Optimize "good feels" for what matters
What kind of “complete” feels most satisfying for the folks on your team?
It doesn’t even have to be about explicit metrics or rewards, though those will certainly have an effect–but if you were an individual contributor, would you feel best about clearing off your own plate, or about collaborating with one other person to get both of your stuff shipped, or about seeing an entire project or workstream brought to a successful close?
There’s a balance to be pursued here; both the individuated and communal approaches have their tradeoffs.
The upside of encouraging individual “task done” accomplishments to be rewarding is mostly about frequency: something cut down for one person is likely smaller than a collaborative workstream, and getting a rhythm of fast wins is addictive and encouraging. It’s a nice way to keep folks engaged & can reduce burnout. The potential dark side is trying to judge individuals’ efficacy by widgets created per unit time; if you’re not running an assembly line, this is probably counterproductive for you at best.
Aside from the smallest of organizations, though, the things you deliver that matter are the result of a series of specialists working together–not a single person checking off a single task. And if you (even unintentionally!) cause “finishing my work” to feel better than “finishing our work”, the temptation is for folks to ship something before it’s optimized for the next person that’ll have to work with it.
For example: in a product-led organization, do product engineers feel they’re accomplishing more if they create and populate general descriptions for eight new features, or if they work with folks that understand the customer needs and delivery limitations to deeply refine a single feature description before anyone even decides whether it’s worth working on?
The “pursuit of balance” here is continual–your team probably doesn’t have the ideal balance for this today, and even if they do, it’s likely to be in flux over time. So keep an eye out, and consider: what feels most rewarding? and what overall purpose does that best serve?
