I didn’t interpret that sentence like you did.

I think he was wary of what it actually meant to the product. For instance, imagine we have a problem with the authentication on an internal component, and then, someone from quality control states “don’t worry, I’ll own the authentication issues”. What does that even mean? Is QA going to solve the issue? How? Are you going to oversee the way other team(s) solve the issue?

That’s how I interpreted it.

He knows exactly what owning a product means. His subtext is "if you're going to talk about owning something, please add specificity to your claim."

He knew exactly what he was saying - he didn't want to "OWN" the problem nor the solution....he was abdicating is sole responsibility for the mess... and rightfully so as its a cross organizational issues (based on the thread). This is a great example of what folks should expect when hiring/working at a large corp. So much time and effort is spent in this EXACT manner. Its amazing that anything does get done, in some respect. Its also why I found the startup experience amazing because there's no time/place for this, but if they succeed, then all end up in this type of environment / scenario.

AND, I can vouch for the pain and suffering that "Marketing" can place on tech teams and end product fails.... heck MS , to this day, cloud "EXPERTS" can not explain their pricing model, or just chose not to.