# Every service needs an owner

DevFeed: [Every service needs an owner](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/every-service-needs-an-owner-34011.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://sridharrajarao.com/blog/every-service-needs-an-owner/>)

Author: Sridhar Rajarao

Published: 2026-09-12T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Sridhar Rajarao](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/sridhar-rajarao.md>)

Topics: [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>)

Tags: [catalog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/catalog.md>), [customer](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customer.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [on-call](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-call.md>), [ownership](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ownership.md>), [platform-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform-engineering.md>), [production](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/production.md>), [reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reliability.md>), [service](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/service.md>), [service-catalog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/service-catalog.md>), [sre](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sre.md>), [startups](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/startups.md>), [team](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/team.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that growing organizations need a focused service catalog to make production ownership visible. It recommends recording each service's customer outcome, owning team, current on-call contact, deployment path, health dashboard, runbook, and dependencies, and maintaining those records as part of engineering work.

## Source excerpt

A useful service catalog is not an inventory project. It is a public record of who owns a customer outcome when the system is healthy and when it fails.