Everyone on the team disliked the tool they were using. Another team was using a tool that might be able to replace it. “Could you look into whether we could all use that one instead?” an engineer asked. The response was a dismissive wave-off — maybe when they have time.

A hallmark of a healthy company is keeping incentives aligned with ownership. Is the person who needs this change able to lead it? When that’s not the case, you lose efficiency and people slowly stop caring. The only way to scale this is to focus on alignment, not control. That requires a lot more skillful communication! Without it, ownership pools at too high a level where the owner has too many competing priorities to make rational choices.

This can have devastatingly broad consequences.

I once found a critical security vulnerability in the product I was working on. I reported it to the department lead, who promptly downplayed the severity by questioning whether it could be exploited and whether anyone would ever notice it. I ended up needing to exploit the vulnerability against the department lead to prove it was serious. Words alone could not align them to the danger.

The number of times I have heard identical security stories from peers in our industry is terrifying. How can decisions so obviously bad be endemic?

You own everything yourself. It’s too much. You’re constantly teetering on panic. Every bug gets compared to financial results, contracts, team capacity, and the other hundred things competing for priority in your brain. Suddenly, a critical security flaw sounds annoying instead of important. You tell the engineer who found it to go ship a feature faster instead. They stop looking for flaws. Next thing you know, you’re LastPass.

If you own everything in your department, you own nothing, and no one else does either. Whether it’s security, performance, team workflow, or user experience you’ll quickly find yourself sliding into the void. If you’re already sliding, there’s only one ways out (besides hastily finding an exit): commit to psychological safety and empowerment. It’s never too late to start divesting.