What is a Single-Threaded Owner?

The best way to doom a strategic initiative is to make it someone’s part-time job. Yet this is exactly what happens most of the time.

For any really business-critical initiative — inventing a new product, starting a second line of revenue, a strategic partnership, a new operation, a business transformation — wouldn’t you want someone to be 100% focused and accountable to its success?

For strategic initiatives, Amazon is popularizing a new model called Single-Threaded Owner (STO), or single-threaded leader, which has been adopted by other fast-growing companies such as Wayfair.

Much of my own career has been as a single threaded owner starting new lines of business, new markets, and new strategic partnerships for established companies to grow and diversify their revenue (though we didn’t use the term single-threaded owner). So when I saw this trend emerge, I knew there was something to it. I wrote all about it in A Single-Threaded Owner’s Guide To Strategy. Here are the key elements.

100% Focus

​Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon’s consumer business explains “When Amazon has a new idea, the company writes a fake press release and FAQ page to help envision how the idea will look on launch day. Then they recruit one single-threaded leader to the idea, and that leader builds his or her team.

For example, when the person leading the Alexa team wakes up each morning, the only thing her or she thinks about is how to make Alexa a better product. 100% focus.

If they got distracted by what’s happening in Kindle or what’s happening in another aspect of the retail business, or what’s happening in AWS, they have less time to focus and less time to notice the things that aren’t going well.”

Star players tend to be assigned the strategic initiatives. But because they are stars, they also tend to have many other responsibilities too, either by choice or out of necessity. The STO model is first and foremost about ensuring 100% focus. Like an entrepreneur who thinks about their startup 24/7, the person you select to own the strategic initiative must truly want a job that is focused.

​Some leaders love variety, getting involved in many areas — that’s great too, but it’s not what you want for an STO. Once you’ve found the right person, empower them by minimizing distractions. Put the STO and their team in a different building for a set period of time. Cut any meetings that aren’t related to the mandate. Reward their focus.

100% Ownership

Maybe you’re thinking this is not new? We have product managers and project managers who lead strategic initiatives, no? Then consider the second, perhaps more important, aspect of the STO model: end-to-end ownership of the strategic initiative.

Companies define a product manager’s role as being in charge of just the product — its roadmap, new features, etc. — while other things like the product’s market strategy, operational model, and pricing are handled by other departments, or higher up. And project managers are too often simply expected to be the coordinators of programs, while subject-matter experts and executives own the strategic pieces.

STO Roberto Carisi from Amazon explains in an interview “The single-threaded owner is sort of like a product manager, but has end-to-end ownership over the whole process leading up to the results.”

By design, a single-threaded owner is a generalist, not an expert at everything. Amazon compensates for this by subjecting the single-threaded leader and their team to a variety of audits with expert groups that specialize in different areas. These expert panels provide ideas and support and serve as a challenge function to optimize the program.

Not Every Program Requires a Single-Threaded Owner

To be clear, I’m not arguing that all PMs should be single-threaded owners. Far from it. STOs should be reserved for truly strategic initiatives that require the company to behave differently to succeed, and are expected to have a considerable impact on the organization, such as:

• creation of a new line of business
• creation of a net new revenue stream
• penetrating a new market that has substantially different needs, perceptions and buying habits than the company’s primary markets
• a partnership (not a logo swap) that could lead to significant new revenue, channels or M&A opportunity
• an overhaul of a company’s operations, e.g. a cloud transformation
• a new product that requires considerably different sales, marketing or operational approaches to be successful

A new product that simply uses new technology (such as AI) might be in this list, but if it’s going to your usual customers and will be priced and supported in the same usual ways, it might not require a single-threaded owner, just a solid PM and team. An upgrade to your existing product, even if it’s expected to generate most of next year’s revenue, may not warrant single-threaded ownership either, as it is just a continuation of your existing operations.

If PMs at your organization are too junior, then hire a more senior manager or senior consultant to fulfill the single-threaded owner role. If PMs don’t have the needed level of authority, assign a dedicated executive. It’s less about who and more about making sure the person is 100% dedicated and owns the program success end-to-end.

You’ll know it’s right when you are measuring this person on business outcomes rather than activities and timelines. If most of your conversations are about product UI and functionality, or about whether the project is running on schedule, this may not be an single-threaded leadership conversation. If you’re reviewing KPIs related to revenue, market penetration, media attention, operational efficiency — now we’re talking!

Turning Strategy Into Reality

Ultimately, a Single-Threaded Owner’s job is to shape strategy for a particular initiative and then turn it into real results. Think you are up to the task? See my full article A Single-Threaded Owner’s Guide To Strategy.