When the Lights Go Out
It’s 11 PM on payday. Your payments service crashes. Notifications blow up, managers panic, and someone asks the inevitable question: “Who’s fixing this?”
The service owner jumps in to roll back and stabilize. Meanwhile, a payments SME joins the call, explaining why retry logic wasn’t built to handle this traffic spike and suggesting how to prevent it next time.
Two people, two very different roles, both essential in that moment. One takes responsibility for restoring the system. The other shapes the long-term fix. This is the difference between an Owner Expert and a Subject Matter Expert (SME).
The Coach: Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Every team has someone who knows a specific domain inside out. They might not be the one pushing commits at midnight, but when you’re designing a new feature or trying to avoid a costly mistake, they’re the first call.
That’s the SME — the coach of the engineering world. They’re the ones who:
- Define standards and best practices.
- Review designs and guide decisions.
- Train teams so that knowledge spreads, not just stays locked in one head.
SMEs aren’t measured by the uptime of a single service. Their impact comes from enabling multiple teams to work smarter and more consistently.
But expertise alone isn’t enough. Every team also needs someone who takes the field, owns the system, and carries the accountability.
The Captain: Owner Expert
Where the SME guides, the Owner delivers. This is the engineer who carries the weight of a system every day. If it breaks, they fix it. If it needs scaling, they plan it.
Think of the Owner Expert as the captain of the ship. They’re the ones who:
- Keep uptime and reliability on track.
- Handle incidents, rollbacks, and bug fixes.
- Own the costs, performance, and stability of their system.
If the SME is about how things should be done, the Owner is about making sure it actually gets done. And the difference becomes obvious when you compare them side by side.
Coaches and Captains in Action
| SME (Coach) | Owner Expert (Captain) |
|---|---|
| Security SME (defines authentication guidelines) | Identity Service Owner (keeps login alive) |
| Database SME (advises schema, migration) | Product DB Owner (ensures data is consistent and available) |
| Frontend SME (drives design system adoption) | Web App Owner (meets Lighthouse score and bug SLA) |
The SME spreads knowledge across teams. The Owner goes deep on a single service. Neither role is optional — and nowhere is this more obvious than in payments.
The Payments Story
Picture the same e-commerce platform. The payments SME is the one who wrote the playbook: retry strategies, PCI-DSS compliance, fraud detection libraries. They’ve made sure every squad knows the rules of the game.
But when the API slows down at 11 PM on payday, it’s the payments service owner who’s accountable. They’re the one watching latency, applying fixes, and making sure money keeps flowing.
The SME sets the strategy. The Owner executes under pressure. To formalize this relationship, many companies use RACI.
Making It Clear with RACI
RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed — helps untangle who does what.
- SMEs fit best as Consulted: they guide, review, and teach.
- Owners are both Responsible and Accountable: they’re on the hook for results.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
| Use Case | Responsible | Accountable | Consulted | Informed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkout outage | Checkout service owner | Checkout service owner | Infra SME (incident review) | PM, leadership |
| Database migration | Product DB owner | Product DB owner | Database SME | Affected squads |
| Design system rollout | Web app owners | Web app owners | Frontend SME | UX team, PM |
| CI/CD deployment strategy | Pipeline owner | Pipeline owner | DevOps SME | All squads |
Another Story: The Migration Gone Wrong
Last year, a squad ran a database migration without consulting the database SME. On paper, the product DB owner was both responsible and accountable. They executed the migration, but a subtle indexing issue caused queries to crawl, impacting three other services.
It took hours of firefighting before the SME jumped in, identified the missing partitioning strategy, and guided the fix. The owner restored the system, but the SME made sure the same mistake would never happen again.
This is RACI in action: owners get systems back online, SMEs make sure the org learns and doesn’t repeat mistakes.
But RACI only clarifies roles. To really measure success, you need OKRs.
From Roles to Results: OKRs
RACI defines responsibilities. OKRs define outcomes.
- An Owner Expert OKR might be: “Reduce failed deployments to fewer than 3 per quarter.”
- An SME OKR might be: “Ensure 100% of squads adopt canary deployment guidelines by end of quarter.”
Owners are measured by the health of their system. SMEs are measured by the adoption of their expertise. And when you make them SMART, they become even sharper.
SMART OKRs for Coaches and Captains
SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) highlights the contrast.
Owners: SMART OKRs are outcome-driven.
Example: “Maintain 99.95% uptime for Checkout API by end of Q2.”SMEs: SMART OKRs are adoption-driven.
Example: “Train 4 squads on retry logic best practices by end of Q2.”
One ensures delivery. The other ensures consistency. Together, they keep the org moving forward. But how does this cascade in a real workflow?
Cascading OKRs in Practice
Imagine the chain from manager to IC.
Engineering Manager (SME role)
Objective: Improve backend reliability across the org
Key Result: 99.95% uptime across critical services
Tech Lead (Owner Expert for Checkout Service)
Objective: Improve Checkout API reliability
Key Result: Reduce p95 latency from 300ms to 200ms
IC (Backend Engineer in Checkout Squad)
Objective: Contribute to Checkout reliability
Key Result: Refactor retry logic to cut failures by 15%
Each level connects. The IC’s change drives the TL’s service reliability, which rolls up to the manager’s org-wide outcome. When done right, cascading OKRs create alignment instead of silos.
Closing the Loop
SMEs and Owners are not competing roles. They’re complementary. The SME ensures everyone knows the right way to play the game. The Owner ensures the game is actually won.
Without SMEs, teams scatter into inconsistency. Without Owners, accountability disappears. Together, they bring both breadth and depth.
If your org doesn’t know who the SMEs and Owners are, your OKRs will drift and responsibility will blur. Define them early, connect them with RACI, and cascade their OKRs. That’s how you get teams that stay aligned at 2 PM in a planning meeting — and steady at 2 AM during a production fire.
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