How I turned engineers into delivery couriers

The first time I consciously manipulated people's motivation, I was paying couriers for speed.

In 2021, at SberMarket (food delivery), I came up with a feature where the courier sees two options: deliver in 30 minutes and get 2,5$, or deliver in 20 minutes and get 3,2$. The model is simple: do X, get Y. The average delivery time dropped, and I concluded that if you want a result, you pay for it, and if it works for couriers, it works for everyone.

A few years later I was running large teams of smart people solving hard problems, and I motivated them the same way: hit the OKR and get a huge bonus, ship the feature by day X and get an extra one.

It didn't work. People started optimizing for the metric instead of the outcome and stopped thinking, and one guy shipped a bad feature, logged it in his review, and rolled it back right after. LOL!

Then I read the research that explained where I'd gone wrong:

1/ Sam Glucksberg, 1962, the candle experiment (see the picture). You have to attach a candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip, and the solution isn't obvious. One group was promised $20 for solving it fast, the other was just asked to solve it, and the money group took 3.5 minutes longer. The reward narrowed their focus, so instead of hunting for the non-obvious solution people tried to "earn" and went dumb. But when the task was simplified so the solution was obvious, money helped and the rewarded group finished faster.

2/ Dan Ariely et al., 2009 ran a similar experiment in India where the reward was a day's pay, two weeks' pay or five months' pay, and found that the bigger the reward, the worse people did on tasks that require thinking.

That's the difference between couriers and engineers. Mechanical work like pick up and deliver has a clear path, so you pay more and the courier drives faster. Creative work, whether you're a manager, a developer or a designer, has no obvious solution, and "Do X, get Y" narrows the mind and turns an interesting problem into a mechanical one. The smart people I so carefully hired turn into couriers.

TL;DR:

• For routine jobs, pay for the result.
• For creative ones, hand out hard problems and growth, then get out of the way.

Stay tuned

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