Top-down strategy. The other common model is where a few senior folks (typically either a CTO or a handful of people who make up an architecture group) make most of the decisions for the whole org. But Larson says these aren’t always the best for every decision. “Chief architects and CTOs are pretty inefficient in terms of actually getting enough context in their heads to make a good decision on any given point,” he says. “Almost every architecture group turns into a committee where they have to balance their different perspectives, making them slow or inelegant. It’s rarely true that a committee gets the best decision, though the upside is it does at least bring all the context into the room.”