“Stronger” by The Score
I’m going to write about ownership sprinkled with AI.
What is so fascinating to me is what this technology has caused in people’s behavior. Some of it positive. Some of it negative.
Ravenous land grabbing.
Unspoken leaderboards whispered in quiet – meanwhile “We are a family! We share everything! We would absolutely never create an aggregated dashboard and use that to determine if employees have adopted it enough making sure, at least the creators of the metric, are always at the top.” I write this coming off the knowledge of someone in my network who got laid off last week as his company laid off 10% of staff, mostly mid-managers.
Mid-managers – a Shakespearean role at the moment – now consumed by a number of direct reports that will cause them to flatline in their sleep if they don’t self eject anyway, hoping they will get ejected with a severance package before they have to use it on a hospital bill. With some at companies rocking a 30+ person structure, they are cursed with only handling time-off requests and local compliance for time reporting.
Many employees know how they are goaled – and immediately wonder – what are the metrics my manager cares about? My manager’s manager? My managers-manager’s-manager’s-manager who has 50 AI agents, knows gastown end to end, and doesn’t know me.
The only way they could have possibly actually made the time to do those things is to stop caring about people in a way that only face to face time can do.
I actually like AI. I like using it – I love plan mode in Claude so much. I love that it can kill a frontend with its brain. I loved it so much I tried it, but because I am a manager, I had to find time. How did I do that? Canceling others for a few days because it was the only way I could sit down to learn.
Dammit.
The vibe in Silicon Valley is just work the weekend – while you look your children in the face and try to explain this future.
I don’t think individual contributors live in a different plane of existence. I think extreme ownership has been given to some in organizations which allowed them to move at a speed and knowledge others could not. And I want everyone who uses these tools to understand that. It is possible anyone who has the privilege to work themselves to death scaled harder and thought, “Yeah, we should roll that out.”
It is important to roll out the right culture in tandem with a technology. It lasts a whole lot longer.
Have respect for your colleagues.
Beware the leaderboard. The 20 docs you made last week that you shipped to them because you had the time, the energy, and the ownership have slowed them down immensely from getting to have any of their own. Inspiration. Motivation.
Remember when you got excited to make that thing – that doc that you peer programmed, peer PRDed, peer wrote with your AI was something you did in a SILO and now you can generate that at a speed that is unheard of. But we are no better if we race each other in a world where opensource has seen that race destroy community.
It doesn’t mean it’s better for the business. It doesn’t mean there aren’t hard parts that need fleshing out. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t an even bigger, harder problem to solve which is “How do you give people more ownership so they can ‘move faster’ in environments where before all this the goal may have been consensus to avoid building too many kinds of the same thing.”
Don’t punish people for the ownership we never gave them.
Don’t punish people for not including their work in your work – literally hands on keys.
The reason I have a blog is so I can have full ownership over its architecture, content, and decisions without putting that pressure and energy on employees – I am supposed to listen to their ideas and try to get those included and aligned with the actual business needs.
The reason I have a blog is so that I can make sure others have space when there is opportunity to have ownership by not taking it up myself and giving them as much heads up as humanly possible. The noise is optional. The energy to create goes here.
That is the job of a manager. To not take space while staying employed so the people around them feel included and similarly to individual contributors, they have to wait for their lane of ownership to drive, usually longer. So much longer.
I’m glad the person I know who was laid off and didn’t deserve it got hired in < 7 days. That’s wild and shows how valuable this person really was – and everyone around him knows it (the only reason I am not mentioning their name is others I know still work there, and I’m very scared for their future).
What does ownership look like?
This brings me back to a land where some people have never really seen ownership. It’s both a self-driven trait but also something we have to be given.
The self-driven trait is that (1) we will be accountable and commit to getting a thing done that was defined and we will drive it to completion. The “gift” is that your manager or org must be clear and concrete on (2) the value you, individually, are providing, (3) the opportunity, and (4) the expectations of the output and outcomes (which are both metrics you own and also, probably, literal code, docs, or a hosted service). If they cannot say “I am giving you the keys” or it feels like someone else is driving – you do not have ownership. You will feel it. It will drive you up a wall.
Lastly: These things must be freaking funded. Holy cow – AI is the the excuse generator to run off, build whatever, and commit that future tech debt to a landscape of portfolio tech debt teams probably already had. This is regardless of how software was built – whether it was vibe coded or we actually read the python to understand why the AI decided to write the same function 5 times. Teams need lanes people can drive in, a car to let them drive, and the time to actually take the journey.
Funding something is deciding you are going to use it for a long time – together. You will keep it updated. You will support it. You will galvanize it. You will talk about how amazing it is for the next 2 years. You will do brown bags for it. You will make sure it is shown on your leadership calls. You will not pussy-foot around the reality of what it means to own a freaking product in an effort to appease the creator. Yeah, I said pussy-foot. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
And finally, if you feel like you don’t have ownership anymore, because that, truly, is what AI has done (amplified that problem), talk through it. Face to face.
Managers? Start giving it away to the colleagues you care about instead of trying to own the lane. Tell them they have it – back them up to completion. Give them the time, space, resources, everything, truly everything, that comes with the baggage of owning a product, a team for what you can. Give them advanced notice. Stop panicking.
AI doesn’t control our future – our attitude and how we treat those around us 1000000% does.
Header Image by Jonathan Ikemura from Unsplash.
