Around 2 years ago, Phorest faced a challenge with their large product accumulating many capabilities over time, leading to ownership gaps and difficulties in addressing production issues or implementing changes. Recognising the need for clearly defined

ownership, we embarked on a journey guided by the principle of “no ownership gaps,” ensuring all areas of our product had an owner in the form of a domain-aligned engineering team.

But how does a team take ownership of operating a complex system in production when they have little prior experience with it, no way to know when it fails, and insufficient tools to help them understand the cause of those failures?

Therefore, we set out to ensure each and every engineer had the ability to see how the software they were responsible for was behaving in production, and more importantly, proactively know when it was causing our customers pain. This led us to invest heavily

in observability, giving engineers the tooling and visibility they needed to truly own the software they built.

This has not been an easy journey. We wish to share how we got to where we are today, the lessons we have learned, and the positive outcomes we have seen.