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Updated August 7, 2023If you’re working towards a promotion to a senior role, your manager may tell you that they’d like you to “take more ownership” of certain projects or tasks that your team is responsible for. To many people, “taking ownership” sounds vague and ambiguous the first time they hear it. Take ownership of what, exactly?
There are a lot of differing opinions on what taking ownership means, so if your manager encourages you to do so, the best thing to do is to simply ask them what taking ownership means to them. It’s always good to clarify their expectations to make sure you don’t miss something they are expecting you to do.
A developer taking ownership of something commonly means they are taking on more accountability for the success of a certain project or task. They are not necessarily the only one responsible for the success or failure of a project, but they will have a bigger influence on the outcome.
exampleA junior engineer will typically work on tasks as part of a larger project. The requirements for those tasks were probably defined by someone more senior than them, either a senior engineer or a manager, and the junior engineer is just implementing a solution to meet those requirements.
As that junior engineer takes on more ownership, they’ll start to get more involved in the planning aspects of the projects rather than just implementing someone else’s plan.
That junior engineer will now add more tickets to the backlog and make sure all the project requirements are defined so that they can be sure the project is meeting the customer’s needs. They’ll help research, plan, and prioritize in case there are any internal or external dependencies that dictate when things need to be done. And they’ll coordinate the release of the code to production, measure its success, and contribute to the ongoing maintenance of the project they led from start to finish.
That junior engineer took on more responsibility for the outcome of the project.
The path to success for a project is never as simple as it looks, and the more ownership you take on as you work towards a promotion, the more ambiguity you’ll be dealing with, which can be difficult. Not only do you need to chip away at tasks to get to the finish line, but you also need to look at the end goals of the project and work backwards to figure out a plan for how to reach the finish line. You may not even know where to begin at times, but that’s part of taking ownership and growing into a senior role. Taking ownership means figuring out a path forward, even when faced with uncertainty about how to proceed.
Ownership isn’t always directly tied to specific projects, either. Sometimes taking ownership of areas involved in a team’s development process is a good way to show maturity. When a developer’s mindset shifts from advancing their own technical abilities to advancing those of their team, they begin the process of thinking like a senior engineer.
While their main projects and priorities always come first, senior developers don’t sit back and wait to be told what to work on. They actively seek out areas where they can improve the codebase or, even better, improve their team’s development process.
Senior engineers learn to put their team’s needs above their own. That often means that senior engineers work on things such as:
Helping unblock other developers if they are stuck or if they are waiting on a code review.
Working on the mundane but important tasks, such as bug fixes or writing documentation.
Helping to teach other engineers and transfer knowledge across the team.
In essence, taking ownership is all about taking on more responsibility for the outcome and results of individual projects and for the results for your team. As you work towards a senior title, try to identify areas where you can contribute more on individual projects, and try to take on more responsibility in areas where you think you can improve your team’s overall output. The more results you can help deliver, whether through your own work or enabling others, the higher the chances of earning that promotion to a senior role.
Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want (effectiveengineer.com)
Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt (joelonsoftware.com)
Ownership — the secret ingredient (medium.com/sears-israel)