Organizing for Ownership

Team ownership evaporates when organizations are split by function or technology. When a small startup divides engineers into front-end and back-end squads, every project becomes a cross-team effort, slowing delivery and leaving nobody fully accountable for the user experience or business outcomes. The same pattern repeats in larger firms that stack engineers, product, design, and data under separate VPs, creating silos where each role focuses on its own deliverables without owning the end result.

The article walks through these pitfalls with concrete examples: a ten-engineer startup forced to create separate front-end and back-end groups, and a typical functional hierarchy that forces cross-functional teams to constantly negotiate and escalate. It shows how these structures force engineers to seek permission to prototype, prevent anyone from feeling true ownership of outcomes, and encourage people to define themselves by role rather than impact.

The proposed solution is to organize around business goals. At Amazon, a SEM automation team owned its profit-and-loss line, reported to a single lead, and handled engineering, data science, and product work internally. Their KPI became the team's identity, eliminating dependencies and communication overhead. The article advises giving each full-stack team a clear KPI tied to a fundamental business driver and letting them control roadmap and priorities, which creates measurable ownership and reduces bureaucratic friction.