Domain 6: Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle

Objectives

What you’ll be able to do

Run structured discovery and requirement gathering
Communicate decisions and trade-offs per audience
Align expectations and negotiate honest SLAs
Document architectures for the people who inherit them
Manage the full lifecycle: discovery to iteration

The story

Three languages, one decision

The claims system needed a second model tier — complex cases deserved deeper reasoning, at four times the cost. Meera had one decision to defend and three rooms to defend it in. In the boardroom, she never said "model." She said: "Complex claims are 9% of volume and 80% of our legal exposure. This spends money exactly where the risk lives." The CFO nodded at a fuel gauge, not a transformer.

With legal, the same decision wore different clothes: "Every complex-case decision will carry deeper reasoning and a full citation trail — here's what that means for discoverability." And with the adjusters, who feared being replaced: "The routine flood you hate goes to the machine. The judgment calls that need twenty years of experience — those come to you, with better preparation."

Same architecture. Three translations. "A decision that isn't understood," she told Theo afterward, "gets re-litigated forever. Translation is how a decision becomes final." Then she wrote it all down in an ADR — because the fourth audience is whoever holds this system in three years, and they weren't in any of the rooms.

Metaphor map

Images that stick

Concept	Image	Why it sticks
The architect	The interpreter at the summit	Business and engineering speak different native tongues. Whoever translates faithfully holds the room.
Discovery	Archaeology	The request is the surface. The requirement is buried under it — dig with questions, brush gently, date everything.
Trade-off talk	The pilot’s briefing	Passengers don’t need aerodynamics. They need the route, the weather, and what happens if it changes.
SLA	The contract on the wall	A promise with numbers, dates, and a plan for the misses. Everything else is a mood.
Documentation	The map for the next traveler	ADRs, runbooks, baselines — drawn for someone who has never met you and can’t call you.
Lifecycle	Seasons	Launch is one day; the system lives for years. Monitoring feeds discovery, and the loop begins again.

Discovery

Discovery interview simulator

A stakeholder speaks. Choose the question a working architect asks next — then see why.

Vp Of Operations, First Meeting

They say: We want an AI chatbot. Everyone has one now.
Best reply: “What outcome would make this project a success a year from now?”
Why: Exactly. Anchor on the outcome, not the artifact. "A chatbot" is a solution someone saw at a conference; the outcome is what you’ll actually be measured against.

Same Meeting, Ten Minutes Later

They say: Fine — the real problem is our agents spend hours answering the same questions.
Best reply: “Which questions, how many per day, and where do the answers live today?”
Why: The archaeologist’s question: volume, shape, and data source in one stroke. The answers determine pattern, model tier, and retrieval design — this is requirements becoming architecture.

Executive Sponsor, Closing

They say: One condition — it has to be 100% accurate. We can’t afford mistakes.
Best reply: “Let’s define what a mistake costs, target a measured accuracy on real cases, and route the highest-stakes ones to human review.”
Why: The architect’s move: replace an impossible absolute with a measurable target plus a safety design. The sponsor gets something stronger than 100% — a system with a plan for its own errors.

Trade-off translator

One decision, four languages

The decision: "Route complex cases to a more capable, 4× more expensive model tier, with human review on denials." Pick who's across the table.

CFO

Money in, risk out. Unit economics, not architecture. The CFO hears every technical word as either a cost or an excuse.

Never say: model tier, tokens, inference
Say this: Complex claims are 9% of volume but 80% of our legal exposure. This routes four times the analysis budget to exactly those cases — total spend rises 12%, projected disputed-claim losses fall by more than that alone.

General Counsel

Defensibility. Can every decision be reconstructed, cited, and defended in front of a regulator or a court — years later?

Never say: black box, the AI decides, roughly
Say this: Every complex case gets deeper reasoning with a full citation trail — which regulation, which policy clause, which precedent. Denials always carry a named human signature. If we’re ever asked "why", the answer is one query away.

Head of Support

Their people. Workload, morale, and the quiet fear in every AI meeting: are you automating my team out of a job?

Never say: headcount efficiency, replace, automation rate
Say this: The repetitive flood — status checks, routine approvals — goes to the machine. What comes to your team is the work that actually needs twenty years of judgment, arriving pre-researched. Your seniors become the escalation tier, not the paperwork tier.

CTO

Now you can speak architecture — but the CTO’s real questions are operational: failure modes, rollback, monitoring, and who gets paged.

Never say: it just works, trust me, temporary workaround
Say this: A router classifies complexity and sends the top decile to the capable tier; both paths share one eval harness and one trace pipeline. If tier-two degrades, we fail over to tier-one plus mandatory human review — same SLA, higher review load, zero downtime.

Lifecycle

Five phases, one loop

PHASE 1 Discovery

Problems, users, data, constraints, success measures — before any design.

PHASE 2 Design

Architecture, pattern, model, and governance choices — each traced to a requirement, captured in ADRs.

PHASE 3 Handoff

Diagrams, runbooks, eval baselines, limitations — understanding transferred, not just access.

PHASE 4 Monitoring

SLA dashboards, drift alerts, feedback loops with real users and stakeholders.

PHASE 5 Iteration

What monitoring reveals becomes the next discovery. The loop is the lifecycle.

Storyboard

The film, shot by shot

01

8s

Two delegations enter the room. Neither speaks the other’s language.

Camerasymmetrical wide shot of a long table, suits on one side, terminals on the other

Motionspeech bubbles rise as incompatible shapes — circles versus angular brackets — colliding mid-air

Soundoverlapping murmur in two "languages", diplomatic room tone

02

10s

Between them sits one chair. The interpreter’s.

Cameraslow push-in on the empty center chair, shallow depth of field

Motioncolliding bubbles pause mid-air; light gathers on the chair; a figure sits

Soundmurmur fades, chair slide, single clear tone

03

12s

"We want a chatbot," says the surface. The interpreter picks up a brush and starts to dig.

Cameramatch cut: the boardroom table becomes an archaeological dig site, top-down

Motionthe word CHATBOT sits in sand; brushstrokes reveal strata beneath: HOURS LOST, SAME QUESTIONS, KNOWLEDGE SCATTERED

Soundbrush sweeps, sand trickle, discovery chime per layer

04

12s

One decision, four rooms. Watch it change clothes without changing shape.

Cameralateral dolly through four doorways in one continuous move

Motionthe same glowing polyhedron passes door to door, reskinning: ledger texture, legal seal, team roster, system diagram

Soundfour musical variations of one motif

05

10s

"One hundred percent," demands the sponsor. The interpreter doesn’t flinch — she reframes.

Cameratense two-shot, then rack focus to a contract materializing between them

Motionthe impossible "100%" dissolves into a measured gauge: 96%, monthly, human-gated — signatures land

Soundheld breath, gauge tick settling, pen scratch ×2

06

10s

And for the person who inherits all this in three years — a map, so they never have to find us.

Cameracrane up from the signed table; documents fold into a glowing atlas on a shelf marked ADR

Motiondiagrams, runbooks, baselines slot into the atlas; a future figure lifts it and nods

Soundpaper folds, shelf slide, warm resolve; title card

Flashcards

Recall drill

Select a card to reveal the answer.

Quiz

Exam drill

Question 1

In the first discovery meeting, a stakeholder says: "We need an agentic AI platform with RAG and MCP." What is the architect’s best response?

Question 2

A sponsor demands a guarantee of perfect accuracy before approving launch. The architecturally sound response is to:

Question 3

Your team hands a production Claude system to a client’s engineering group. Which handoff package is complete?

Revision

Close your eyes and remember

Dig for outcomes, not features. Translate every trade-off into the listener's language. Promise numbers, never perfection. And write for the person who inherits the system — they're the audience that matters longest.

Domain 6 · 14% of your exam

Next: Domain 7

The best architectureever explained badlylost to a mediocre one explained well.