Why Reliability Starts with Responsibility
The Ownership Trio
In the world of software engineering, ownership is often debated but rarely well-defined. We see organizations struggle with accountability—some blame SREs for reliability gaps, others push on-call burden onto developers, and many simply lack clarity on who owns what.
The root of these problems? Broken Ownership.
To build and maintain reliable systems, organizations must align responsibility with control. This is where the Ownership Trio—Mandate, Knowledge, and Accountability—comes in. If any of these three elements is missing, ownership breaks down, leading to inefficiencies, poor reliability, and operational burnout.
Let’s explore why ownership matters, how it breaks, and how the Ownership Trio provides a framework for fixing it.
The Problem: Broken ownership
Ownership fails when teams are held responsible for something they don’t control, when they lack the knowledge to act effectively, or when they aren’t accountable for the consequences of their actions.
Responsibility without control
A team is told they are responsible for reliability, but they lack authority over key decisions—such as infrastructure changes, deployment pipelines, or observability tooling. They get paged at 3 AM for an issue but can’t fix the root cause.
Example: An application team relies on a central DevOps group for deployments. They own uptime targets but can’t control when or how their services are deployed.
Impact: Blame-shifting, inefficiency, and slow response to incidents.
Control without knowledge
A team has full ownership of a service but lacks the necessary expertise in incident management, monitoring, or capacity planning. They deploy frequently but aren’t trained to handle outages effectively.
Example: A newly formed product team manages its own infrastructure but doesn’t understand how to set up meaningful alerts or optimize auto-scaling.
Impact: Increased downtime, longer incident resolution times, and unnecessary on-call stress.
Actions without accountability
A team makes decisions that affect reliability but doesn’t experience the operational consequences. They push features at breakneck speed, but when failures happen, someone else—often an SRE or operations team—has to clean up the mess.
Example: A development team builds a microservice, but another team handles on-call duties. Developers don’t experience the impact of poorly tuned alerts or inadequate failover strategies.
Impact: Fragile systems, operational silos, and recurring incidents.
If any of these failure modes exist, ownership is broken, and reliability will suffer.
Ownership trio
To ensure effective ownership, teams need three critical components:
Mandate: The power to act
You cannot be responsible for something you don’t control. Ownership starts with giving teams the authority to make meaningful decisions about the systems they are accountable for.
Developers should have full control over deployments, alerting, and infrastructure choices.
Teams must be empowered to define and enforce their own reliability policies.
SREs and platform teams should enable, not block—providing tools, guardrails, and expertise.
Knowledge: The ability to act effectively
You cannot use your mandate effectively if you don’t understand the system. Ownership means investing in operational knowledge, so teams can build, maintain, and troubleshoot their services with confidence.
Teams should be trained in observability, capacity planning, and incident response.
Engineers should experience real-world operational scenarios—e.g., game days, failure injections, or postmortem deep dives.
A self-service platform should enable teams to configure and manage their own infrastructure without unnecessary toil.
Accountability: The Incentive to Improve
You only gain knowledge if you are fully responsible for the consequences of your decisions. Ownership means teams feel the direct impact of their design and operational choices—both positive and negative.
Developers should be on-call for their own services—not just SREs or centralized ops teams.
Postmortems should focus on learning and systemic improvements, not blame.
Teams should have clear service-level objectives (SLOs) that balance innovation and reliability.
Without mandate, knowledge, and accountability, ownership will always be shallow—leading to burnout, frustration, and unreliable systems.
Aligning Ownership with Reliability Strategy
Different organizations adopt different models based on scale, maturity, and operational constraints. The key is ensuring the Ownership Trio is intact—regardless of structure.
Platform Engineering: Self-Service
For “You build, you own it“ to work at scale, developers must not be overwhelmed by operational burden. A strong platform engineering function can provide:
Automated infrastructure provisioning so teams don’t have to reinvent deployment pipelines.
Unified observability with standardized dashboards, tracing, and alerting.
Incident tooling that reduces toil—e.g., automated runbooks, self-healing capabilities.
SRE as an Enabler, Not a Gatekeeper
Instead of owning production support, SREs should enable teams to succeed by:
Coaching developers on production readiness, incident handling, and reliability best practices.
Designing reliability standards that teams adopt—rather than enforcing rigid approvals.
Providing shared tooling for capacity planning, alert tuning, and chaos engineering.
This allows development teams to own their services without being left unsupported.
Blameless & Continuous Learning Culture
Accountability should never be about punishment—it should be about learning and systemic improvement.
Postmortems should identify process and tooling gaps, not just human mistakes.
Operational pain should drive engineering investments—e.g., reducing alert fatigue, automating fixes.
Teams should share reliability learnings org-wide, fostering a culture of resilience.
Final Thoughts: Ownership Is the Foundation of Reliability
At the heart of every reliable system is clear and effective ownership. Whether your team follows “You Build It, You Own It”, SRE, or a hybrid model, reliability suffers when ownership is unclear, incomplete, or broken.
To fix this, organizations must apply the Ownership Trio:
Mandate: Ensure teams have real control over their services.
Knowledge: Invest in operational expertise and learning.
Accountability: Align incentives so teams experience the impact of their decisions.
When ownership is structured correctly, reliability becomes a natural outcome—not an afterthought.
Now, Over to You
How does your team structure ownership? Have you experienced broken ownership in your org? Let’s discuss how we can create better ownership models for more reliable systems. 🚀
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Great work. 🙌 A couple of relevant links from my side:
- "You build it, you own it": https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/you-build-it-you-own-it
- The subtle but important difference between accountability and responsibility: https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/accountable-vs-responsible
- What happens when one or two elements of ownership are missing? https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/broken-ownership