I'm fascinated to hear that this worked. I worked at one place where that was the goal: Everything had an owner. It was
terrible (and from what I hear, still is).
I'd have a job which required some expertise. John nearby had his job with his expertise (different from mine). John is overloaded[1], and can't own everything related to his expertise. So they take things off his plate and distribute it to other people - including people like me who have almost no understanding of what he does.
Then when something goes wrong, people come to me, but I don't understand any of it. So I go to John and, generally, he fixes the problem.
This is inefficient. People should have just gone to John.
But that's not the worst of it. John can refuse to help or fix. He makes it clear he is not the owner. I am. Or he's on vacation. Or whatever. No one cares about the reason. I'm the owner, so I need to fix it.
I got a demerit on the job because I didn't go to his cubicle multiple times a day, every day to demand he fix it (he was the one who broke it, BTW).
Management has a lot of excuses to support this dysfunction: I should have harassed him. I should have harassed his manager. I should have decided to become a domain expert when it was assigned to me. I'm supposed to hustle with a "Can do" mentality. On and on.
The other dynamic it led to was trying to pass it on to other people. When something broke, the reason wasn't always clear. The person assigned to own it didn't want it to be his problem, so he'd find some trivial detail that was off, and simply forward it to that other person to fix. That person would then write a lengthy (and often obvious) explanation why that trivial detail couldn't possibly have led to this breaking and pass it back. Only then would the original person dig deeper (well, unless he found some other trivial detail to bug someone with).
It was exhausting, and the impression I got was that by making everything owned by someone, it led to a culture of no one wanting to own anything.
If it's possible to really give every task appropriate ownership, I can understand. They definitely couldn't do it at that job. Ownership was just a word management used to sleep at night.
Getting back to my original point, the first question should always be: "How can this problem be fixed?" When exploring that, you may end up with "John owns it and he's the only one with the expertise" - and that's fine. Diving straight into "Who owns this?" is often his way of saying two things:
1. I don't want to fix it.
2. I want someone to be punished for this.
> We would just figure out if there was a root cause. If it was someone's mistake, they might be made responsible for fixing it, but if we felt they were in over their head, we'd pitch in, and help. Everyone was always responsible for rolling up their sleeves.
This is good. As long as there was a mechanism to assign appropriate ownership.
[1] There was always a lot more work than people available to do it.