The problem with shared ownership
Hi Everyone,
A lot of cross-functional initiatives fail in the gap between strategy and execution.
A product launch, pricing change, platform migration, or new market entry may look clear at the strategy level, but once several teams own different pieces of the work, someone has to own the space between them.
Today, we're looking at how to run that work with one owner, clearer decision rights, and a weekly meeting that deals with stuck work early.
Give the initiative one owner
The owner's job is to keep the whole bet moving across teams.
That means they know where the work is stuck, who can make the next call, and which assumptions have changed since the plan was agreed.
They also keep one version of the plan. If different teams are working from different dates or assumptions, the owner gets that fixed before it turns into rework.
This role needs enough authority to matter. A founder, Chief of Staff, COO, functional lead, program manager, or single-threaded owner can all do it, depending on the size of the company and the weight of the bet.
The title is secondary. The test is whether they can get the right people into the room and get a decision made.
Decide how decisions will get made
A cross-functional initiative needs decision rules before the work gets difficult.
The owner should know which decisions they can make alone, which decisions sit with the leadership team, and which decisions belong to a specific function.
List the decisions that could slow the initiative down and put one name next to each. That might include scope changes, launch timing, budget shifts, pricing exceptions, customer risk, and final go-live approval.
ITONICS found that teams reduced decision bottlenecks by 35–45% when they mapped the most important decisions at kickoff and gave each one a named owner.
Use the weekly meeting for stuck work
Once the initiative is moving, the owner should run the weekly meeting around the issues that need the group.
That usually means decisions that are stuck, dependencies between teams, and trade-offs the owner can't settle alone. Anything one team can handle on its own should happen outside the meeting.
This is where many weekly meetings waste time. They give equal space to every function, even when only one or two issues need a decision.
Ramp uses weekly product jam sessions for high-risk product decisions. Product managers bring decisions to product and design leaders while there is still time to challenge the thinking and change the work.
That is a useful habit to borrow. Bring the stuck work into the room early, and leave with a named owner for the next move.
Score confidence monthly
Quarterly reviews come too late for cross-functional initiatives.
Easy Agile added a monthly 1 to 5 confidence score to each key result. When confidence drops, the team reviews the work before the quarter is over.
Use the same habit for major initiatives. Ask the owner to score confidence once a month. If the score drops, find out whether the issue is a stuck decision, a weak assumption, a dependency, or a target that needs revisiting.
Make escalation decisions stick
For bigger initiatives, the owner will hit decisions they cannot make alone. They may need approval to change scope, move people onto the work, pause part of the project, or stop it altogether.
Those calls need one clear place to go. That might be the CEO or senior leaders closest to the work.
If decisions keep getting reopened, the owner has to return to the same discussion instead of getting the work moving.
For the owner, the rule has to be clear. Once that call is made, the team can act on it.
Try this today
Rewrite the agenda for your next cross-functional meeting.
Replace the first 15 minutes of status updates with three questions: what's blocked, who else is affected, and what decision do we need to make right now?
Run that format for two weeks and see which decisions get made faster.
Go deeper
👉 Lenny's Newsletter: How Ramp Builds Product — Inside Ramp's "farming dissent" model and weekly product jams. Useful if you want a lighter version of a weekly decision forum.
👉 Easy Agile: OKRs, Strategy Alignment & Execution — a simple example of monthly confidence scoring.
👉 ITONICS: Partner Governance — Useful for decision ownership, decision bottlenecks, and cross-team dependencies.
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow we're sharing how to talk to your directors directly without it looking like you're managing the board around your chair.
That's it for today!
P.S. If the work is already moving well, leave it alone. Test this where the same decisions keep coming back without getting resolved.