Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 21. Rewards and Incentives

Rewards and incentives are motivators for the employees of every company. The biggest issue I see with companies trying to transition to becoming product-led is that they don’t evaluate their current reward structures to make sure they incentivize the right behavior.

I worked with a company in which everyone’s bonuses were paid out based on a corporate scorecard. Every year, the company would go into yearly planning, determine what it wanted to accomplish, add it to the scorecard, and assign people to it. Much of the scorecard was made up of items to deliver, rather than goals to hit.

When I was first interviewing the product leaders about how they were measured for success, they all laughed. “Do you want to know what we do in December? We stop everything we’re doing and look at the scorecard. If we haven’t delivered on the items there, because they were really not as important as we thought a year ago, we just start building anything that will satisfy those requirements. Melissa, we literally ship whatever shit we can build in time that will check that box. Come January, we spend all our time pulling apart all the sloppy code. But, hey, we all get our bonuses in March.”

Basically, everyone was wasting a month out of the year just trying to meet these goals so that they could get their bonuses, which represented a significant part of their salaries. Disaster.

It would shock you the number of times I’ve heard product managers say, “It doesn’t ...