Pre-sales Solutions Architecture Lead

**Purpose & Mission**:
To establish global _pre-sales architecture_ standards and processes, the early-stage design and validation of client solutions that enable confident, fast, and high-quality pre-sales.
The goal is to make pre-sales architecture a shared responsibility across senior technical staff and a recognised growth path for consultants.

To create a structured, collaborative, and scalable approach to pre-architecture that:

- Improves how we engage with clients in early solution design
- Develops repeatable methods, processes, and reusable assets (so pre-sales is repeatable, lower effort, more accurate)
- Connects** pre-sales architects across all regions into one active group.**

**Core difference vs the current model**:

- ** Pre-sales architecture is part of seniority, not a favour**
Starting at Lead Consultant, contributing to pre-sales architecture and client pre-sales work is an expected element of seniority. Establish that participation in pre-architecture is a requirement for progression from Lead to higher levels.
- ** Pre-sales architecture is structured and measurable**
Logged in Ruddr, planned, and visible to leadership — not ad-hoc extra effort. Always with a code.
- ** Consistency**
Standardisation of diagramming, notation, and architectural patterns ensures every pre-sales engagement looks and feels professional, similar, regardless of region.
- ** Group**
The pre-sales architecture group connects experts globally, sharing learnings, reusable content, and proven approaches.

**Key Responsibilities of the Pre-Sales Architecture Lead**:
**1.** Build, Lead, and Coordinate the Global Pre-Sales Architecture group**:

- Bring together architects from the Americas, EMEA, and the UK under one shared working model
- Run recurring syncs to review new opportunities, lessons learned, and reusable patterns
- Engage consultants across levels to contribute to pre-sales activities
- Define how to enforce the structure and have people engaged (so everyone is participating, not necessarily one person doing all the pre-sales work)
- ie, each pre-sales architect can step out from the billable engagement to do pre-sales work. To be coordinated with some advance with the PM/Delivery lead

**2. Define and Roll Out a Standard Pre-Sales Architecture Process**:

- (Primary objective for the first 3 months)_
- Design and document a standard pre-sales architecture process covering
- Opportunity qualification, scoping, and estimation
- Client discovery and validation steps
- Deliverable standards and handoffs to Sales or Delivery
- Create standard templates for proposals, discovery notes, and architecture outlines.
- Pilot the process with selected sales teams and refine based on outcomes
- Define and enforce common diagramming and notation standards**( ie, standardised visual style, icons, and layer structure for solution diagrams)
- Build and maintain a registry of common architecture patterns — covering reference architectures, reusable blocks (e.g., streaming pipeline, AI model deployment), and best practices
- Maintain a registry of projects and make the pre-sales group aware of all we’ve built
- Ensure that every pre-sales architecture engagement contributes back to this registry for future reuse
- Provide lightweight training and guidance for consistent visual communication across teams and proposals.
- Process of handovers to other pre-sales architects so they can resume the conversations with clients

**4. Engagement Management**:

- Coordinate and assign pre-sales architecture support across the group (trackable via Ruddr codes).
- Provide transparency between Sales, Delivery, and Architecture on who is involved in each opportunity.

**5. Training**:

- Organises internal enablement sessions on:

- _ Leading a pre-sales discovery_
- _ Translating technical concepts into business value_
- _ Creating clear, standardised solution diagrams and visuals_

**6. Recognition and Incentives**:

- Build a recognition mechanism (ie, _Pre-Sales Architecture Kudos_ or community leaderboard).
- Collaborate with HR and leadership to ensure pre-sales architecture work is visible in performance reviews.
- Highlight standout contributions to the architecture registry or key deal wins.

**7. Provide quarterly updates to leadership**:

- Number of opportunities supported and regions covered,
- Adoption of standard templates and diagramming styles,
- Registry growth (number of reusable assets and patterns),
- Wins and lessons learned
- Identify blockers (e.g., lack of available time or unclear process) and propose mitigations.

**8. Identify projects that overrun**:

- Find the reasons for the overrun, and if connected to pre-sales, improve the process

**Time Allocation for the Pre-sales Architecture Lead**:

- 70-80% billable
- 20-30% non-billable to allow Leadership work (Initially 50% and then lower after it is established)

**Expected Outcomes (6-12 Months)**:

- A fully operational pre-sales architecture group span