The 4 Levels of Ownership

As I thought about how much ownership people take over their assigned responsibilities, especially over complex technical tasks, several distinct levels of ownership came to mind.

Suppose you are tasked with driving QA improvements in you organization. You start by asking what your leaders want you to do, and whatever they tell you, you execute faithfully.

Though it’s better than failure or incompetence, this is the lowest level of ownership.

Suppose that instead of ask your leaders what outcomes they are looking for. What’s their intent? What problems are they solving with your role, and what do they want to achieve?

You learn that a number of quality issues have been affecting the business. Feature development is slow because of the workload on QA testers. Outages and severe bugs are still occurring, sometimes in places that seemed unconnected to new changes. This in turn affects everyone’s appetite for risk and makes releases slow and high-overhead. They want to move faster without everything breaking.

To own the problem, you speak with engineering and QA teams to work on solutions. As they propose specific plans, like “increase test coverage” or “improve the engineering to QA handover process”, you promote some solutions and reject others. You use your discernment in light of the overarching goal. You ask for clarification on the bigger matters and handle the small ones

Ultimately, quality improves. Your leaders didn’t tell you how to do it, but you accomplished the mission they gave. That’s level 2. The more ambiguous the mission, the more discernment is required from you, and the further along you are at taking ownership.

Suppose, instead of being asked to drive a quality improvement effort, you notice those problems yourself. Your leaders may not even recognize what a drag they are on the business, but you experience affecting yourself and your teammates.

In this case, the solutions are beyond implementing by yourself. So you begin the process of communicating to motivate change, perhaps with a well-worded email or Google Doc.

Regardless of who drives the rest of the task, you’ve now demonstrated level 3: championing change for the better in every sphere you touch.

Suppose your team doesn’t have quality issues as obvious as the prior examples. But in you reading you come across a new capability: the API specification format you use for your servers has code generators that your QA team might find quite useful. The only catch is that it would require one small to change to how your team operates.

You reach out to the QA team to see if they would find this feature helpful. When they say yes, you champion the change within your own team to enable them. You provide them the instructions to make it smooth for them to use, even altering your build process to enable them, knowing that’s your expertise and not theirs.

This is level 4. Level 4 owners are so aware of their organization’s mission, as well as other teams and their responsibilities, that they know when to proactively “push” information rather than waiting for it to be pulled.

Ask yourself: