Outsider Ownership: What It Actually Looks Like in Consulting

I was thinking recently about a time in my career when everything felt in flow. Not just for me, but for the entire product organization. We weren't necessarily working longer hours. We weren't using some revolutionary methodology. We weren't even particularly well-resourced. But something was fundamentally different.

I had theories about what made that period special, but I wanted to test my assumptions. So I reached out to colleagues from that time and asked them: What do you remember about how we worked then?

Their answers confirmed what I suspected: we had genuine ownership. Teams understood what they were responsible for. The goals were clear, but we had space to figure out how to get there. When we hit obstacles, we addressed them early instead of working around them.

Looking back, I've thought a lot about what actually created those conditions. The goals were clear, but it wasn't just the clarity. It was the people. Everyone on the team was invested in the outcome. They knew what they were building and why. They knew who was waiting for it and what success looked like. That connection between the work and its impact was never lost.

I didn't fully recognize how crucial that was until I worked without it. 

What Faux-nership Looks Like

Faux-nership is easy to miss because it often looks right on the surface. The team shows up to meetings. They use the language — "our product," "our users." They're engaged, responsive, technically sharp. But the substance isn't there. Ask them about the goal and they don't know. Ask them what a successful launch looks like and they defer to someone else.

That's the checked-out version. But there's a second, subtler form that's harder to spot: the folks who genuinely love the idea of ownership but quietly disappear when accountability arrives. They want the autonomy. They want the identity of owning something. But when the outcome is at risk, when something isn't landing, when a decision needs to be defended, when the work isn't working, they step back.

Real ownership means you feel it when things go wrong. You're uncomfortable when the outcome is in jeopardy because you actually care about it. Faux-nership is ownership without that weight.

Why This Is Genuinely Hard in Consulting

In a product company, ownership has natural reinforcement. You're building something that belongs to your organization. You'll live with the consequences. The feedback loop is direct and ongoing.

Consulting breaks that loop. Engineers rotate across clients. The product belongs to someone else. The transactional dynamic -  here's the work, here's the deliverable - is always pulling in the opposite direction of genuine investment. Most consulting models don't fight this. They accept it. The work gets done, the engagement ends, and nobody asks whether the engineers ever really cared about the outcome.

We think that's a mistake. Engineers who are genuinely invested in impact make better decisions. They ask better questions. They surface problems earlier. They build things that actually work in the world, not just things that meet the spec.

Curiosity Is the Foundation — But It's Not Enough

When we hire at Commerce Architects, we look hard for curiosity and love of problem-solving. Not just technical aptitude, genuine investment in figuring things out, understanding how things work, caring about whether the solution is actually good.

But curiosity alone can stay inward. An engineer can be deeply curious and still be focused on the elegance of the solution, the technical challenge, the interesting puzzle. That's not ownership. That's craft, which we value, but it's not sufficient.

Extreme ownership is what happens when curiosity turns outward. Toward the user. Toward the business outcome. Toward what the work actually does in the world once it ships. The engineer who's not just asking "how do I build this?" but "why are we building this, and will it actually work?"

How the Turn Happens

We don't create this through process. There's no onboarding module that instills it. What we've found is that it's transmitted, through the architects and senior engineers who model it every day.

When the most senior people in the room talk about client work as if the outcomes genuinely matter to them, when they ask about impact in design reviews, when they push back on scope because they care whether something will actually land, when they're visibly uncomfortable with work that's technically complete but strategically wrong,  it sets a standard. Junior engineers observe what investment actually looks like, and it recalibrates what showing up means.

This is the part that can't be faked. Engineers know the difference between a senior person who's performing investment and one who actually has it. The modeling only works if it's real.

The Test That Matters

There's a quick test I use when I want to understand how an engineer is showing up on a project. I ask them what the goal of what they're working on is. Or when it launches. Or who it's for.

The answer tells me everything.

Engineers with extreme ownership can answer that question at any point in the work. Not because someone reminded them, but because they've never let go of it. They carry it with them through the technical decisions, the tradeoffs, the edge cases. It's the thing that orients everything else.

That's what we're building for at Commerce Architects. Not just engineers who execute well,  engineers who are genuinely invested in what the work does in the world. It's harder to cultivate than a process. It's harder to sustain in consulting than in a product company. But it's the difference between work that ships and work that matters. And in the AI era it is more important than ever.