we're a product team supporting all BUs across the enterprise. Our assigned architects who we never ask for contribute nothing to the core of our products but trying to leave their fingerprints on the surface or setting up red tapes here and there. Our VPs, on both product and engineering side, enjoys giving unfounded architectural directions to use case teams, simply because they're in the position use case teams first reach out to. Fighting the architects and cleaning up the messes the VPs leave around drains our already thin engineering capacity.
Neither the architects nor the VPs are doing their job. Architects should be pulled down from the authority they assumed and help the use cases to solution with our products, in other words, they should be "solution architects" supporting not dictating our engineering team, leaving the "product architectural decisions" to us.
The VPs, if they can't provide the vision and strategic thinking they're supposed to provide, should be cut all together. Too many layers we have already!