[fatnoah]

>But mostly I just needed to get used to the act of sitting down, drafting, and writing a design document. I also needed to encourage the team to have a bit of discipline and design before coding.

In the architect role, I write a lot of documents as well, but mostly for the purposes of: 1) Organizing my own thoughts 2) Summarizing for the benefits of upper management 3) Influencing discussions with peers 4) To serve as a record that someone interested can refer to

The documents are generally higher-level and tailored to the audience that I intend to read it. In very rare (none?) cases am I ever getting detailed enough to get to this is exactly how we're doing it, since what I'm really trying to do is to set the overall direction and goals in pursuit of strategic objectives. I let the experts in individual domains handle the details. The entire process is also iterative. I build consensus through synchronous, high-level discussions ("wouldn't it be great if") and, through those, get a handle on the challenges faced by various orgs. I then try to coalesce that into something that benefits each org in some way, while still serving the overall objectives (developer velocity, flexible infra, performance, etc). My goal is to influence & inspire rather than dictate and own.