Our team is always tackling many different problems in parallel, and it’s important to assign explicit ownership to make sure each ball moves forward. Having a name on something is what matters. It’s a simple concept with a lot of important downstream impact.
In practice, we do this organically every day— figuring out who is driving a project, assigning someone to take next steps, etc. This doc is meant to outline our team’s common vocabulary behind the concept of assigning explicit responsibility.
At Finch, we assign an owner to indicate they are directly responsible for the outcome and they are the default decision-maker.
Owners are assigned a problem space and take ownership of all successes and failures for that scope. Everyone is expected to have extreme ownership and be proactive where the owner is the explicit person who is officially responsible.
In day-to-day conversation, the team can organically discuss owners:
Everything necessary to ensure a successful outcome.
If someone is owning next steps, then they are expected to reliably follow through and communicate the final conclusion. If someone is owning a project, that means ensuring smooth execution and maximizing impact from learnings and wins. If someone is owning a team, that means ensuring the team is setup for success and achieving high impact learnings and wins.
Owners are also meant to be fluid based on constraints— ownership can transfer if we need to rebalance people’s plates, reprioritize plans, or course-correct when someone struggles to own the problem space. Everyone should be flexible to prioritize the team’s needs.