- 2.1 Misalignment
- 2.2 Collective Ownership
- 2.3 Ownership Using SRE
- 2.4 The Challenge Statement
- 2.5 Coaching
- 2.6 Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
2.2 Collective Ownership
According to Wikipedia, “collective ownership is the ownership of means of production by all members of a group for the benefit of all its members.”1 The definition shows that everyone needs to benefit from the ownership. In the context of product operations, it means that if collective ownership is to be established in a product delivery organization, the ownership needs to benefit all the parties involved. Specifically, if collective ownership of production operations is to be established among product operations, product development, and product management, each party needs to benefit from it.
This is an interesting point to delve into. In the product operations team’s view, they own product operations. However, they encounter great difficulties engaging the product development and product management teams in their operations activities. Therefore, product operations will welcome it if the product development and product management teams take partial ownership of production operations.
In the product development team’s view, they are feature developers. Shipping new features to production quickly is at the core of their activities. What kind of benefit would they gain if they were to own production operations in some partial manner? What would it look like? Would the backlog contain operational user stories? This is not really feasible, as the operations work is not predictable compared to feature work that can be planned using a feature backlog. What would be beneficial is if the partial ownership of production operations led to insights that would lead to an improved development process augmented by a full operational context. In turn, it would be beneficial if the improved development process led to the reduction of production issues that interrupt feature work.
In the product management team’s view, they define the product. The features should be developed by the product development team and operated by the product operations team. What would be the benefit for product management to own production operations in a partial way? To answer this question, customer escalations need to be looked at. Product management particularly dislike customer escalations. Customer escalations disrupt their work, require immediate focus, take a lot of time to justify the product to various stakeholders despite customer dissatisfaction, and chip away the stakeholders’ trust. Diminishing stakeholder trust might lead to budget reductions for the product. This is a difficult situation every product owner works to avoid. To be sure, every customer escalation is about an issue in production. So, if the partial ownership of production operations would lead to a reduction of customer escalations, it would be a great and welcomed benefit for product management.
Table 2.1 shows the benefits each party would see in a product delivery organization if a collective ownership of product operations were established.
Table 2.1 Benefits of Collective Ownership of Production Operations
Discipline |
Benefit |
|
|---|---|---|
Collective ownership of production operations |
Product operations |
Appropriate engagement of product development and product management in operations activities as needed. No more chasing product development and product management on every production issue to decide how to proceed. |
Product development |
Appropriate insight in product operations to get to an improved feature development process augmented by the full operational context. Feature development performed with the full context of what is necessary to make the features technically successful in production leads to a reduction of customer escalations. This leads to more uninterrupted time for working on new features. |
|
Product management |
Reduction of customer escalations and time investment to handle them. |
Having clarified the benefits a collective ownership of production operations may bring to product operations, product development, and product management, the next question to explore is how to get the benefits. An associated question would be the cost of getting the benefits for each party involved. In other words, in the context of an SRE transformation, how do you implement collective ownership of production operations using SRE with a positive cost–benefit ratio?