Many engineering teams treat reliability as 'everyone's responsibility.' In practice, that means it's nobody's responsibility. Here's why you need someone whose job is specifically to care about it.
The 'everyone owns it' myth
It sounds great. In reality, every product engineer has a feature deadline. When the deadline competes with reliability work, the deadline wins every time. Reliability becomes the thing you do when you have spare time, which you never do.
Dedicated ownership isn't about gatekeeping. It's about giving someone the explicit job of fighting for reliability against other priorities.
What the role does
