DevOps Articles

Working like an Amazonian: Leadership Principles Explained — 2. Ownership

In my previous article (and the very first of this series,) I explained the first leadership principle — customer obsession. Today, we are going to talk about the second leadership principle: Amazon’s definition goes as follows: Leaders are owners.

It means to take ownership when there is an external dependency and follow it up; it means when there is a valuable task, but because of lack of responsibility, you go ahead and do it; it means trying to remove blockers and push projects forward instead of waiting passively because the external dependencies are “not your job.”

When there are blocking issues, instead of trying to take the lead and try to remove it, if you stay passively and wait for others to solve it for you, this shows the lack of ownership.

If I want to see if you can really take ownership in projects, I might ask: tell me something you did that is good for the product and the company, but because of the lack of ownership, nobody had done it before.