Introduction
It seems almost a given these days, if you are a software engineer working at a company that delivers software as a service over the Internet, your company will employ some form of full service ownership strategy. This approach has taken over cloud service businesses. All the big companies do it. Many people have written about it, extolling its virtues. Full service ownership, it’s the easiest decision a cloud company can make, right?
I worked at a cloud services company that employed this strategy. Not only that, but the company’s business model was built upon evangelizing this approach. They claimed that the more mature your technology implementation, the more this model would appear in your business.
After experiencing many painful incidents at my company, problems with defining service boundaries, technology stacks, and support and maintenance responsibilities, I began to see that many of our struggles stemmed from a near-religious devotion to the full service ownership mantra, “You code it, you ship it.” It’s a fine theory, but does it hold up in practice?
What is Full Service Ownership?
Full service ownership is an operational model where small development teams are tasked with writing code to deliver a product, then deploying and maintaining that product as a service. It sounds simple and intuitive. Often, it is the right choice for delivering cloud products. The premise is that if a small team both owns and operates the software, when issues arise, the right person to fix the problem is easy to find, they know both the code and the deployment model best. Additionally, if you are responsible for maintaining the code you write, you are more motivated to ensure high quality to avoid repeatedly fixing buggy software.
I love the idealism. I have sat across from managers, trying to gently point out that the software I was responsible for running was actually written by another team. I explained how our delivery pipeline, conceived and maintained by yet another team, hindered our ability to deliver our product. I advocated for dedicated support personnel for our product, which desperately needed it. Every time, my concerns were brushed aside with, “We just don’t do it that way here at The Company.”
You might blame poor management, but there were plenty of successful teams at the company using full service ownership. These managers were attempting to apply a consistently successful strategy across the company. It was idealistic, and after a while, our product failed.
What was the ultimate failure? Dogmatic adherence to an ideal. At that company, full service ownership was the hammer. They tried to use that hammer everywhere, squandering years of labor and the goodwill of many talented employees who eventually had to be laid off.
Jack of All Trades
By its very definition, full service ownership creates an environment where service creators and maintainers must wear many hats. You are a code writer, a quality assurance specialist, a deployment pipeline engineer, a scrum master, a support guru, and an architectural genius. When someone needs to integrate with your service or build a product supplementing it, you spend hours on Zoom hashing out the product and engineering details of that integration.
For your service, you are the jack of all trades. You can do everything, and you are required to do everything. Oh, and by the way, your service runs on the cloud, where customers use it 24/7, so you must also be on an on-call rotation with the rest of your team because you are the front line support for your service.
Does this sound exhausting? It’s manageable when your services are tiny. Tiny services rarely have problems, and when they do, it’s usually easy to find and deploy a solution. This is the startup life, creating small services that provide MVPs for customers, then growing them over time.
I suspect the full service ownership model originated in the startup world, where a small number of people must wear multiple hats for the business to succeed. Full service ownership needs to stay at the startup level. Growth and development bring challenges that FSO cannot handle. It’s not a scalable model. Why? Context switching.
The Hidden Cost: Context Switching
As people living in a complex world, we must accomplish many tasks throughout the day. In the morning, you wake up, brush your teeth, make your coffee, check the morning news, blogs, or social media, and then head off to work.
To complete these tasks, you had to switch mental contexts multiple times. Brushing your teeth required you to remember to put toothpaste on the brush and apply it to your teeth. However, you probably didn’t even give it conscious thought. You’ve been brushing your teeth since you were three, and it takes no genius to move a brush back and forth over your teeth.
Then, you made coffee. At some point, you had to learn how to measure the grounds, place them correctly, and add water—however you prepare your favorite brew. You likely didn’t think much about it today, but at one point in your life, you had to pay attention, or you’d end up drinking bland brown water or making a brew strong enough to put hair on your chest.
Switching from brushing your teeth to making coffee required almost no effort. Easy tasks demand little mental energy. But imagine this scenario: You’re a music producer. You go to work, ready to give your best effort in making your clients sound great. You’re immersed in the music—thinking about chords, progressions, and rhythms. You’re in the zone. Then, your phone buzzes, reminding you that it’s April 14th, and you still haven’t done your taxes. Panicked, you shut down your studio and start scrambling to find all the documents you forgot to compile, hoping to rush them to your tax professional before they close.
Music is completely forgotten. Chords, rhythms, and progressions mean nothing to you now. Where is that 1098-INT form? Your mind is in tax mode. Do you have all your documents? Did you make any special financial moves this year? How will that impact your return?
This example illustrates the importance of mental contexts. To do something well, you need to be mentally engaged in it. The more complex the task, the more mental energy it requires. Urgent situations create massive context disruptions. If a music producer is “in the zone” and then has to spend four hours dealing with taxes, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be able to jump back into that creative flow quickly. What a catastrophic loss of productivity. Humans do their best work when they’re fully immersed. If you can’t consistently get into that state, both your work quality and productivity will suffer.
If your job requires you to juggle 20 different tasks successfully, then either those tasks must be simple, or you must have a solid strategy to create the necessary space to focus on them effectively. If those 20 tasks constantly interrupt each other as they arise, your productivity and job satisfaction will inevitably decline.
How This Relates to Full Service Ownership
Full Service Ownership (FSO) is a system that requires employees to wear multiple hats. Context switching is built into the model. The more roles you must juggle, the more they will interfere with one another, and at some point, your effectiveness will drop. If urgent tasks frequently arise, the problem compounds. If the workload includes many mundane tasks—such as long meetings where your presence is required but not meaningful—you will struggle to perform the important work effectively.
I once attended a company motivational event where they used the analogy of an IndyCar pit crew. They showed footage from the beginning of the season when pit stops took eight seconds, then compared it to the end of the season when the team had refined their process down to a two-second stop. The point was to illustrate teamwork and how a cohesive unit improves over time.
As an employee trapped in an FSO organization, however, that analogy made me want to cry.
The reason an IndyCar pit crew can perform so quickly and efficiently is that each member has one job. That’s right—one job. In my FSO role, where I had to wear 20 different hats, I couldn’t help but think: What if the pit crew were a quarter of the size, and each person had to do three tasks instead of one? They wouldn’t even hit an eight-second pit stop.
Full Service Ownership models are not designed for scale, speed, or efficiency. They are designed for cost savings. Hiring a full pit crew and giving each person only one responsibility is expensive. Most businesses couldn’t afford that level of specialization. However, as companies grow, such investments become essential. In a scaling business, specialization isn’t optional—it’s a necessity.
As We Scale
When you work in an FSO model organization, over time, cracks will inevitably start to show. The mantra “You build it, you run it” begins to break down. As the company grows and legal requirements start to dictate engineering decisions, it becomes highly inefficient for each team to handle compliance individually.
For example, if your business wants to pursue government contracts, FedRAMP certification will be essential. Now, imagine that every team must individually demonstrate FedRAMP compliance—this quickly becomes unsustainable. Instead, the business decides to consolidate parts of its services into shared components, managed by dedicated teams. This is a reasonable business decision. And just like that—congratulations!—you’ve taken a step away from FSO and into the real world.
Now, the service that I build, run, and maintain depends on code written by other teams—so much for “I build it, I run it.” Additionally, broader business constraints will limit my choices in how I build and operate my service. This is completely reasonable and necessary. An efficient business will always find ways to share critical resources and maximize the contributions of its smartest employees by leveraging their work across multiple areas. This is a crucial concept for scalable businesses: sharing essential resources while applying reasonable constraints to service implementations.
As businesses grow, the need for specialization increases. Proponents of full-service ownership have forgotten history. Before Henry Ford implemented the assembly line for automobile production, motorized vehicles were bespoke creations. The craftsmen who built these custom automobiles were highly skilled and produced a small number of high-quality machines. However, had we remained in that build-and-delivery model, Americans today would not be able to purchase motorized vehicles at an affordable price.
A Better Business Needs a Better Strategy
To scale efficiently, the automotive industry embraced specialization on the assembly line. Workers were trained and assigned to perform a single task, becoming highly skilled and efficient in their specific roles. By breaking down work into small, repetitive tasks, production volume increased, and training costs dropped significantly. Employee replacement costs also decreased—rather than needing to find a worker proficient in welding, riveting, engine design, and oil changes, companies could simply hire a riveter, a welder, or an oil changer. A jack-of-all-trades is a highly competent individual who commands a high salary, whereas a specialist in one or two tasks cannot demand the same level of compensation.
FSO (Full Service Ownership) organizations are inherently self-limiting because they rely on a workforce that is difficult to hire. Once these skilled individuals are onboarded, retaining them becomes a challenge. Over time, as the services they build require increasing amounts of context switching to operate and maintain, the work becomes less enjoyable. This often leads to burnout and attrition, causing employees to leave and restart the cycle elsewhere.
Sustainable business growth can only be achieved by increasing specialization within an organization. Utilize small teams focused on specific tasks. Assign dedicated support specialists to manage services. Maintain service quality by employing engineers whose sole focus is ensuring excellence.
Specialization is the antidote to burnout—an inevitable outcome of the full-service ownership model. The next time someone advocates for full-service ownership, smile, be friendly, and show them there’s a better way.