What Engineering Leaders Get Wrong About “Ownership”
Is it really just about documentation? Personal story: When ownership exists on paper but nowhere else
I remember one production incident very clearly. Luckily, it was just enough to affect internal users, Slack notifications were firing off, and I could hear the iconic notification sounds echoing from everyone’s laptops in the office.
Someone shared a service link while another group said they have tagged the team that owns it. But overall, there was silence.
No one stepped in. Not because they did not care, but because everyone was waiting for the “right” owner to speak first.
That was when I realised something was very off, not with the system, but with how we think about ownership.
Hello everyone! Welcome to another Articles by Victoria, the place where I randomly write things I’m curious about. In this article, I want to share what that incident taught me about ownership, why treating it as a label often backfires, and what I have learned as a solutions engineer lead about creating teams that actually step up when things get messy.
What leaders think ownership means
When leaders talk about ownership, it usually sounds very clear. Things like:
A name on a Jira ticket
A service with the team name on it
It’s all very black and white, someone is accountable on paper.
In the org charts and dashboards we see, everything looks perfect and clean. Every tool, every ticket, every dataset has a name under the “Owner” label.
Unfortunately, when real incidents happen, no one steps up. In reality, this kind of ownership often turns into boundary policing. People optimise for not being blamed rather than fixing the problem. The first instinct becomes deflection, not action.
“This is technically another team’s responsibility.”
That’s the most common answer I’ve heard at one point. So what does real ownership actually look like?
What real ownership look like in teams
Real ownership, from what I’ve seen, is the one who moves and shows up when things needed clarification. The one who can say, “I may not be the best person to work on this, but I will figure it out and find someone who can help.”
I have seen engineers jump into incidents for systems they barely touched, simply because they understood the impact and refused to let users suffer while teams debated scope.
I have also seen the opposite. Teams with clear ownership documentation where no one steps forward without explicit permission.
That’s when I noticed: the difference was never about skill. It was safety and behaviour.
A personal mistake
Earlier in my leadership journey, I assumed ownership was obvious, as I mentioned in the previous section. We had documentation. We had owner names labeled. Everyone had been there long enough so I assumed they know their responsibilities.
So I did not explicitly clarify who would drive certain cross team responsibilities. I trusted the system, perhaps too much.
Weeks later, a dependency slipped. Not because anyone was lazy, but because everyone assumed someone else was handling it. The typical bystander effect. By the time it surfaced, it was urgent, visible, and painful.
The most awkward moment was the conversations. Each team lead could explain, very reasonably, why they thought it was not theirs. And they were not wrong. I had never created shared understanding. I had just assumed it existed.
And so I had to face the uncomfortable truth about ownership: that it is not a label, but a behaviour.
You can create conditions around it but not every organization, especially startups, have clear-cut black and white roles. When an issue arises, it could be in a gray area where there is no explicit owner. And when people feel punished for stepping outside their lane, they will stop stepping up. When ownership equals blame, people will avoid it.
That’s why I learned that for leaders, it means ownership starts with us.
So how to make it work?
Instead of enforcing more labels and specific scopes, what I observed actually work within my organization was better environments. Having shared context rather than rigid boundaries helps teams understand why something matters, and they are willing to act even if it is not technically theirs.
Instead of asking “Who owns this?” which facilitates that black-and-white thinking, the leads would say “I am available and willing to help unblock this”. By modeling this attitude and behaviour, we promote proactivity and a blameless work culture.
We also recognized the ones who embrace this culture first, praising publicly for their efforts. This creates a cycle of positive reinforcement and makes the rest more comfortable to follow suit. For a long time, I understood that being a leader is about silently pushing the team onward, but someone had to be the first one in order to get the rest moving.
So I learned to lead by example and collaborate with other leads to create this safe and blameless work culture.
Conclusion
Real ownership feels risky, especially under uncertainty and being visible if something goes wrong. And this is why we avoid it instead of showing up.
It is the leads’ responsibility to create a supportive and blameless culture with safe space for guidance and collaboration. Thanks for reading! I don’t usually share a lot on articles on leadership since I felt I’m too new at this to be writing about it. But if this helps you in any way or if you have any feedback or thoughts, feel free to let me know in the comments!
See you in the next article! Cheers!
