As someone who has been at amazon for a bit and has been a single threaded owner (STO) for a few different things, autonomy and authority part is largely overstated in many orgs. In reality, most groups still have cross-functional overhead to get folks to agree to anything in many of the orgs I've seen and you have slightly more weight on the matter but still are expected to get this cross-functional agreement in many cases since functional leaders still exist. I no longer believe the phrase STO when it's used unless this leader clearly has the cross-functional team members reporting to them as well or the authority to move quickly without having to talk to their senior management.
I always assumed STO was as much about “this person has only one job [rather than 50% on each of topics A and B]” as it was “this person can decide whatever they think is best for topic A”.
That's the single threaded part, but it is also meant to be the proper "owner" in order to move quickly, but the bigger organizations get, the less that part ever actually happens and instead you get decision by committee which is inherently slow and usually sub-optimal since all decisions are negotiations. This is also where my favorite jeff b. quote comes into play (though it is sadly ignored more and more nowadays): "even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation"
Ah; thanks, that makes a ton of sense. We've struggled with both "halves" of that phrase at different times, but recently we've done better on the O and are still weak on the ST part, so I was overly-focused on the most acute painpoint for us.
