The “You Build It, You Run It” Trap

In 2006, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels gave the industry a rallying cry: “You build it, you run it.”

The idea was powerful. Eliminate handoffs. Tighten feedback loops. When engineers feel the consequences of their code in production, quality improves. Responsibility drives better systems.

The industry embraced the slogan—and then copied it too literally.

Twenty years later, for many growth-stage and mid-sized engineering organizations, “You Build It, You Run It” has quietly become a trap. Ownership isn’t the issue. The problem is mandating it without removing the structural friction that makes it unsustainable.

The Cargo Cult of Autonomy

We copied the culture of large tech companies without copying the infrastructure that made it viable.

At Amazon, the mantra is backed by massive internal investment: platform teams, tooling, paved roads, and abstractions that make operating software boring. When a smaller organization adopts the same slogan, it often means handing a product engineer the cloud console, a PagerDuty rotation, and Terraform written by someone who left months ago.

That isn’t empowerment. It’s a cost transfer.

The failure isn’t that teams own production. Ownership is the right goal. The problem is asking every team to internalize the full complexity of operating distributed systems without providing leverage.

This is not a team-level maturity problem. It happens when complexity is distributed instead of designed away. Senior leadership must choose to invest here.

The Cognitive Load Tax

Somewhere along the way, we quietly redefined “software engineer” to mean:

• Product development

• Database administration

• Cloud architecture

• Security modeling

• CI/CD maintenance

• Incident command

We call this Full Cycle Engineering. A more accurate term is Cognitive Load Bankruptcy.

I’ve seen senior engineers, hired to solve hard product problems, spend 30–40% of their time debugging Helm charts, IAM policies, and brittle pipelines. In one case, a team’s deployment frequency dropped by half when the only infrastructure-literate engineer went on parental leave. The bus factor wasn’t theoretical. It showed up immediately in missed commitments.

Every hour spent on configuration plumbing is an hour not spent on customer value. At scale, this is more than frustrating. It’s a resource-allocation failure that later manifests as velocity decay, attrition, and operational risk.

When everyone owns infrastructure, no one really owns it. You get shadow operations: inconsistent patterns, unpatched dependencies, and critical knowledge trapped in a few heads. That’s not autonomy. It’s unmanaged risk with a better name.

Abstraction Isn’t Babysitting

A familiar counterargument usually follows: “Engineers should understand the full stack. Abstraction breeds ignorance.”

Abstraction isn’t about assuming engineers are incapable. It’s about removing repetitive friction so expertise is applied where it matters most. Formula One drivers understand their engines well. They still don’t change their own tires during a pit stop. This isn’t because they can’t, but because the system is optimized for winning races, not proving self-sufficiency.

The same principle applies to engineering organizations. The goal is sustainable velocity, not just performative completeness.

Ownership Isn’t Doing Everything Yourself

Ownership means being accountable for outcomes—not personally assembling every layer of the stack.

If operating software requires every team to solve the same infrastructure problems, the organization isn’t promoting autonomy. It’s fragmenting attention. High-performance teams don’t prove autonomy by doing everything themselves. They win by removing friction where it doesn’t differentiate.

Earning the Right to “You Build It, You Run It”

The intent behind the mantra is still correct—tight feedback loops matter. Teams should feel the impact of production failures. Incentives should align.

Ownership must be earned by providing leverage.

If leadership wants product teams to “run it,” leadership must provide the Golden Path: a paved road that makes the right thing easy. That means treating the internal developer platform as a product, not a side project.

Centralize complexity. Platform teams should own the most challenging parts of the system: network topology, identity boundaries, secret management, observability, deployment primitives. These problems benefit from deep specialization and consistency.

Decentralize consumption. Product teams should consume these capabilities through high-level abstractions and self-service interfaces. If provisioning still requires talking to a human, you haven’t built a platform. You’ve just renamed operations.

The complexity doesn’t disappear. It’s absorbed by the people best equipped to manage it and exposed through interfaces that don’t require every engineer to be an infrastructure expert.

You Don’t Need a Massive Platform Team

Smaller organizations often dismiss this as unrealistic: “We can’t afford a platform team.”

You don’t need one to start.

At 30–50 engineers, a Golden Path might be opinionated Terraform modules, well-maintained CI templates, and documented defaults that encode how software is meant to be built and shipped. The first milestone isn’t a portal. It’s eliminating unnecessary choice and reinvention.

The investment scales over time. What matters is committing to remove friction, not just distribute it.

Advocating Upward

If you’re a senior IC or engineering manager who agrees but doesn’t control the budget, you still have leverage.

Start measuring where time actually goes. If teams spend a third of their capacity on infrastructure toil, that’s not sentiment—it’s data. Frame the problem in terms that leadership understands: delivery risk, retention, and compounding bus factors.

“We’re mass-producing single points of failure” lands differently than “engineers are frustrated.” One is a feeling. The other is an operational liability.

You don’t need a five-year platform roadmap. Propose a quarter of focused investment to remove the most painful friction point. Show results. Expand from there.

The Litmus Test

Ask your product teams a simple question:

If you had to ship a new service today, how much time would go to business logic versus configuration plumbing?

If the answer is less than 80% business logic, the system isn’t optimized for velocity. It’s optimized for anxiety.

“You build it, you run it” isn’t a right—it’s a privilege you earn by making “running it” boring at scale. Until you make that investment, the slogan isn’t culture; it’s cost transfer.