How To Demonstrate OWNERSHIP As A Software Engineer

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all right folks I'm headed to the office it says it's going to be about an hour which is nuts because it's already 20 minutes after rush hour ends so we'll see how that goes but I'm going to Reddit for a little bit of a change I've been doing a bunch of uh viewer asked questions uh saw this one on Reddit that I thought would be interesting about lacking ownership and before I dive into that just a reminder if you want your questions answered leave them in the comments below or you can write me look for Dev leader on social media Dev leader is my main YouTube channel check that out for more polished Ed videos this one is going to be some rambling and some yelling at cars on the road um if you send them in I will answer them an honestly so you

can write whatever you'd like and I'll try to just use the information and generalize it um but with that said we'll get into lacking ownership and so this person writes my team has this one feature that we cannot seem to successfully deliver due to consistent failures or regressions and mandatory dependencies folks more senior than me have tried and failed now this feature has been handed to me D dunun okay I'm really not happy about having to own this feature but ever since coming to me my manager insisting I show total ownership and get it done I've gotten probably 75% of the way there but the last 25% is really complex in fact none of our text lead none of our tech leads can actually provide me a sound path forward recently my manager said that I lack ownership because I said it might be almost

done then a month later I it wasn't done for reasons outside of my control so they mentioned dependencies having major regressions how to handle this type of thing okay so this is something that becomes a lot more important in terms of uh advancing in your career so um it's not that ownership is never important but being able to demonstrate it becomes more and more important um reliability accountability ownership these are all similar types of words um and when I was thinking about how I wanted to kind of navigate this cuz this is a topic I looked at like I literally got into my car and then opened up Reddit and was like this will be an interesting one um I don't do a lot of prep for these so it's really just stream of Consciousness I was thinking that I wanted to share um an

example of mine even from being at Microsoft so it's quite recent well last within the last 5 years kind of recent I guess um where I I have an example where I feel like I was not taking ownership and then really had to turn it around so um I wanted to start by talking through that and uh I won't share the actual details of the project because that's I mean number one it doesn't really matter number two it's private um it's confidential so the uh the scenario though was that I was working on a very large project that was sort of uh cross many teams in the organization and so every every team has their own part to play and I remember like projects already ongoing and I come into it right so this is an existing project lots of people working on it and

now my team has a role to play and I'm going to be working on this and helping coordinate our part now at the time I had a project manager that was very new to the team experienced project manager but new to the team so one of the the things that's tricky in a situation like this is like in terms of domain knowledge I'm relatively new certainly new to the project so I have a lot to learn but they're also not only new to the project but new to our team so the good news is because they're an experienced project manager like it's not like they're just navigating how to do their job in general they're good at their job which is awesome we this is this is good news I like to think as an engineering manager I'm good at my job okay this is

good news but what we're lacking is like number one the project domain knowledge and then we have one of us uh which is lacking a lot more sort of experience in our own domain I'm relatively new at this point but getting by um so we get working on this project and initially it was like from the project manager's perspective he's like hey like I can I can do a lot of the coordination here I can kind of do a bunch of this stuff like basically you can take a bit of a back seat this is how like it wasn't said exactly like this but sort of the interpretation from how we were splitting up work and stuff was mostly like you can take a back seat um because when it comes to actually getting the work done that's when I'm going to be more involved

with kind of looping in the engineers and stuff um so we felt like I feel like we had a pretty good plan going into this um and then what was happening is that it was really difficult to get Buy in from the other teams so we had to collaborate across different teams in the or but it was like every literally it felt like every time we would meet and have discussions cuz it was pretty complicated it felt like we were just starting from scratch every time so you couldn't have a 30 minute meeting because 30 minutes were spent recapping the last meeting if you did an hour meeting we'd probably do 45 minutes recapping and then have 15 minutes of moving forward and it felt glacial like we couldn't get anything done it was nuts um now during this time frame we were making a

little bit of progress and the way that things progressed is that that project manager ended up moving over to another team but by the time they were doing that it felt sorry this guy's I'm driving through a construction zone and I have the right of way to drive through they have the signs at the end that are flipped to slow and stop so I have slow and then one of the guys wasn't paying attention in the middle midd and was trying to direct traffic to like pull out onto the road um and like that's not how it works you need to have both ends saying stop so that he can direct traffic so um almost a whoopsy on his part um so at this point in the project the project manager ends up moving over to another team but fortunately we had just gotten to

the point where we were like hey I think we have alignment we can move forward and build these things or at least our dependencies can start working on this stuff cool turns out no one actually was really aligned on things um so there was no movement by partner teams there was no movement on our end because we were still actually lacking Clarity when it came time to start implementing and then I found myself in this situation where it was like well we told the partner teams why aren't they doing it right like my project manager was working on this like I thought everything was good like did he not sort of do the part that he was expected to uh not not necessarily to blame him but like at least to where I thought things were like is it not actually there and I found

myself in this situation where I was like well what the hell like I thought that all of this was moving and it's really not where it needs to be and this is a pretty bad like from my perspective looking back on it a pretty bad spot to be in because it was almost like we spent all of this time and I don't think that we've even taken a single step forward um and what had to happen was that I I basically realized when I was doing one of my um we call them connects at Microsoft and we do them twice a year sort of write down our accomplishments our setbacks things like that was writing mine up and I just remember being like it almost felt embarrassing to say I was working on this project maybe that's too strong of a like an emotion to

convey but like it felt like I have to go write about this because I've been working on it but like what's been delivered like nothing like we we are we're definitely behind so that was a moment where I said okay if I'm doing this reflection there was work getting done like we were putting work into this but nothing was coming out of it and I was like I'm not actually driving this like I'm not actually being accountable I'm not following up I'm basically uh wanting to trust that people that are saying they're going to get stuff done they're just getting it done and it's happening but I just got burned really really bad by that not being the case and I not sitting here blaming the other people because maybe they maybe they were doing the same thing and they thought other people were getting

stuff done and not necessarily owning it end to end but that's like I can't sit here and blame them for it because I wasn't doing it either so I had a pretty like transformative experience after that where I was like okay we got to get the right stakeholders in we got to make sure that we can get on the same page I realized that there was another team that wasn't even when we started engaging with them and talk like I started talking with their manager I realized their manager wasn't even aware of the project like that's the kind of Gap we had so and we' been working on it for like almost a year like crazy so I was like okay there's a huge communication gap we have to sort out um we need to have people start being accountable and that's ultimately going to

start with me so this was for me an example of trying to get in the driver's seat and take ownership and the Really the way that this looked different was instead of me having conversations with people and saying okay you're doing this right okay cool and then just moving on to the next thing and never sort of like I don't know like following up specifically on goals and the actions that were taken I trusted a little bit too much that it was just going to happen the way we talked about it but the reality is it was nothing like that so um it was much more of a passive approach to Leading things right like I'm going to help whoa budy you can't just come in this Lane he tried to merge two lanes at once to get around a truck but I'm in this

Lane um my God so it was a much more of a passive approach where it was like I'm going to help lead on the steps to go forward but I wasn't being accountable right and it was a lot more work once I had to start stepping in and being accountable and taking ownership so when we talk about things like taking ownership I like thinking about being proactive I like thinking about being accountable um and being responsible for things and that's like a the reason that this becomes important is that like it pardon my language like it could be a really shitty spot to be in because when you have people like the person that wrote this on Reddit and they're saying oh these dependencies there were regressions or we were stalled on them it's like guess what like I get that it's outside of your

control but like guess what man like unfortunately it doesn't like the world doesn't revolve around you and I get it because you're sitting there going but yeah this thing it's outside of my control okay what is in your control though you have this dependency you're waiting on it's blocked okay are you communicating that are you bringing visibility to that are you working on alternative strategies that work around that engineering is all about having constraints and being creative within those constraints we have to do a ton of analysis and we have to work within constraints so you have this constraint which is we have this dependency that we need now there's a regression and it's not going to be able to get delivered okay as soon as you know that visibility immediate visibility right people need to know it's not a sign of you failing it's

you saying hey look we agreed that we need this dependency not going to fly and it's we're blocked on it so number one visibility why is it blocked maybe someone on the other side that owns that visibility depending on how that's being managed we actually need their leadership to get involved and say hey look like you need to stop these other things you're doing and focus on getting this done could be a million different things but raising visibility is super important to do early when there's big things like this that are holding up projects I think sometimes people have this feeling like I kind of want to hide it like it looks bad on me I want to hide it but and I don't know in this person's case I I obviously don't know the individual and they don't comment on it but it's a

common thing I've seen where people are like something's not going well like oh crap like don't want to don't draw attention to this but that's the opposite you really want to draw attention to it and unfortunately it's going to mean more work because now that you have attention drawn to it you need to be able to demonstrate what you're going to do to make sure that it doesn't get screwed up so original plan was you have this dependency it's now blocked step one visibility right people need to have awareness of this that's going to be on your side that might mean that you have to escalate to the leadership side of the other group where the dependency is coming from you can attack it on both fronts now what oh man I see people slamming on the brakes and swerving off the Road um love

that next from there what you what you want to do is start thinking about your alternative path for alternative paths forward because if you had one path forward and it's not working for you you can either accept that you're going to miss the project due date which may very well be okay but you'll never know that if you don't communicate it early someone might say yep we actually have some wiggle room of about 2 weeks here a week whatever or no absolutely can't miss this because this is a dependency for some other group everything's going to get pushed we can't let this slide and ideally you're not just giving into letting things slide anyway but sometimes there's some wiggle room built in so now okay let's plan for the worst this is like one of the things that I don't want to say I love

to do but apparently I do because I do it all the time and my wife hates it I always look at situations and I go through a bunch of different scenarios I tell her this is just my engineering mindset I will always analyze things and I will always try to come up with worst case scenarios always and I do this because if I'm looking at the worst case scenario and I'm going hey the worst case scenario is not that bad it's probably a pretty okay solution to go with um if you're looking at the worst case scenario and it has you scared shitless like maybe it's not maybe it's not your risk tolerance uh or sorry it's not up to par with your risk tolerance so like this is why I do this kind of stuff so you want to be looking at alternative paths

in a situation like this dependencies is blocked you have one course of action which is how do we try to unblock it and while that's happening what is your backup plan because if the backup plan is just wait it's probably not going to be great your goal is to get this delivered what are you doing I get that the dependency is blocked I understand I've been there many times so what are you putting into play for an alternative strategy maybe there's something that can be done that's not the ideal thing maybe it's going to mean more work in the future right we can do this other thing for now that's not as good but gets us most of the way hear about the 8020 rule a lot we can slide that in here gets us 80% of the way there and okay like that's not

perfect but at least we'll have something by the due date and maybe it's going to mean more work later to pull it back out and put in the right solution but at least we can meet the deadline that's a possible path forward now if you do the analysis on it in terms of cost and effort is it viable is it worth it right like we have to like the whole goal here is that we have to be thinking about different ways to do things and not just sitting back and being passive regarding what's happening so I need some water but that's kind of my my thinking on this um let me get a sip of water here and then I'll see if there's anything else up in the up in the old brain I've been delaying my caffeine inake a lot and even over the

weekend so for those of you that don't know I have like a serious caffeine problem um I was having like for years like over a gram of like a gram to a gram and a half of caffeine a day cup of coffee is like 80 milligrams of caffeine so um you can imagine that's a lot of caffeine and uh ended up I I don't know if it's because of it but I I can't see any other way uh but I basically have narcolepsy now um and I've been working on this for almost almost a year at this point I would say trying to reduce my caffeine intake so I'm down to around 400 milligrams a day probably a little bit less on average which is a big step down it's still a lot of caffeine um and even like uh over the past couple days

the weekend and the we had a long weekend here like I didn't I didn't have caffeine on one of the days like at all very tired like for me to go through a day without caffeine is rough but but I did it okay um the other thing I should probably talk about here is like because this person's saying like their manager telling them they're lacking ownership right it's probably a good opportunity to um to talk about this a little bit but like this is direct feedback from your manager right so it's something that they're observing if um when you hear me talk about like alignment with your manager right A lot of people are focused on like how do I get to the next level in my career how do I get promoted um how do I know if I'm doing a good job I

always say like the best person to have a conversation with about this is not me I would love to give you advice but like I don't I'm not managing you unless you're someone on my team that I'm managing right now in which case I'm lying but probably statistically speaking most of you are not people I'm managing so I can give you my perspective but at the end of the day the perspective that's going to matter is from the conversation you have with your own manager okay so in this case this person is getting feedback from their manager you're lacking ownership this is a trait that they are looking for they want you to demonstrate this it's an expectation that you're demonstrating this so I would say like as crappy as it is to hear feedback like this and I don't know how it was delivered

to them right like it's not said in the in the Reddit thread but even if it was delivered crappy the the Silver Lining here is like someone's telling you something that you can specifically put effort to improving on which is great now the trickier part might be that you have no idea what to do about it right like how do I go take ownership so something that might be valuable again in terms of level setting expectations is having a conversation with your manager about how this Project's been playing out I've given you some ideas in this talk so far about some things that I would like to see I tried to be a little bit vulnerable and explain like I've literally been in situations where I was not taking ownership and kind of had to learn the hard way and make adjustments but um but

the reality is like if you want to if you want to keep like sort of moving forward in your career you can take the general advice like that I'm offering um you can adapt it because you know I'm just one person on the internet so adapt it for your suit uh your suitability but the um the ultimately like you need to be aligned with your manager on this stuff so if you're like okay they're saying ownership but I don't know what they're expecting here great opportunity to go dive into that with them say hey I hear you okay I need to take ownership um you're you're not observing that for me can you explain to me in more detail like what that looks like to you right like how like what does ownership in this look like in this situation you could even go on

to say like hey I've been feeling like uh I'm blocked on these other dependencies I'm feeling stuck and I might need support uh so if you're saying I need to take ownership like I don't really know what that looks like it's okay to to have conversations like this I think sometimes people feel that when they're trying to do this kind of thing is it Rolls-Royce behind me oh man we got to let this guy pass it looks nice it's big oh yeah sorry I'm distracted by this thing it's nice I think it's a cullin let's see um but I think people are afraid to say like I don't know something right and there's nothing wrong with doing that take that as an opportunity to learn and get alignment let's uh let's see if this will pass us oh yeah man it's nice I would love

a Rolls-Royce col in no if like if I were going to buy one no I'd like a a ghost I think but I bet it's nice inside um yeah so alignment with your manager really important for this kind of thing uh so I know it's a bit of a tangent from the the specific topic but I wanted to bring it up because when I see people and like don't get me wrong I'm not saying like don't do this but when I see people writing online to Reddit and and asking questions like this I I realize they're just looking for more broad feedback and opinions and perspective nothing wrong with that but I would say if they're not talking to their manager about this like it's just a a missed opportunity people just don't do this um obviously there are plenty of people that do but

from the I've done like mentorship programs where my mentees will they'll talk to like they they'll open up to me about stuff that they're they're struggling with that they have questions about and um or like hey like something's not really feeling good in the team so we're chatting through it and you know and I've seen patterns like this happen a ton and we get to a point and I'm like hey so like uh you know what's your manager said when you talked to them about this and they're yeah like I know I don't haven't really brought it up with them yet and sometimes I don't even say yet just like yeah like no I haven't talked to them about this and I find it fascinating right because and I get it some people have managers that might be intimidating they might have bad managers maybe

this individual is kind of quiet and they're I don't know they're they're timid they're they're nervous about bringing stuff up like this to their manager but I find it like the reason I kind of chuckle at it is because it's like this is probably the best person to go talk to about this thing um so I always try to remember people that I mentoring like please have conversations with your manager work on that relationship to be able to have those conversations um but that's like I said a bit of a tangent from this conversation ultimately ownership is going to mean that you have to be proactive and sometimes that means doing extra work that you didn't plan for it might it might mean that you're stepping outside of areas where you're like I shouldn't have to do this this should be someone else's responsibility it

doesn't feel Fair why aren't they doing it but like if it's a project that you're leading and taking ownership on you are responsible for the results of that project that's why ownership is not like a simple thing it's not just like easy you check a box and do it often times ownership can be complicated and it can be hard you might be very fortunate and work on projects that go very smoothly you don't have to worry about this that's great but like you can really showcase ownership when you're working on projects like the one that this person described and they're saying you know things went South dependencies blocked we're screwed right now okay great time to step up time to demonstrate ownership when it's difficult I want to share another brief example because this one's actually super relevant and this is one where I'm in

the middle of it and I need to demonstrate um ownership okay so bear with me as I try to explain this one I mentioned in one of the videos maybe a couple of them um that I had to do a presentation last week and that present ation did not go uh the way that I wanted it to um I feel like not that the not that what was being presented was the wrong thing but I feel like the messaging in that presentation was not effective and therefore the side effect of that is that the audience that received that message was like well now we can't tell if you know if that is the right thing I'm still convinced the things are the right things nothing's wrong in that sense but the messaging did not convey that and then the side effect of that feels like

uh almost like a lack of credibility like we kind of failed to show and I when I say we like again to take ownership like I drove a lot of that so like I am failing to demonstrate that we are working on the right things it's not confidence instilling if you're on the other side and you're feeling confused about that so again from the perspective of ownership what I'm not doing is saying oh well I had other people review that document that I had to go present right and like that includes my manager my skip level manager and they said it's okay so like not not my fault or I collaborated with uh at least you know one product manager on it and they helped write some of the parts and they had in put so like like I mean it's their fault too right

like I I can't and will not do any of that because the point is it doesn't matter like that's a project that I'm responsible for in this case this presentation portion and if that's the case and I fail to deliver on part of it I need to own that I need to own that so we have other people that are going to be participating and we're essentially going to do uh another quick follow-up version of this just mostly in like a document format and and say like hey look we heard the feedback we heard that this is not you know this was not doing a good job of conveying things and here's a different way that we're going to try and message this and communicate these thoughts so yes I do have other people participating on this but at the end of the day like

it's got to it's got to land and when I say land I mean like the the messaging has to land so if they come back again and they say still no like our work's not done so I have to keep following up on this until we have a message that feels very clear and sort of the unfortunate part about this was that this was already a big presentation to put together this is like it seems like in terms of like a planning perspective this is just extra work to go do it again but like tough luck like that's and I I don't mean that like in a way where I'm being factious about it I mean like tough luck like I literally have to go do this and I should go do this it makes sense for me to own this so that we don't

continue down this path of uncertainty from the perspective of the other stakeholders so it sucks right like I had when I was receiving the feedback I was like man like it feels embarrassing it feels frustrating like I feel I feel like a dummy and I know that like you know my manager and my skip level manager would tell me directly like hey like don't you know don't feel like that but I mean that's the response I have internally right I feel like man I really I don't know if I I don't want to drop F bombs on YouTube I think I've been able to say and that's okay but I don't want to drop an F bomb but like I feel like I really screwed up and um not that it can't be improved upon but in that moment it was like it just felt

it felt very embarrassing and I know that's not the intention of the stakeholders to make you feel that way but I was like Hey like there was there was effort put into this it wasn't like we just coasted by and like scraped something together like there was effort put into this and the the result is that it feels embarrassing right um but I need to own it so cool I understand the feedback to the best of my ability right now I I hear at least where there were gaps and how that uh these things were conveyed it's time to go do the extra work to go make this right now so again without giving all the details of it I just wanted to give you another example of like this is a situation where I'm going okay things aren't going as planned in this person's

case from Reddit hey dependency is blocked in my case it's hey presentation that didn't land well extra work's got to get done because the project is not done we have to keep moving and we're not just going to miss our deadline for it so time to figure it out the um from the persp perspective of like why ownership so important right is like when you become more and more senior as a software engineer people people want you on their team when you're reliable right if you have a track record for being reliable you take on projects and people know you as someone that's going to get done they're like I want that person on the team I want that person because I know if they're on the team they're going to work their butt off to deliver things they're going to make sure that when

we set our goals they're going to work towards them and get them done what they don't want is someone that is constantly in a position where it's like oh well someone else you know it's it's outside of our control and like cuz at the end of the day like we just want to get our stuff done we want to get through our deliverables and if everything is always oh it's someone else someone else like that doesn't it doesn't help and you might be right like that's the the hard part here you might be right someone else's fault dependencies blocked someone else's fault someone didn't communicate something that's their fault I get it there can be tons of fault on other people but when it comes to ownership you have to own it you need to be the one that takes accountability for it getting done

stop beeping at me um yeah I think that's my thoughts on on ownership um it's why I'm saying it's like it's not some people might have experience where they're like hey yeah like I I owned a project end to endend and it was it was actually easy like Nick you're kind of blowing it out of proportion uh other people might have a similar experience of this person on Reddit where they're like everything was outside of my control it sucked how can I demonstrate ownership um and probably most projects are somewhere right in the middle right a lot of stuff is you feel like it's under control and you might have one or two things that you're like oh crap like this feels like it's outside of my control but um you'll have different experiences right so I I think for this person that's being told

they don't have ownership if they can kind of reel this in uh it might be a very good success story for them right so their manager telling them they're not demonstrating ownership that doesn't mean like oh you're screwed now like you might as well give up they're basically saying you're not showing it and we can clearly see that there's an opportunity to show it so like this is an opportunity to step up and work on that this car has got to stop beeping at me but yeah I think that's it I'm getting to the office this here um my wallet fell in the cup holder get out of there um I am going to be in the office tomorrow as well so I'll probably get this is the third video for today that I've recorded I'll get four done I'll do another four tomorrow uh

two actually because I'm not going to CrossFit tomorrow damn um and then as long as I get to cross fit on Thursday I should be able to get you folks uh two videos every day this week except today which is Tuesday because I think I've only posted one but that's my goal I'm trying to get minimum one video a day published on this channel so a minimum of five for during the week weekends are a little different um I'm not going to beat I'm been trying to tell myself this I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't get videos out on the weekend um I got a lot of to do and going from three YouTube videos a week to uh 10 to 15 or 12 to 15 is like that's a big step um so I'm trying to be a little bit

more kind to myself if I don't hit those those numbers um but I hope you found this helpful ownership proactive accountability responsibility and uh if you have questions leave them in the comments and if you want to send me a message to Dev leader on social media I'm happy to try and answer and I'll see you next time take care