The real fix wasn’t more skills or tools, it was hiring for something we had never tested before.
I had already lived through the problem. Our supplier team used to deliver tasks, not outcomes. Release notes looked neat, yet product expertise stayed patchy, defects boomeranged back, and customers felt they were project-managing us. We fixed it, but the lesson did not come from a sprint retrospective. It arrived one crowded morning in a coffee shop.
Arjun, our Project Manager, slipped in for a quick cappuccino before a customer demo. The place was packed. Cups stacked unevenly. Milk pitchers everywhere. The cashier looked lost. Customers were restless. In the middle of this, a young barista stepped forward. Not the manager. Not the most experienced.
“You only do lattes,” she told one colleague, pointing to a single station she had cleared. “You handle payments,” she said to another, sliding the Point of Sale machine closer and removing everything else from that counter. “I will call out names and hand over,” she announced to the room, voice steady.
Within minutes the jam cleared. Orders flowed. People smiled again. Arjun watched that small act with a big implication. This is ownership. No new tools. No title change. Just a decision to drive the outcome when nobody asked for it. The root cause of our earlier pain clicked into place. Our supplier team had good skills, but we were not selecting for and reinforcing ownership. We were hiring for capability and then measuring velocity. We were not testing whether someone would step into the gap between problem and solution and carry the ball to the end zone.
Back at the office, Arjun and I, Maya the Delivery Head, replayed the last quarter. Customers had said, “I do not see your team working with ownership.” They were right. Too often, people were executing tasks without grasping the bigger picture. Our interpretation of “done” was too narrow. The shop floor lesson was clear: we needed to make ownership part of hiring and keep checking for it while people were in the system.
So we changed the entry gate. Alongside technical rounds, we began using a Willingness Questionnaire. It asked candidates to respond to messy, imperfect scenarios, a vague requirement with a fixed deadline, a critical bug found at 6 pm in a module they didn’t own, and a risky detail overlooked by the Product Manager. What mattered was not the perfect solution but whether they showed initiative without permission, outcome orientation over activity, and communication that pulled others along. That small test revealed the same instinct the barista had shown in the café. But ownership cannot be tested only once at hiring. It must be visible over time.
“Why will this work?” Maya asked before we walked the plan to the customer. Because it fixes the root cause, not the symptom. The coffee shop did not add more people or machines. It clarified roles, removed friction, and focused everyone on what mattered most: delivering coffee. In the same way, our change stopped rewarding ticket closure and started rewarding outcome creation. People always respond to what is measured and shared, and now what we measure is ownership.
A month later, Arjun saw the shift in daily updates. Fewer “blocked by” lines. More “I tried X, then Y, here is the evidence, and here is what I will do if Z fails.” In one design handoff, Priya, a mid-level engineer, pinged the Product Manager before anyone asked and walked through failure cases in the user journey that no one had documented yet. “This is ownership,” Arjun wrote in the team channel. This is ownership.
Why should the customer care? Because when the supplier team is selected and grown for ownership, their own effort drops. They stop repeating context. They stop stitching gaps. They stop acting as accidental program managers. In our last two releases, the customer reported roughly 20 percent effort saved. Not because we worked longer hours, but because the work was done with better first-time quality, faster decisions, and clearer communication.
20%
That morning, the young barista never knew she became our silent coach. She simply looked at a messy counter and chose to own the outcome. In our world, that translated into a supplier team that hires for the will to act, checks for it regularly, shares progress openly with the customer, and grows product expertise as a habit. The coffee line moved. Our delivery did too.
Key Takeaway
By testing ownership at hiring and reinforcing it every six months,
the supplier team grew beyond task execution into outcome ownership.
