Can we actually co-own quality?

In my experience, every few years, something would move quality work off the people who used to own it. Sometimes it was a layoff. Often it was a reorg (I don’t think I have enough fingers to count how many). Sometimes it was a new engineering model. Usually resulted in a smaller quality team and “shared ownership” of quality.

I’ve seen this work out well and not so well. Some teams step through the hoops and check the boxes but lack deeper judgment. Some teams pretend not to see the hoops and know about the checklists. And some teams don’t have hoops at all. But in many cases things would slowly and quietly (or quickly and loudly) degrade.

At Dropbox, I watched quality practices get redistributed across functions pretty successfully multiple times over several years, and I learned a lot about how to do it well by making distributed ownership of quality work clear, with enough structure and guidance to help pass along the judgment (not just the checklist).