In a highly collaborative and fast-paced environment, assign explicit ownership for every feature, no matter how small. The goal isn't to assign blame for failures but to empower individuals with the agency to make decisions, build consensus, and see their work through to completion.

To combat diffused responsibility, starting a committee at Coinbase requires explicit CEO or COO approval. This forces the assignment of a single "Directly Responsible Individual" (DRI), ensuring clear ownership, accountability, and faster decision-making.

Intentionally assigning fewer people to a project than seems necessary forces extreme focus on the highest priorities. Overstaffing is "poison" because it breeds politics, encourages work on non-essential tasks, and creates cruft that slows the entire company down.

When a project stagnates, it's often because "everyone's accountable, which means no one's accountable." To combat this diffusion of responsibility, assign one "single-threaded owner" who is publicly responsible for reporting progress and triaging issues. This clarity, combined with assigning individual names to action items, fosters true ownership.

Using the classic "ham and eggs" fable, projects fail when filled with "chickens" who are merely involved versus "pigs" who are fully committed. To ensure accountability, organizations must assign single-threaded leaders ("pigs") who own an outcome end-to-end, rather than committees of contributors.

As teams grow, ambiguity over ownership increases, causing key tasks to be dropped. The RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) combats this by clarifying roles upfront for any project, ensuring clear ownership and preventing the diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes larger groups.

Owning a project launch means being accountable for its success, requiring more than execution. It involves proactively identifying all possible failure modes (technical, infrastructural, etc.) and systematically working backward to prevent them. This active risk mitigation is the essence of strong ownership.

An event manager, solely responsible for all logistics for 30 events in three weeks, made a major booking error. This demonstrates that assigning high-volume, complex projects to a single person without support turns them into a single point of failure, making critical mistakes almost unavoidable.

A Tech Lead can't do everything. Using "recursive accountability," the lead (as the Directly Responsible Individual) delegates ownership of sub-problems to others. While they own their pieces, the lead remains ultimately accountable for the entire project, preventing a "that wasn't my part" mentality.