Ownership of digital assets: what to get right first

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you only fix one thing about ownership of digital assets this quarter, make it the first item below.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Start here

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Then this

Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Eventually

Get it in writing before work starts. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.