GitLab Leadership & Management

What are the best practices you follow to cultivate ownership on your team? Where did you learn these practices?

Cultivating ownership within a team is essential for empowerment and decision-making, motivating team members and developing strong subject matter experts. 

I foster ownership by clearly defining boundaries and roles for SMEs, making their expertise transparent. This clarity helps everyone understand who the experts are and their responsibilities. I trust these team members with challenging problems, helping them build the confidence to tackle difficult issues.

When questions arise, I redirect them to the relevant SME. This practice reinforces their role within the organization, ensuring everyone knows who the go-to experts are. It also helps SMEs feel valued, needed and important in the company. 

At GitLab, we ensure this by assigning objectives and key results to specific SMEs. They identify solutions, build them, delegate work, communicate status, define timelines and set metrics to determine OKR success. They own the entire process.

I learned these tips over years of feedback from people feeling micromanaged or bored and ready for challenges. Empowering people and giving them ownership of tasks proved to be a great motivator, resulting in high-functioning teams and better results.

How has a culture of ownership positively impacted the work your team produces? 

Just today, I found myself overwhelmed with tasks and decided to delegate to an engineering manager. 

Our team is often busy, working to build top-quality products quickly, efficiently and securely. Occasionally, we need extra help to manually test our features. At GitLab, we build tools for developers and practice “dogfooding” — testing our products before or after public release.

At the last minute, I needed feedback on a new feature but struggled to find someone who could “dogfood” due to everyone’s busy schedules. Instead of searching for a volunteer and disrupting their workflow, I handed the task over to an engineering manager. She engaged solutions architects, who were eager to test the new feature and were well-suited for this task.

Her solution was far superior to my original plan. My approach would have been time-consuming and might have involved less enthusiastic testers. The solutions architects, being closer to the customer, provided feedback based on direct insights, aligning with our customer-focused goals.

This situation demonstrated how my report’s expertise and relationships led to a more effective solution, resulting in higher-quality feedback and a better product.

What advice would you give to other engineering leaders interested in fostering ownership on their own teams?

To answer this question, I considered what would motivate engineering leaders to encourage ownership on their teams. 

Having ownership leads to higher morale and retention — which is motivating for most engineering leaders — while the absence leads to lower morale and retention. 

Ownership fosters innovation and creativity, whereas its lack stifles these qualities. Ownership creates an environment of psychological safety and trust between leaders and their direct reports; without it, the opposite occurs. 

Also, delegating ownership lightens your load, allowing you to focus on responsibilities only you can perform. Conversely, withholding ownership requires constant oversight, preventing you from meeting your job’s requirements. 

Empowering team members with ownership leads to faster system delivery and fewer bottlenecks, while the absence of ownership results in delays and lower-quality outcomes.

An example of a time that I fostered ownership within my team was when I needed to restructure my organization but lacked the time. I decided to empower one of my senior managers to take on this task. They were closer to the work and the team. They had the time and enjoyed shaping their own organization, making it a win-win.