Every decision needs an address

One change I noticed after taking ownership of several related features had nothing to do with the software itself. It changed the way people asked questions.

Before, conversations often began with uncertainty. People were not trying to solve the problem yet; they were trying to identify the right person. Sometimes locating the owner of a feature took longer than answering the original question.

As I gradually became responsible for several connected areas of the product, that pattern started to disappear. Support tickets, consultancy questions and feature discussions naturally came to me. Nobody announced a new process or updated an organisation chart. People had simply developed a shared understanding of where that knowledge lived.

Around the same time, I noticed another recurring pattern. The boundary between Support and Project Management was not always clear. Production issues were sometimes passed from one team to the other—not because people were unwilling to help, but because ownership itself was difficult to interpret.

That made me realise that ownership serves another purpose beyond accountability. We often describe ownership as the person who approves changes or makes decisions. Equally important is its role as a routing mechanism. It tells the organisation where a question should begin.

When people know where to start, questions move quickly. When they don’t, work begins with search instead of reasoning. Knowledge may already exist, expertise may already exist, yet the organisation spends its energy trying to locate both.

Every decision needs an address. Not because one person should hold every answer, but because every organisation needs a reliable place to begin looking.