They have a built in feature to assign individual cards to people that we used, which showed their avatar clearly on the board view. It wasn’t tied to “start”, but we did use that. There was only one WIP column for the whole team.
The decoupling from “start” is an interesting detail.
In Tracker, as a developer on a team, it was nice to just be able to click “start” and then… well… get started, and have my name automatically be assigned.
But there was still some rough edges we all got used to (having to then manually add our pair as the other owner). And as a PM or some other individual on the team who cared more than the rest to update things to reflect current state, there was some extra steps involved to get it into the right state with the right owners.