. Most of the time these will be Solution Architects who try to make sure a set of systems used in their solution are developed and integrated properly.
Personally, I’ve worked as a Scrum Master while having the job title Project Manager before and also have the chance to work as all 3 cases above. I can guarantee that this mindset work well when applying Scrum.