When Do We Hold the Whole Team Accountable?

Let’s begin with the answer to the question in this lesson’s title: when looking at the aggregate output of the team’s activities.

Most often, engineering team accountability is in the realm of “success or failure” and we most often focus on their failures—either the team collectively chose to take no action or it lacked a process to prevent the failure (and could’ve and should’ve created one).

Consider a scenario in which an engineering team fails to respond to a production incident or, worse, creates a production incident. A few years ago, there was a rather embarrassing moment for HBO Max (the entertainment conglomerate) when an email went out to a subset of their subscribers by accident. HBO Max later tweeted that “it was the intern” who was responsible. The tweet itself highlighted a common scenario: the intern does something that embarrasses the team.

But really, this is a team failure. How was it that one person had the ...