In our org, architects are assigned to team(s) in a support role. It's up the architect on how their relationship works with the team(s), their reviews are based on that relationships. In our org, we are not 10X engineers who got promoted into those positions. Rather, our focus is to drive the overall strategy and help team(s) deliver their product. Some of the responsibilities I've worked on:
1. Help teams design new systems and manage backlogs. This suck up bulk of my time.
2. Help my business org to get new and more exciting or sexy work, such as event streaming, ML/AI and potentially blockchain adoption. Senior director of my business org loves me because I make him look good.
3. Cheerleader and promoter of the team(s). For example:
* I run high-profile spotlight meetings to show case my team(s)' work to upper management and across the organization
* I develop and run entire business unit developera round table for usually very silo'ed teams to talk and ask questions, as well as gather information on their general approach to their problems.
4. R&D research; third-party vendors evaluation, negotiation and management
5. Business cases for budgets, and development plan for the engineers. During Q4, this would get about 50% of my time.
Architecture team needs support from upper management. Its role should be well-defined and understood, as well as accepted. My philosophy is that, I lead by serving the teams to achieve its goal. In my current position, I still have a team or two that disregard my advice. The rest are all on-board with me because they know I'm here to help them to do their jobs better.