About Ownership Matters

matters

1. verb - be of importance; have significance

2. noun - an affair or situation under consideration; a topic.

Some engineers and leaders are frustrated with the traditional approach to building and releasing software. Operations is at odds with Engineering. QA has an antagonistic relationship with Development. Some new team called "DevOps" is trying to squeeze their way in between all the others. The silos are tall and growing taller. Some people are looking for better answers.

This blog is for those people.

In 2006, Werner Vogels famously said, "You build it, you run it."1 After many frustrating years of fighting friction from vertical silos, I've come to agree with him on this. So much of the anguish I've witnessed from engineering teams has come from a misalignment of ownership.

I want to share the benefits of successfully aligning ownership. More importantly, I want to show why it matters. I want to share stories of situations where a lack of ownership or misplaced ownership caused unnecessary pain.

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