Story short, this is what a functional architect (FA) is for me: mostly a BA as his main job is to create requirements, with enough field knowledge so that he knows how a feature would fit customers best and beat the competitors' feature, with the guts and power of decision to cut down on or to extend his ask, with good project timeline awareness so that he can add a touch of prioritization to his ask, with enough UI design skills to add a drop of color to his words, and an English phrase not to far from that of a documentation writer.
(... now my FA, he used to code a lot before doing this role, so he also sees my point of view and he knows very well the technical architecture)
How do you know if you're destined to become an FA? The first sign is that you take special pleasure in writing down the Expected behavior of a new defect you are submitting:
