You Build It, You Run It — Ownership as a main change catalyst

This article (preaperd in cooperation with Jacek Jaworski) is about how we implement ‘You Build It, You Run It’ at StepStone. We believe that YBIYRI goes way beyond operating workloads, thus the article covers the topic quite broadly and is not a tech guide. What you’ll find out is:

• Description of a use case — why we went for YBIYRI and what we wanted to achieve
• Our experiences — successes and failures while we transformed our organization
• Hints — which can support you in your job (if it is related with leading or changing the organization)

Concept

It was 2006, when Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview:

“Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the quality of the service.”

Since then, You Build It You Run It gained a lot of popularity and was interpreted in many ways. At Stepstone we believe that ownership is crucial to achieve great outcomes — thus we decided to put ownership at the core of our YBIYRI implementation.

We often say that for StepStone it’s more about You Build It, You Own It, rather than Run It. We aim for teams owning products from the very beginning of the ideation phase, trough development, and operations, to the point where it is phased out. We embedded this thinking into our company strategy.

As with most of the strategies, ours was also on a high level, so while it was great to describe the direction, it was too abstract for teams to make the calls. This is where we came up with the Ownership Model — a bridge between the strategy and real work of our teams. For every product team (we have around 80) the journey towards YBIYRI is a bit different. By having Ownership Model as a Compass and strategies as a Northern Star, we are sure that, while the journey is different for each team, still all of them are moving in the same direction.

The Ownership Model

The Ownership Model is built on three pillars:

• Product — focused on defining a proper baseline for product discovery and development in a complex environment, with multiple teams working together
• Platform — describing how teams participate in building a proper product platform — reliable, secure, with good performance and quality
• Engineering — describing elements used in the development lifecycle and focused on accelerating delivery to production

Each pillar contains multiple areas described in two dimensions:

• Autonomy — defining range of autonomy which we provide to teams
• Alignment — describing what kind of areas we would like to keep managing centrally, because each team is a part of wider organization

On the picture it looks like that:

[HINT] Visualizing the model was important part of the implementation. You want to make sure everyone in the organization gets the idea. Product, tech, marketing, senior management and more — you want to pitch the idea in a way that is contextual to the given group and that it is easy to digest.

Here is where the conceptual part ended — we understood the context, we had a vision where we would like to go, we had our Northern Star. This was the easiest part, now to the harder one — how to implement a change and how to lead transformation in our company?

Implementation phase

Here we started asking ourselves some questions:

• How are we going to build awareness and desire around a change?
• How are we going to build knowledge and capabilities to do the change?
• How will we reinforce it to be a continuous model?
• How are we going to measure the results and gather feedback?
• How will we recognize good behaviors?

[HINT] Use similar questions to challenge your transformation. There is a lot of useful models, which can support you. (e.g. ADKAR model).

First thing we decided to do was to go outside the working group and reach out to the whole organization. So, we established Q&A sessions open for everyone in the company, where we presented the results of our work, gathered feedback, and answered any questions people might have had.

[HINT] Bring people on board. Invite them to the YBIYRI journey. You’d like teams to take more ownership of their products based on this model. Working this out behind closed doors and expecting people will love it — doable, but unlikely.

Slowly, iteration by iteration, we were getting more and more clarity around how to work towards our Northern Star. One of the first great feedback we got was a question around clear vision presentation. The model you saw above is an outcome of this feedback. Previously Ownership model was… 16 slides long PowerPoint presentation. Second thing, which started to become visible, was awareness inside the organization. You build it You run it started to appear in e-mails and communication. So, at this point we had something tangible, a bridge between company strategies and the teams’ daily activities.

Our next step was to try and find several early adopters. We wanted to leverage on adoption curve (check Simon Sinek speech if you would like to hear more about adoption curve) and validate our assumptions. We therefore met with several teams that were open to experiment and, according to their believes, were almost already working with YBIYRI principle. This soon became a dead end. Our learning was that while YBIYRI is already present in the company and we already built awareness and some desire to change, the correct understanding was still missing. Each team had different view on what YBIYRI is, how high we are aiming, and their current level of maturity varied. We needed to add some details to our vision and build more knowledge around where we would like to go.

[HINT] You are going to learn new things during every change or transformation. Remember to use those learnings and incorporate them into your actions. Don’t be afraid of dead ends — you will face them many times.

While we gave up the work with early adopters for a while, we discovered two things:

• We lack the ability to assess team maturity — we have around 80 teams, so it was not possible to run detailed workshop with each and every one of them to really understand where they are.
• Our ability to support teams in their journey towards YBIYRI was weak.

To assess the maturity, we created the Ownership Model Assessment. Inspired by Accelerate by Dr Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, we created advanced assessment to evaluate teams’ maturity in every single area of the model. Questions we asked were more about how teams currently act and operate, rather than how they understand the vision or how good they think they are in applying company strategies. Example question:

Business ownership: OKRs (single choice)

• My team does not have OKRs.
• My team has OKRs, but do not use them for planning or review purpose.
• My team has top-down given OKRs and Product Owner is reporting based on them.
• My team has top-down given OKRs and use them during planning and review.
• My team contributes to OKRs definition and then use them to drive product development.
• My team is responsible for defining OKRs and use them to drive product development.
• I don’t know.

There are around 40 questions in current Ownership Assessment, and we are running the assessment twice a year. Results are being presented to each portfolio/domain/team in a dedicated session where we invite both product and engineering folks and encourage a dialog.

[HINT] Make sure you are using the results only as an indicator and a trigger for dialog. This is not supposed to be used to compare or judge the teams.

Ownership Assessment becomes not only a tool to stimulate team development and give them ability to reflect on their progress. It also adds another level of detail to the proper understanding of the vision and how ambitious it is. Now the teams have a clear view on where we would like to go. Still — starting point for each team was a bit different. Some of them lacked maturity when it comes to support processes, some others were weak with NFRs or were not aligned with their portfolio. As in many cases when it comes to teams.

The first big finding from the Ownership Assessment was that some of the areas (like culture and mindset) are quite strong across StepStone, while some others (like Cloud native or Costs) are subsequently weaker. We understood that while each team can have its own journey (autonomy), we also need to promote some wider company initiatives to address common challenges (alignment).

We said — we need support to take care of each area in the Ownership Model. So, we established area ambassadors — people who were damn good in a particular topic and willing to share their knowledge with others.

[HINT] Engagement is key in every change. Focus on engaged people who are open to new challenges, willing to share knowledge with others and to support change.

Every area in the Ownership Model has an ambassador, someone who is the first person to ask for a support when you have questions around how to develop your team in this specific area. Ambassadors also prepared a list of useful tips, good practices, tools, or initiatives, which can support the teams. Almost like a cheat sheet. We started to gain more and more knowledge around YBIYRI and how to train our abilities to perform the change. This stimulated knowledge transfer between different parts of our company.

[HINT] There is always already a lot in your company which can be used to support the change. You just need to find it or find people who know where to find it.

Ownership assessment + cheat sheet + ambassadors were our initial way to build knowledge and expand teams’ abilities to implement change.

Is it working and what challenges are we currently facing?

Probably we’re not the ones to judge, but yeah, it is working. We are yet to define a set of metrics so we can prove it, but all the signs are telling us we’re good.

Something we certainly have is:

• Northern Star plus Compass guiding us in our journey (Ownership Model)
• Awareness and Desire to change in an organization
• Slow but steady progress of DevOps practices and tools adoption (our last step is service catalog roll-out)

Right now our biggest challange is to increase the engagement of our middle management. Focus is still too much on short term goals and quartely objectives which leaves too little time for long term investments. We are still on our journey to incorporate long-term thinking and need to continue our work on ensuring ownership for the implementation of change by the whole leadership team.

Currently our focus is on enablement — we want to make a journey as simple as possible. We implement new tools (e.g., service catalog) and new processes (e.g., incident management process rework) to accelerate the journey.

[HINT] Remember about enablement — providing right tools and process will accelerate every change.

The last hint we would like to share is around ownership itself.

[HINT] Please note that ownership is not something you can enforce. The idea is to create an environment with enough support and enablement, so the teams take the ownership. For more info take a look here: Here’s how you get employees to take ownership over their work

And how is it with your journey? How it looks like? Did you get some inspiration from our case? Please share in comments.

Explore all articles about our organisation & processes, or read more about the technologies we use. Interested in working at StepStone? Check out our careers page.