Congrats, you are the owner!

Most things in real world won’t go exactly as planned, or as we wish for. We all want a CI/CD pipeline that takes our changes to production within seconds; it runs unit and integration tests meticulously on each change, with 100% code coverage; the changes go through alpha, beta, gamma, one box, first availability zone, first region, second region and more regions in fan out stages, flawlessly… But the reality is different: the CI/CD pipeline likely breaks now and then, which may take days to figure out why; integration tests fail randomly; tests take forever to complete; and these mysterious deployment failures, host failures, network failures, why don’t they just give us peace? Today a team member told me pipeline xxx has been broken for days, nobody knew why. It was blocking his feature launch. I asked: “Have you figure out who should be the owner to unblock the pipeline?” The answer is “No”. So I said: “Congratulations! You are now the owner to fix the pipeline, unless you convince someone else to be the rightful owner.” That is the Amazon Ownership model: “If you can’t find the owner of a problem, you are the owner of the problem!” It might sound unfair. “I didn’t break the pipeline!” “I have other things to do!” … Well, you need the pipeline, don’t you? Isn’t the feature launch your top priority now? And the broken pipeline is blocking you launch? Then you have to fix it! One way or another. But this model can certainly backfire into “Kill the messenger” model: nobody want to call out problems, we all play emperor’s new clothes. Because whatever problems you identify become your problems. The extreme ownership model must be compensated with a sensible team structure, and team charters clearly define “who owns what”, for 99% of the problems. There is still that 1% that can’t be defined. Team structure, processes, even standards, policies and laws can only go so far. If processes and run books need to cover everything in reality, they become a twisted reality themselves, not the reality you and I live in. At the end of the day, if nobody wants to be owner in an organization, then all the processes in the world can’t save that org. So I joked with the team member who now owned this broken pipeline problem: “If not us, who else? If not now, when?” To be a leader, start being an owner, not of world hunger, not of saving human race, but of the mundane problem in front of you, now!