Every project you assign is a chance to grow the person you hand it to. The best leaders design it that way.
Give an engineer a problem that stretches them, the freedom to solve it their way, and a clear line to why it matters — and you'll get work they're proud of. That's not a personality you got lucky with. It's three motivators Daniel Pink named in Drive, and I build how I lead around them.
Mastery. Assign projects that grow a specific technical edge. The engineer who wants to go deep on distributed systems gets the architecture work on ECS. The project is the gym.
Autonomy. Let them choose the stack and the method — inside guardrails that protect the product, not my preferences. The freedom is the point; the guardrails just keep it safe.
Purpose. Tie every task to something real: moving ECS forward, hardening the architecture, expanding what we offer for our customers. When an engineer sees why the work matters, they bring more of themselves to it.
A few years in, one of my teams had run out of mountain to climb. Nine engineers, a mature product — every major customer feature shipped, operations stable, region build-outs automated down to a runbook the on-call operators could run themselves. Solid work, and the start of KTLO mode. But a team that's hit the ceiling stops growing, and a team that's stopped growing gets restless — I could see it coming. So I lobbied for — and won — a greenfield re-architecture of a service handling over 200 million calls a day: the kind of rebuild that sets a product up for its next five years. Every engineer got room to develop deep mastery across several areas. The team owned how the new service got built. And the work plainly mattered — reshaping a core product, not keeping a light on. They're thriving now, delivering at a velocity and standard that's raising the bar.
One project. All three.
Pay people fairly first — enough that money isn't the question. Then design for the three. The raise and the promotion still come, but they arrive as the result of great work, never the thing that produced it.
Motivation isn't something you pay for. It's something you design.
So before the next assignment, ask the question that matters: what is this project growing in the person I'm handing it to?
The skill isn't motivating your team. It's designing work they'd want to do anyway.
Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose come from Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009).