Service ownership

Every production service needs a clear owning team accountable for SLOs, on-call, runbooks, security patching, capacity, and change authority. Without ownership, reliability decays and incidents bounce between teams.

"You build it, you run it" trades specialization for accountability; platform teams provide paved roads without owning business logic.

On interviews: define ownership for a new service — who pages, who approves schema changes, who speaks to consumers.

Common pitfalls: shared ownership meaning no ownership; orphan services after reorgs; platform team blamed for app bugs.

The trade-off is flexibility versus complexity—know when the simpler path is enough.

Checklist:

• One primary team per service in a service catalog.
• Document SLOs, escalation, and runbooks.
• Align code review and deploy rights with owners.
• Reassign ownership during team changes explicitly.