PB 7/6: What motivates you?
And how important is doing 'proper product management' ?
How important is ‘doing product properly’ to you?
As part of the course I’m developing and my coaching, I’ve been looking a lot at what motivates product people. Often in our heads this is a jumble of things that we can’t quite work out. And a big part of what I’m trying to to is help make sense of that.
I’ll get to the product stuff in a bit, but first a bit of a detour into general theories about motivation in the work place.
Daniel Pink’s Drive and Self Determination Theory
A while back everyone was reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive: the Surprising Truth about what motivates us, with its mantra that the three things that really motivated people at work are:
Purpose: the why of work
Mastery: the feeling of getting better at what we’re doing
Autonomy: which is giving people control about certain aspects of their work (more on this later!).
His book was (I think) meant as a guide to executives on how they should set up their companies to be less focussed on carrot and stick motivation (ie: just cash); and more about creating environments where people can do great work.
In my experience it was mostly picked up by disgruntled employees who found a new rationale for their disgruntlement. (‘See - no wonder I’m so grumpy - I have zero Autonomy!).
Pink built on an earlier work around Self Determination Theory (just google it!) by to psychologies, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.
Their theory (SDT to its friends) is all about drawing the line between Intrinsic motivation, that is, when you do just for your own benefit ; and extrinsic motivation, the stuff you either to impress or avoid reprobation from others.
And the three big drivers of intrinsic motivation were
Competence (ie: Mastery by another name)
Relatedness (which is the level of connection you feel with people around you)
Autonomy.
The intrinsic motivators of product work.
If you think about product work - all of these motivators apply.
First Competence/ Mastery: I’ve never met a product manager or product designer who doesn’t take pride in their work, and doesn’t want to be better at it.
There’s a reason there’s so many books, newsletters, coaches out there - because there’s a massive demand for Mastery in our world. Product managers and designers come in all shapes, sizes and personality types…but in my experience pretty much all of them want to hone their craft.
Purpose and Relatedness are also big drivers. We care about the Why, and we care about Who we work with.
Whatever problem it is we’re solving for our customers has to feel important to us; and we love doing it working with smart, fun and equally motivated people.
And then there’s Autonomy. Which is the most loaded of all. Autonomy isn’t about just being given free rein, more an overall sense of control.
Pink talks a lot about stuff we (ie: product people) take for granted: such as being able to wear what you like for work. But also things as product people we aspire to like having very fixed outcomes but relative freedom in how you chase them.
But the other aspect of Autonomy that has become a massive issue since Covid has been the whole issue of remote working - and giving people a choice about where they are on a given day and mandating x number of days in the office.
‘Proper product work’ = Mastery + Autonomy
‘Proper product management’ is something of a mythical beast. But we all know what it is, even if we’ve never actually experienced it.
It has the promise of ticking two of these prime motivators: The ability to hone our skills (Mastery) in an environment where we have freedom to decide exactly how we will achieve the results that are needed (Autonomy).
The fact that it ticks two of these main motivators shows why we all get very excited / intoxicated when we read ‘Empowered’. Our ‘intrinsic motivator’ meters go off the scale.
The question though isn’t whether this is a good / bad or realistic thing (see every discussion ever on LinkedIn about feature factories vs empowered teams). The question is even if it excites you - how important is it to you right now? In your next move? Is this something you should chase?
But…Money! Status!
But what about Money? What about Status? Officially these get called ‘threshold motivators’ - ie they need to be at a certain level, but after that they stop being the drivers of great work.
A lot of Pink’s argument is that if as a boss you put too much focus on monetary reward, people will simply focus on taking the shortest route to achieve that (cf lots of bad behaviour in companies where hitting financial numbers is all that matters).
But from the other perspective, ie: us as individuals: money and status are obviously a big motivator, and can often trump lots of other factors.
So, let’s say you’re a Senior PM and you’re deeply unhappy in a product job. You think your boss is an idiot, you don’t buy into the company’s mission (if they have one), and you are basically just being given orders. So when it comes to the annual pay review and your £80K salary goes up to £83K, you roll your eyes.
But if they suddenly increased your salary to £100K and promote you and give you a couple of people to manage. Well your boss is still an idiot, but at least they’re an idiot who recognises your talent. And well that mission thing…you can live with it.
And yes isn’t it nice to update your LinkedIn profile and get all those ‘Congrats’ message? (Extrinsic motivation of the highest order!).
At the same time - even if you don’t actually rate your work, the fact that someone has given you the bump up does at least make you think you’re good at it (Intrinsic motivator: Mastery!).
I’ve talked in the past about the importance of trajectory in a career - this is really about your rate-of-change of status. It’s not just a nice to have - it’s a necessity for how you’re perceived both internally and in the broader market. In other words, it’s naive not to care about how you’re perceived.
Motivators = Features.
My whole schtick is that you can apply product thinking to your career.
What we need to do is think of each of these six motivators as the features of any job.
Money
Status
Mastery
Autonomy
People (Relatedness)
Purpose
And being a good product person, you know with features, as we all know, is that you can’t have all of them. No matter how much you want them. You have to prioritise.
Your priorities will also shift over time. The need for Money in particular fluctuates with your life stage. As will your definition of some of these.
When you have very young kids real Autonomy might be much more about the time you need for childcare; and frankly, whether you have freedom in how you might pursue an outcome or whether you’re just given top down directions is just a rounding error.
The point is when it comes to your career: you are responsible for both feature definition (ie what each motivator really means to you) and prioritisation (the relative importance of each feature).
Need help..?
I’m going to offer a very nice simple and reasonably priced course to help you develop these ideas. It’ll be ready (all being well) in a couple of weeks.
If you’re looking for something a bit more personalised - just reply to this or find me on LinkedIn to talk about coaching!