If You Want Ownership, Change How You Ship
Why CD is a great practice for high-performing teams
If you want ownership, change how you ship
If you want ownership and maturity in your team, stop talking about it and move to daily delivery.
Most leaders say they want more ownership; fewer hand-offs, less drama, more adults in the room. But then they keep a release process that screams the opposite. Monthly “big bang” releases, manual checklists, surprise deployments late in the evening, everyone hoping nothing breaks. And all these handovers to others, as if no one can actually handle a single change alone anymore.
That is not a technical choice; it is a cultural choice. It tells your team: we don’t really trust ourselves; we prefer to hide the risk until the very end; and hopefully it doesn’t hit me back.
Continuous Delivery is the opposite message. It says: we ship small, we ship often, we accept reality faster than our ego would like. That is why I see CD as a leadership practice, not a DevOps trick – and, of course, self-leadership is included.
Let’s get into it.
CD as a mirror for how you really work
When you move to daily delivery, you remove most of the places where people can hide. You see how you actually work, not how your Jira board looks. You feel where the process is heavy, where quality is unclear, where ownership is missing.
Every change is suddenly close to the user, close to the result. That proximity is uncomfortable at first, especially for teams used to hiding behind “the release train”.
But that discomfort is precisely what builds maturity. You can’t be a “senior engineer” in theory and then deploy once a month with fingers crossed.
Maturity is about caring.
A mature team, for me, is not the one with the fanciest architecture; it is the team where individuals care about three things at once: product, process, and outcome. They want the feature to be good, the way it's built to be sane, and the effect on the user to be positive.
Continuous Delivery forces that triangle to come together. You cannot just optimise for “closing tickets” if you know your code will hit production tomorrow morning. You automatically start thinking about blast radius, observability, testability, and the user’s reality.
The four leadership pillars, seen through CD
Let’s walk through CD with the four pillars: credibility, role model, vision, and challenge.
1. Credibility – shipping as proof, not slides
You can present as many roadmaps and strategy decks as you want; if every release still feels like a gamble, your credibility is capped. With CD, you move the conversation from promises to proof.
“We fix issues quickly” stops being a slogan; people see hotfixes going live within hours. “Quality matters” is no longer a poster; your dashboards show low failure rates and fast recovery. A reliable pipeline becomes a quiet, stubborn signal that you mean what you say.
We are stopping to talk about something sometime in the future; instead, we deliver the first step today and show it. Maybe we make mistakes, perhaps we were correct with our hypothesis, but we know it tomorrow, not in weeks.
2. Role model – how you behave around production
“you created a movement of people aiming for improvement daily, not during post-mortems.”
The way you behave around production tells your team everything they need to know about courage and responsibility.
If you panic during incidents, vanish into “management meetings” when things go wrong, or start looking for the person to blame, your team will copy that. If you stay calm, stay present, ask “what did we learn?” instead of “who did this?”, they will copy that too.
Continuous Delivery makes incidents smaller but more frequent; it turns them into normal learning moments instead of rare catastrophes. That only works if you show, with your behaviour, that learning is allowed and that telling the truth is safer than hiding it.
This honesty becomes the default in your teams, and by practising it, the number of incidents will drastically drop over time because you created a movement of people aiming for improvement daily, not during post-mortems.
3. Vision – from ticket factory to value stream
“A vision is based on good storytelling; but not on storypoints.”
Many teams still live in the old story: product throws tickets over the wall, devs implement, someone deploys, then everyone moves on.
CD gives you a better story to tell; a value stream from idea to outcome. We hear something from the customer, we shape it, we build it, we ship it, we watch what happens, and we adjust. One flow, not five silos.
Senior people don’t get excited by “we deliver story points”; they get excited by “we learn from production every day”. I mean, no customers asked for story points anyway, right? 😀
CD connects directly to that purpose. Yes, it is more uncomfortable.
But it’s the good kind of discomfort: the one that gives you faster, more precise feedback from reality.
4. Challenge – raising the bar without fear
High standards are not created in a workshop; they are made in small decisions under stress. Continuous Delivery gives you very concrete boundaries to protect.
We keep batch sizes small, even if the roadmap screams.
We do not merge on red tests.
We don’t accept flaky tests as “just how it is”; we fix them or delete them.
We don’t sneak “just one more change” into today’s deployment.
Those are not technical preferences; they are leadership lines. You challenge your team to respect them, and you invite them to challenge you when you try to bypass the system for convenience.
That mutual challenge is where absolute ownership starts.
Are You Worth Following? Using the 4 Pillars to Audit Your Leadership
You can think of this whole piece as one sticky note above your desk:
Discipline: the courage to keep it boring
Underneath all of this sits discipline. Not the harsh, self-punishing version, but the original meaning: being a student of something, every day.
Again: Discipline is about to become BETTER every day, not just doing something every day.
Continuous Delivery is simply a discipline applied to shipping. You accept the boring reality of small, consistent steps. Instead of waiting for “the perfect moment” to clean up the build, you make the build slightly better every week; the question is, can you keep it boring?
Because your ego wants drama, the significant migration, the heroic weekend, the “we finally refactored everything” story. CD asks you to trade that story for something much less glamorous: twelve months of quiet, incremental improvement. The funny thing is, a year later, that boring graph of lead time and failure rate is precisely what makes you proud.
As a sidenote:
A tech lead told me they have shipped something new for months; something is very off right now. Another told me they collect everything to ship when ready, but the release date keeps moving forward. In both cases, there is no real discipline or leadership involved. In both cases, teams are crippled by insecurity or even fear.
It’s never a technical issue; it’s always a very foundational human issue.
Genuinely aiming for CD as a leader is definitely the right way to unblock a stuck culture and turn stagnation into practice again.
Because progress equals happiness (Tony Robbins) – Yep, that mindset is a fundamental human act, both as individuals and in groups. If we are not in continuous progress, we are basically not happy. Happiness in this example stems from not being blocked or stuck in fear, or from being afraid of punishment; instead, from becoming better every day on a journey of improvement.
If you see this as wishy-washy talk rather than what it is, you clearly need to work on your culture.
How this looks in the day-to-day
This is where a lot of leaders get stuck:
“Okay, I like the philosophy, but what does it look like?”
It looks like pair programming is not a rare event but a regular part of the week. Two people see the code, two people understand the impact, two people feel responsible when it goes live—less hero culture, more shared ownership.
It looks like TDD is a natural complement to CD. Every test is a small leadership act: we decide what “good” looks like before we rush. We write the expectation first, then the code. Not because the book says so, but because we want to be able to change this code quickly without acting bravely every time.
It looks like a short daily reflection instead of only big retros. Ten minutes: what slowed us down yesterday, what surprised us in production, what is the one thing we change today that is under our control?
The Stoic Component of CD
Very stoic, by the way. You cannot control the market, the CEO’s latest idea, or your cloud provider’s pricing. You can control batch size, observability, and your honesty about failures. CD keeps your attention in that circle of control.
When CD quietly tells you, “You have a leadership problem.”
There is a pattern I see a lot: organisations buy all the tools, build pipelines, set up staging, talk about feature flags…and still release once a month. Engineers are afraid to deploy, releases are postponed until “after the event” or “after the quarter”, and people quietly batch changes again.
That is not a missing-plugin problem.
That is fear. That is a lack of trust. That is leadership, or the absence of it.
If you recognise this, don’t start by shouting “we must ship daily” at your team.
Start with yourself; always start with yourself!
In the last serious incident, did you stay calm, visible, and constructive, or did you add chaos?
When the team raised concerns about flaky tests or unstable environments, did you set aside time to fix them, or did you say, “We’ll handle that next quarter”?
If everyone on your team copied your current behaviour under stress for the next five years, would your delivery improve or worsen?
Those are uncomfortable questions, but they are the right ones. CD doesn’t care what you claim to value; it shows what you actually tolerate.
One concrete move this week
Continuous Delivery is not the reward for already being high-performing; it is the path that makes high performance possible. It is one of the few tech practices that connects leadership theory directly to daily practice.
You cannot outsource it to “the DevOps team” or treat it as a side project. You either own how you deliver, or you delegate your credibility to randomness.
So make it simple. Pick one concrete move this week:
Shorten the batch size for one product area.
Kill one manual release step that everybody hates.
Join one post-mortem and explicitly protect the people in the room from blame.
Just one. Then stick to it.
The message you send to your team is clear: we’re not waiting for the perfect moment; we’re building the discipline now. And if you keep that baseline, especially on the messy days, your team will eventually feel it too. Ownership will stop being a word in the job description and become the way people show up every time something goes live.
—Adrian
For a good overview of what Continuous Delivery is:
Do you want to learn the necessary self-leadership to start such a journey?
Mentoring Session: Self-Mirror-Journal – Practise Self Mastery
“Ask yourself the question: Can you be honest with yourself?
The framing of Continuous Delivery as a mirror for leadership rather than just a pipeline optimization is incredibly powerful. I love the point about 'credibility being capped' if every release feels like a gamble—it perfectly captures why so many 'transformations' fail when they focus on slides instead of shipping. You're absolutely right that the discomfort of daily delivery is what forces maturity; you can't hide behind a release train when your code hits production in hours. One additional nuance is how this shifts the role of QA from 'gatekeeper' to 'quality enabler'; in a true CD environment, quality becomes an engineering constraint rather than a seperate phase, which fundamentally alters the team's psychological safety. That shift from 'hoping nothing breaks' to 'knowing we can fix it' is the true mark of a high-performing culture.