Mission 🙏

To envision and plan innovative, high-quality solutions that solve our clients’ problems and exceed their expectations.

Definition of Success 📈

Improved Profitability

Improve project profit margins by at least 10% per year by finding efficient and effective ways to deliver our work

Consolidated Technology Stacks

Continually consolidate tools so that every year, we reduce the amount of diversity within our tech stacks (2024 target: 25% reduction)

Efficient Design-to-Development Pipeline

Reduce average development build times by implementing automated design-to-development tools. (2024 target: 10% reduction)

Key Responsibilities 💪

• Collaborate closely with strategists at the inception of a project to envision innovative and strategically-aligned solutions, along with accurate and safe estimates.
• Make the critical decisions about how we build websites.
• Find and implement tools and methods to optimize design and development efficiency, aiming to significantly reduce developers' time spent on the project while ensuring the highest quality outcomes.
• Ensure the quality of our design work, steering the design direction of every new project while collaborating closely with our talented designers to meticulously refine concepts, ensuring they align seamlessly with our elevated standards of excellence.
• Ensure our development practices are effective, efficient, and user-centric.
• Manage key designers and developers, providing direct guidance and mentorship to help them grow and meet our standards.

Not Responsibilities

The Chief Solutions Architect is not expected to:

• 🚫 Act as a strategist. Strategists will initially meet with clients to help determine their needs and then pull in the CSA to determine a production plan, project estimates and resourcing.
• 🚫 Create and manage tasks in Asana. It is the PM’s responsibility to work with the CSA to determine what work needs to get done and get that into actionable tasks. The CSA will, however, have to provide technical direction in tasks.
• 🚫 Take the lead on sales. However, the CSA may be involved in sales conversations to provide perspective on what we would build for a client.

Tier Definitions

<aside> 🎁 This is a new methodology for us to figure out which tier someone falls into. Managers and reports should “feel out” where someone sits in this rubric by choosing the description that best represents the person. The person doesn’t have to match every sentence of the description, but the tier chosen should be the most accurate to their status and skillset.

</aside>

L1

The L1 CSA can handle all the core responsibilities effectively for many types of project, but requires continuous support and help from executive leaders. There may be large project types they are not capable of creating solutions for. Their plans may not be fully optimal and their estimates may be significantly off and require substantial revision from strategists. The L1 CSA does not have team management responsibilities.

L2

The L2 CSA can handle more types of projects with less support. Their plans are solid and tend to work out. They manage at least one Core Team member. They do a good job establishing design and development standards and communicating them to the team.

L3