Triads with Clear Ownership Model - John Costello

Context & Background

Ownership was spread across functions, not outcomes. Teams worked the same areas without knowing who owned what.

Key issues:

Overlapping work and duplicated effort

PMs coordinating instead of leading

Teams waiting for clarity instead of building

Decisions escalating up, not resolving locally

Root cause: Speed wasn't the problem — clarity was.

📋 Project Details


Duration	3 months
Scope	Entire R&D organisation
My role	Designed ownership model, coached triad leads

The Challenge

Fragmented accountability – Multiple teams "touched" problems, but no one owned the solution.

Decision bottlenecks – Teams escalated up because no one had authority to resolve locally.

Collaboration fatigue – Every decision required meetings, alignment sessions, and Slack threads.

The organisation wasn't failing to work hard — it was working inside a structure that made accountability a shared hope, not a clear responsibility.

The shift required one foundational change:
from "Who's working on this?" → to "Who owns this outcome?"

Strategy & Implementation

Map current ownership
- Audited product areas, responsibility overlaps, and accountability gaps
- Identified decision bottlenecks where teams escalated instead of owning

Design triad structure
- Created cross-functional pods (PM + Design + Tech Lead) with shared missions
- Defined clear decision authority and outcome accountability

Define boundaries and handoffs
- Established swim lanes and what each triad uniquely owned
- Removed ambiguous "shared responsibility" areas

Restructure success metrics
- New KPIs: Outcome completion rate, decision velocity, team autonomy score
- Dashboards replaced legacy output-shipping metrics

Implement decision model
- Replaced escalation culture with "decide where the work lives" approach
- 30-day reviews to re-align, rebalance, and address edge cases

Results & Impact

The three-month transformation shifted the organisation from fragmented ownership to clear accountability, with triads owning end-to-end outcomes.

🎯 Clear ownership of full workflows
Reduced handoffs and faster delivery cycles

⚡ Decision velocity increased
Fewer escalations to exec level, decisions resolved locally

📊 Teams shifted from output metrics to outcome metrics
Adoption and completion rates replaced "tickets closed" as primary KPI

🚀 Higher team autonomy
Fewer dependencies, more end-to-end accountability

🤝 Collaboration improved through clarity
Because boundaries were clear, not because teams tried harder

The transformation wasn't just structural — it changed how product teams thought about responsibility.
Instead of asking "Who's working on this?", teams began asking "Which triad owns this outcome?"

Key Insights & Learnings

🧠 Key Learnings & Reflection

Clarity is not control — it is enablement.

The more explicit the boundaries, the more confidently teams act.

Ownership unlocks collaboration.

Teams only help each other when they know what they don't own.

Org design is not a one-time event.

The best structures evolve — they don't freeze.

Triads only work when decision authority matches responsibility.

Otherwise, you've just renamed the old organisation.

The breakthrough wasn't the triad model — it was the shift from shared responsibility to owned outcomes.