What Does Taking Ownership ACTUALLY Mean?

Dev Leader Weekly 120

Dec 21, 2025

TL; DR:

Ownership has several meanings
It’s collaborative, not done in isolation
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Happy Holidays!

I wanted to take this moment to say thanks so much for being a part of my community! We’ve had another full year of software engineering topics covered, and you are all the reason that I stick to doing this -- so thank you for being here.

I hope that you all have amazing holidays, however you choose to celebrate. Surround yourselves with friends, family, and loved ones.

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“Take Ownership” -- What That Actually Means for Software Engineers

If you spend any amount of time in a software engineering organization, you will hear the word ownership come up constantly.

Managers talk about it in performance conversations. Senior engineers are expected to demonstrate it. Job descriptions list it as a requirement. And yet, when you listen closely, people are often using the same word to mean different things.

That’s where confusion starts, especially earlier in a career.

Ownership is not a single concept. In practice, I find that it usually falls into two distinct (but related) categories, and understanding the difference matters a lot for how you show up at work.

The first is ownership as accountability and responsibility.
The second is ownership as direction and prioritization.

They overlap, but they are not the same thing. I have talked about ownership on Code Commute, but I felt like this would be a great topic to expand on.

Ownership as Accountability and Responsibility

This is the most common meaning when engineers are told to “take more ownership.”

What your manager is almost certainly not saying:

You now control everything
The code is “yours”
No one else should touch it!

That interpretation leads to gatekeeping, silos, and brittle systems. What they are usually saying is that they want you to be accountable for outcomes.

Ownership in this sense means that when something goes wrong, you don’t mentally distance yourself from it. Bugs, regressions, reliability issues, confusing designs, tech debt, or unclear behavior are no longer someone else’s problem. You may not have caused them, but you help ensure they get resolved.

It also means becoming a go-to person in an area. Not because no one else is allowed to contribute, but because you understand the system well enough to guide others, explain tradeoffs, and keep things moving in a healthy direction.

This is where the word “ownership” can feel misleading. It sounds like possession, when in reality it is about responsibility. The best teams I have worked on are built so that anyone can contribute, provided they follow established patterns and quality bars:

Code is readable
Tests exist to guide behavior
Design choices are documented and explainable

The team members also work together, with as few silos as possible, and are empowered to voice their perspectives -- sharing feedback and learnings with their peers.

Ownership does not mean exclusivity. It means accountability.

I have experienced this personally on projects where I felt a strong sense of responsibility for quality and outcomes. In one case, I worked on a product used for mobile data acquisition in digital forensics. Other engineers contributed regularly, but when customers ran into issues or reliability problems, I felt personally accountable for driving fixes and ensuring the product met a high standard. (It’s worth mentioning that the ENTIRE team felt that way, and it was an awesome culture to have)

Earlier in my career, I rewrote a significant part of an application’s UI layer. I was still a junior engineer at the time, but I became the person others went to with questions. That meant helping people understand the structure, adjusting patterns when they caused friction, and staying engaged when problems surfaced. Ownership there was not about control. It was about being willing to stand behind the work.

Why the Word “Ownership” Can Be Dangerous

One reason I dislike the word is that it can unintentionally encourage unhealthy behavior. Engineers sometimes interpret ownership as a mandate to protect their territory. They block changes, resist feedback, or act as the sole authority.

It becomes locked down. Possessive. Protected. Isolated.

That is not ownership. That’s fragility. Nobody wants that 😃

Healthy ownership makes systems easier to work with, not harder. If you truly own something, one of your responsibilities is ensuring that other people can contribute safely and effectively. Clear patterns, good documentation, tests, and shared understanding all reduce risk.

They do not dilute ownership. They strengthen it.

Ownership as Direction and Prioritization

The second major meaning of ownership shows up when people talk about roles like product owner, tech lead, or even engineering manager.

In this context, ownership is less about code health and more about direction. It is about deciding what gets built, when it gets built, and why. And again, it’s NOT to say this is mutually exclusive from what we’ve already talked about, it’s just a different primary focus.

For individual engineers, especially senior ones, this does not usually mean making unilateral decisions. Instead, it means providing strong technical input into prioritization discussions. Senior engineers are expected to:

Understand tradeoffs
Identify risks
Explain how choices impact delivery and long-term maintainability

For example, if there are ten potential initiatives competing for attention, a tech lead who “owns” an area should be able to explain which ones are risky, which ones unlock future work, and their perspective on which ones can safely wait. That input directly influences prioritization, even if the final call is made collaboratively with engineering managers or product managers. They have a role to play in that.

Ownership here is shared. Product-focused roles represent customer needs* and business priorities. Engineering-focused roles represent technical realities*. Neither side can do the job well in isolation.

(* this is a generalization -- teams that work really effectively have a lot of overlap in these, I find)

Product Ownership and Shared Accountability

When people talk about product ownership, they are usually describing a set of responsibilities rather than a clean job title. In practice, those responsibilities are often distributed across multiple roles.

Product managers may gather customer feedback and define high-level goals. Engineering managers may balance delivery, team health, and technical risk. Tech leads may translate goals into viable technical approaches. Project managers may coordinate timelines and dependencies.

Ownership in this context is collective, but accountability still exists. If customers are consistently unhappy, or if priorities feel disconnected from reality, something in that ownership chain is broken. The solution is rarely to assign more control to a single person. It is usually to improve alignment and communication between roles.

What “Taking Ownership” Actually Looks Like in Practice

If someone asks you to take more ownership, the most productive response is to clarify what they mean.

If they are talking about accountability, the question becomes whether you are:

Proactively driving issues to resolution
Understanding systems deeply
Supporting others who work in the same space

If they are talking about direction, the question becomes whether you are contributing thoughtful input into:

Planning
Tradeoffs analysis
Prioritization decisions

In both cases, ownership is not about authority. It is about responsibility and accountability for outcomes.

Avoiding the Ownership Trap

One final caution: ownership should never turn you into a single point of failure. In fact, if you are taking a lot of ownership and accountability, one of the things you should figure out is how to handle such issues!

A common mistake is assuming that owning something means doing everything yourself. In reality, strong ownership reduces dependency on any one person. You spread knowledge. You build systems that are understandable. You enable others to help without constant oversight.

When ownership turns into gatekeeping, it is usually a sign that the system or team structure is failing, not that ownership is being exercised well.

Closing Thoughts

Ownership is a useful concept, but only when we are clear about what we mean by it. Otherwise, it leads to these confusing situations where people aren’t really sure what you’re actually talking about -- and it’s quite common.

For most software engineers, ownership means accountability and responsibility for outcomes. For senior engineers and leadership roles, it also includes influencing direction and prioritization.

If you strip away the ambiguity, ownership is not about control, ego, or exclusivity. It is about standing behind the work, helping others succeed in the same space, and caring deeply about the results.

When practiced this way, ownership strengthens teams, improves systems, and accelerates growth rather than slowing it down.

I hope that help clarify things -- and as I always say: If you are still unsure, ask for clarification with your manager.

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