Presentation: Mistakes and Discoveries While Cultivating Ownership

I've learned a lot as a manager about cultivating ownership on our team. I wish I could say that I learned it the easy way. I actually learned the hard way. I feel like I discovered the many different ways that creating ownership breaks down between a manager and their team and within people on the team. I want to share the mental framework that we use to think about a lot of different levels of ownership and also different failure modes. Being able to have that framework and terminology takes something that's you kind of aware of in the background and puts it right clear front and center and can be something you talk about in one on ones, or you can talk about even in larger team meetings depending on what kind of culture and flexibility you have on the team. This can be the kind of thing where I'm going to do it, you're going to watch and ask good questions all the way to the other end of the spectrum where you're taking the lead on this.

Within that spectrum is where the gray area happens, and I have experienced various levels of mismatch and understanding what level we were at. And even if we have been in agreement about what level we're at, being at the wrong level of ownership for the time. I'm sharing how we think about that and also the stories of those missteps along the way as a way of humanizing it, making also approachable.

It's for anyone who is responsible for leading projects and tasks with other people. This talk would not really be for someone who's going to be heads down themselves. They may get some benefit with understanding their relationship with the people that are delegating work to them or figure out how to share in those responsibilities. But the real target audience for this talk is people who are in that leadership position, could be team lead, could be principal engineer, could be a manager, could be the most senior software engineer in a team. But if you're in that realm of being the default owner of something and need to transfer that ownership to various extents to others, this talk is there to help.

Hopefully, new tools to have smoother conversations with different people on their team, and that smoother conversations will lead to healthier projects and also help that person to scale themselves as they can more rapidly transfer ownership when appropriate to other people.