The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
One person, even a person with many years of experience, a giant in their field, a brilliant individual, can not be as productive as that same person would be if they were working together in a cooperative, collaborative effort with a team.
- Individuals have ideas. Teams have that many more ideas to build on.
- Individuals have a perspective. A team can provide a much broader, richer point of view from which to view a problem.
- Individuals make mistakes, have limitations. In a team, you have the opportunity to work together to overcome the limitations of any one individual.
It’s called synergy. The whole exceeds the sum of the parts.
But you don’t get that by taking a group of people and telling them what to do. To get synergy from a team, the team must be ultimately responsible for their own success or failure. If the team is simply doing what they are told to do, the one responsible for their success or failure is the one giving orders. That is why the Product Owner is a member of the team, and the team is responsible for architectural decisions. If you need the unity that having an architect brings, then let the architect be a part of the team, to help bring that unifying perspective without taking away individual accountability and contribution.