Hook
Ownership does not stop at deploy.
Problem
When teams hand off operations to a separate group, feedback loops slow down and accountability is diffused. Issues are harder to fix because the builders are far from the runtime.
Why it matters
Production ownership drives better design decisions and faster recovery. It also improves learning because teams experience the impact of their choices.
Signals you are here
- Developers are not involved in on-call
- Incidents are resolved through ticket ping-pong
- Operational knowledge is isolated in a separate team
- Fixes are delayed due to handoffs
Anti-patterns
- Throwing code over the wall to ops
- No developer access to production metrics
- Separate KPIs for dev and ops
- Blaming ops for production issues
Try this
- Shared on-call rotations for service teams
- Production access with guardrails and audit
- Runbooks owned by the service team
- Post-incident reviews led by builders
- Service-level objectives owned by the team
Example
A product team took on-call ownership for their service. They simplified deploys and added better monitoring, cutting MTTR in half.
Reflection prompt
What would change if your team owned the service in production? Start with one responsibility today.
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