[enormousness]

We use architects for what you've described. It's a distinct technical track from developers and from team leaders. They're usually senior developers with outstanding experience in multiple technologies. They deal with technical design, specification and documentation. They sit in-between the product owner and the team in the story flow. The PO feeds the team with user stories and priorities, the architect fills in the technical spec, developers choose the implementation and provide the time estimates, QA uses the spec to test.

[gardenhedge]

Could you provide some more detail on what the architect does versus the developer? Is my example below along the right track?

e.g.

* PO says they want a way for customers to book an appointment on X product

* architect identifies where that change should be made, how it integrates with the rest of the system, identifies any non-functional requirements that need to be addressed, identifies any third party dependencies, what docs should be updated,

* dev writes and tests the code, supports through the testing, release and post-release phases