Architecture Review

Challenge a design without owning the team’s roadmap: clarify forces (scale, money, people, regulation), surface risks, and leave decisions traceable—usually as an ADR or review notes.

Inputs you need (ask early)

• Goal and non-goals; users and SLAs; constraints (budget, deadline, org skills).
• Current pain—latency, incidents, cost, velocity—not buzzwords.
• Alternatives considered, even if rough.

Review lens (pick what fits)

• Failure: blast radius, partial outages, data loss, replay.
• Ops: deploy model, rollbacks, observability, on-call load.
• Change: team size, Conway’s law, long-term ownership.
• Security: trust boundaries, secrets, supply chain—at architecture depth, not a full pentest.

Output shape

• Summary of the proposal in your own words (catches misunderstandings).
• Top risks with severity; mitigations or experiments.
• Open questions for the team—not a pretend-final design.

Not this

• Replacing the team’s product judgment; rubber-stamping; 20-page templates nobody reads.

Done when

• The team can explain what they decided, why, and what would falsify the choice later.