Stage 4: Ownership
Blocker
Releases are unstructured or still managed by leadership.
Solution
The team owns the full development life cycle.
Owning the Full Development Lifecycle
To achieve true delivery ownership, we map and define responsibility across the entire System Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
(full guide linked below)
There are 7 stages in a System Development Lifecycle
GATHER: Collect ideas, run customer interviews, and capture insights.
DEFINE: Write features and break them down into clear user stories.
DESIGN: Plan architecture, create UX/UI designs, prepare technical specs.
DEVELOP: Code the feature or product increment.
TEST: Run QA, UAT, and integration tests to ensure quality.
RELEASE: Deploy, version, and communicate the release.
SUPPORT: Monitor bugs, analyze usage, gather customer feedback.
Mapping Ownership Across the SDLC
For each stage in the System Development Lifecycle (SDLC), we define the following to ensure full ownership and clarity:
OWNERSHIP – Who is responsible for this stage?
This ensures accountability and prevents work from being “dropped” or handled ad hoc.
PROCESS – What steps are followed?
This makes the work repeatable, consistent, and transparent.
WORK ITEM (INPUT / OUTPUT) – What goes into the stage, and what comes out?
This clarifies handoffs and dependencies.
DEPENDENCY – What other stages, teams, or tools does this stage rely on
Understanding dependencies reduces bottlenecks and surprises.
COMMUNICATION (FEEDBACK) – How are results shared and feedback captured?
Ensures learning, iteration, and alignment across teams.
Final Note
This SDLC matrix may look simple, but in reality, it’s rarely this clean.
Most teams only own small parts of the development cycle at first.
The goal of this exercise is to uncover two critical insights:
Hidden bottlenecks — spots where other teams or stakeholders are involved in the process that you might not have realized.
Ownership potential — the more a single team can take responsibility for the entire cycle, the better outcomes they can deliver.