Who Owns the Incident When Several Teams Own the Platform?
PlatformEngineering.com, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
Shared platforms need one accountable owner per service and an incident commander separate from root-cause investigation.
When a developer platform fails, infrastructure, DevOps and SRE teams may each own part of it, leaving developers waiting while the teams debate who responds.
Sombra's Mykhailo Voitovych says ownership problems come from unclear, overlapping or undocumented responsibilities that only surface during outages.
He recommends a single accountable owner for every service, backed by service catalogs, ownership matrices and escalation paths, plus an assigned incident commander who sets priorities while specialists investigate the root cause in parallel.
After recovery, postmortems, updated runbooks and response drills should prevent confusion the next time.