[exelius]

Agree 100%. In fact, this is how I built my career -- I knew the tech ok, but realized that I was never going to have the type of influence I needed unless I got into the product side as well.

In the consulting world, we call this job "enterprise architecture". It does, in fact, pay very well: it requires someone with both a sharp business mind and comprehensive technical skills, and those are very difficult to find in one person. I personally am more of a "jack of all trades" type; but you can be a successful architect by focusing on specific technologies as well.

I honestly find that it's easier to take someone who's a hacker type, and teach them the business. You look at the business itself as a large, complex system and model your application development around that. But you also have to be a good enough technologist yourself so that you can tell your dev team when their designs don't match up to the business problem (this is a common problem when requirements are not clearly communicated).

A good architect is the person who understands both the business context and the technology implementation. You don't have to be in-the-weeds building the product, but often you do have to build quick POCs to prove out an approach before handing off the designs to development - so being able to code is a necessity IMO.