Cultivating a culture of ownership in your team
It can have a huge boost on delivering high-quality software products on time.
So I’m going to start off this post by bringing up a sports analogy because this is the best way I can relate.
In every sports team, each player has a role. Let’s take cricket, for example, we have players who take the role of batsmen and players who take the role of bowlers. Some players even do both.
Each player knows how they will contribute to the team because they own this role. They own that segment of the match, and this is what eventually leads to winning the match.
In software engineering, each member has a role.
Senior engineers contribute to the technical roadmap of the project as well as guide junior engineers.
Junior engineers contribute to the execution of the roadmap.
Product managers contribute to the product roadmap of the project and how best it would serve the user.
It is important to clearly define these roles within the team, so that everyone is aware of how they will contribute to the team.
This is the key ingredient required for members to feel a sense of ownership for their work.
Once this sense of ownership has been achieved, members start going beyond simply completing tasks.
They take initiative, anticipate problems and strive for excellence.
⭐ Fostering Ownership Within Your Team
Fostering ownership within your team is a 3-step process:
Empowerment
Transparency and communication
Meaningful work
1. Empowerment
We talked earlier about defining clear roles and with clear roles, we can go a step deeper and clearly define tasks with clear expectations.
There is a balance to be struck here.
We want to define expectations clearly, but we also want to allow other engineers the freedom to make decisions as long as the expectations are met.
This process of allowing engineers the freedom to make decisions is where growth really happens.
For example:
During a refinement meeting, the criteria for a new feature to redesign the “contact us” page has been clearly defined. By that I mean the Figma designs have been supplied and the reasoning behind this feature is also clear (i.e. to bring in more leads).
How the engineer achieves that should be left up to them. A step further would be allowing the engineer the freedom to suggest an alternative design that they believe would be more appropriate.
2. Transparency and Communication
The best way to ensure clear communication is to put important information and decisions in a form of written communication like the team Slack channel, an email or even a Confluence document.
That way there is no ambiguity on what has been decided and why.
This step might not be the easiest if part of your team is in the office and part of your team works remotely, but this scenario makes it doubly important to have written communication in order to ensure that everyone has seen the information.
We should also encourage feedback and challenges to these decisions.
This allows members within the team to use their expertise within parts of the tech stack to improve the overall design.
The more we allow challenges, the more healthy discussion we can have as a team and the more understanding of the project ahead can be formed which would lead to more synergy within the team.
This is effectively a repeating cycle that leads to engineers within the team having true ownership of the products because of the deep understanding that they have developed through the culture of challenging from their understanding and then getting a deeper understanding through discussion.
3. Meaningful work
The most important thing for meaningful work here is to ensure that each task that is picked up aligns with the team’s vision and KPIs.
The last thing we would want is someone working on something that would immediately go to the bin or just because we needed to find something for them to do.
I had this a lot in my last company where we would assign engineers work just because we needed something for them to do.
What ended up happening is that the engineer didn’t contribute to the team’s overall goals or the direction the team was heading in, and that engineer was unable to take any ownership for key products that the team was developing.
A true lose-lose situation.
Ultimately, the solution to this issue would be to ensure that we are working closely with our product managers and setting up a backlog for the next 2 sprints and ensuring each task directly aligns with the team’s KPIs.
The tasks for the next sprint are the most important because these will serve as the basis for the next refinement.
Doing this allows for a clear plan of attack for building towards the team’s KPIs
🙅Fear of Failure
In my opinion, the biggest challenge we face when cultivating a culture of ownership is the fear of failure.
If the environment isn’t one where we embrace learning due to the fear of failure, then this directly inhibits all 3 of the steps we mentioned above.
Members would feel afraid to speak up if they hit a roadblock or if a mistake happens. This would then lead to the team not learning from these mistakes and improving its processes.
The solution to this is simple: when an issue arises, shift the conversation from blame to finding solutions and learning from the experience.
For example:
A bug is discovered during testing.
❌ Don’t blame the engineer for their lack of attention to detail or their lack of skills.
Instead:
✅ Focus on collaboratively debugging the issue and implementing a fix along with discussing improvements to prevent similar issues from arising.
🔑 Key Takeaways
Clearly define roles and responsibilities: When each team member understands their role and how it contributes to the overall project, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership for their work.
Empowerment and Transparency: Give engineers the freedom to make decisions within clear expectations and foster open communication through written documentation and encouraging challenges to decisions. This empowers them to grow and fosters team synergy.
Meaningful Work: Ensure tasks align with the team's goals and KPIs. Avoid busywork and prioritize tasks that contribute to the team's direction, allowing engineers to feel their work is valuable.
Embrace Learning: Create a culture that values learning from mistakes. Shift conversations from blame to finding solutions when issues arise, leading to improved processes and a more fearless team.
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