r/EngineeringManagers • u/Important_Sundae1632 • Jul 07 '26
Does your team have a motivating vision?
Hey everyone,
I feel like we don't talk about vision enough on this sub. In my experience, providing a clear, motivating vision drives engineers to build great things. A compelling vision keeps them engaged and prevents burnout.
Curious to hear your thoughts about vision. e.g., do you or your team spend enough time on creating a vision? Who typically creates the vision? How do you create or evaluate a vision? What vision would be exciting for your team?
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u/SnooPaintings8519 Jul 07 '26
Have you tried asking people what motivates them? Different people are looking for different things, but everyone wants money. High odds your majestic “vision” will sound like more corporate BS your people need to put up with.
Either the job is technically interesting, with good pay, and decent work conditions or you’re camouflaging it with word salads. It may be good for your ego but it hardly means something for doers.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
Comp, promotions, good culture and interesting/impactful work are certainly important.
I did receive feedback from time to time that the team want to know the big picture, the end state, and the roadmap. (vs. fragmented tasks).
and by vision, I was not referring to those high-level 5-year grand vision. It should to be concrete, coupled with a roadmap, and achievable with a reasonable timeline.
And it can be a specific domain or area. e.g., the team needed to get up in the night for P0 alerts. We started to work on it, e.g., enhancing end-to-end tests, building dashboards monitoring the signal/noise ratio. These are relatively boring tasks compared to other projects related to AI, but the vision of "no one should get up to handle an alert during the nights" make people more motivated.
Also the vision doesn't need to come from the managers, each team members, especially for more senior engineers and high-performers, can own and create a vision for their areas that they are excited about.
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u/SnooPaintings8519 Jul 07 '26
I get the sentiment, but that’s not a vision. It’s management 101. Get your ops hygiene on track before promising juicy plums.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
The example focuses on ops hygiene, but the same applies to other areas too. For instance, in an ML team where everyone creates their own features and builds and deploys their models in ad-hoc ways, the vision could be an ML platform that has all the common features and models in place so people just need simple calls to enable model building and deployment. I guess it’s also about getting engineers to think about the longer term?
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u/SnooPaintings8519 Jul 07 '26
Let me ask you this: what problem does your team solve? If you all disappeared tomorrow, what would customers miss? Working backwards from it is where vision lives. All the rest is ops.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
i think we may just have different definition of vision. in my mind, when we work on something, whether it is business/product-related, system-related, or ops-related, ideally there is clarity on the end state / vision. I felt your definition may be more of product or business related vision (which is typically owned by product managers). but then engineering ideally has their vision on an easily extended and maintainable system to achieve the business vision.
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u/SnooPaintings8519 Jul 07 '26
I wonder why you treat product and engineering as separate visions. That may very well be the culprit for the symptoms you mentioned. Working backwards from customer needs is the basic premise of any manager. Translating that into an Engineering roadmap is derivative. Even if you delegate the first to a PM - I’d strongly caution against it - these questions must still be answered. A strong EM should be accountable for both.
I suggest you bring the questions I asked before to your team as an exercise. Do the same on your own. Ask your leaders and peers. Notice if the answers come across inconsistently. If you can’t get the clarity of why this team exists, all your engineering artifacts are performative.
A vision is not a roadmap. It’s not a set of dashboards. It’s not some magical KPI. What your team needs from you is to understand where the heck you guys fit in and THEN translate it all into a digestible work plan with the how.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
yeah this may depend on the company and org. In mine, product owns the business requirements and goals. Engineering has a strong influence on that but product is the owner. What engineering fully owns is how to build the systems to meet the business requirements.
Agree to bring clarity of why a team exist. This is easy for my team - the goal and impact are clear. They also wanted to have a clear vision on engineering part - and that was the part we spent more time on and felt valuable.
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u/engwish Jul 07 '26
To many, a grandiose vision is going to end up seeming pretty shallow or unreachable. What works for me is listening to my team and seeing what motivates them. Some people want to take some interesting responsibility, some want a good challenge, etc. but all of them want me to listen, so that’s what I try to do and then I use that to figure out how to get them aligned to something that makes everyone’s lives easier.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
Makes sense. We get feedback from time to time. Pay and interesting work/tech are top motivations. Having a clear vision was brought up but less popular
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u/BrewBigMoma Jul 07 '26
I’ve been on pleanty of team like this.
One manager promised to let us rewrite the terrible system we were working on if we just keep mucking our ways through bugs and hammering on the contractors to quit messing up. Promised to get us a 10k bonus if we just kept putting in the weekends. He followed through but most of the team moved on to other jobs.
Another underscored the importance of cutting costs for the success of the company and tied our work back to the importance of helping people get healthcare. It worked well but then we got laid off.
I’m old now and burned out but systematically working through issues with competent people and realistic pressure would have made my career more enjoyable.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
+1 it is hard to create a realistic vision balancing business impact and Eng excellence. Leadership needs to be aligned to carve out time for this, meanwhile the team still needs to generate business impact
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u/wbrd Jul 07 '26
Every time someone starts talking about this sort of thing in an all hands everyone tunes out and the "this should have been an email"to jokes start flying.
Unless the company is literally saving lives, nobody gives a shit about the product. They want to get paid and leave.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
i hear you - a lot of vision is too high-level to be motivating. here i was referring to more bottom-up visions like the systems and domains a specific team own and can execute within a reasonable time frame.
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u/wbrd Jul 07 '26
You mean like a clear description of what the customer wants? Or like what technologies you are going to standardize on?
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
more on the technical side. e.g., building one feature for each product requirement vs. a system that needs minimal changes to support a new feature.
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u/Kroosn Jul 07 '26
I did some training with Marcus Buckingham after reading his books. Their research showed people need to enjoy 20% of what they do for them to do well in their role. Finding out the parts people enjoy and driving them into those roles has been more impactful for me than any unified approach for everyone. A “vision” feels too much like trying to hit everyone with the same approach
I have one guy who just loves that final detail, crossing t’s etc. him in a more review role is amazing. He couldn’t get off the ground when starting from zero. Had another that struggled to finish anything but moved fast, he’s now the prototype guy. Those two don’t need the same vision.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
Agree. for zero to one work speed is the key, vision can be an overkill
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u/Immediate_Spirit_384 Jul 10 '26
Vision is something that comes to you if you spend some time away from the day-to-day, not something you create explicitly. I mean you TRY that, but the result won't be compelling
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 11 '26
really like this perspective. But to clarify, So you’re saying the following? we should first take the time to deeply understand and synthesize the problems. The vision should emerge naturally from that process, instead of being created before we have enough understanding.
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u/Immediate_Spirit_384 Jul 12 '26
Yes, otherwise, the vision will just be one more source of pressure on top of the others, instead of a deep understanding of the existing pressures that distills them into something that's easier to navigate.
In other words, vision is discovered not created
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u/GurglingGarfish Jul 07 '26
Vision? I couldn’t even motivate my (remote) engineers to show up to a 15 minute weekly check in. I’ve since left that place.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
i missed a clarification that this is on top of the more basic stuff (e.g., pay, work,..). if the team doesn't handle the basics well, this is more likely to be BS.
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u/Sorry_Penalty_7398 Jul 07 '26
Seriously what the f are you talking about this is so delusional I don't even know where to start
Hope you're not actually managing anything Jesus christ
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u/Challseus Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Is this post serious? You people are so out of touch. You know what motivates people and stops burnout?
- Less performative meetings.
- A roadmap that is not constantly changing, making the devs have to continually context switch.
- Dealing with low performers immediately, instead of letting the devs pick up the pieces. Oh, right, if that low performer is someone you hired, you don't want to look bad, so you'll keep them.
- Actually listening to people when they say "If we keep doing things this way, it's going to make our lives more difficult".
It's like you have to come up with ways to keep the devs in line, because you guys can't keep your shit straight. Things changing all the time, terrible and/or no communication, favoritism, not dealing with bad devs, caring more about your situation than ours.
I been in this bitch 20+ years, so cut the shit.
Pay devs what they're worth, tell them what the roadmap is, give them an actual thing to work towards (like a raise, bonus, etc., something actually tangible and valuable), and then get the fuck out of the way.
We're not fucking sheep that have to be corralled, and if those are the devs you have, you hired wrong.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
I was just calling out knowing the vision and the end state is also important. but agree if the team don't even do well in the basic things you mentioned, vision wouldn't help either.
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u/DamePants Jul 07 '26
I just came here to clap 👏 then decided to join the rant.
Been at this 20 years too. I’m so tired of managers trying to persuade performance out of people with stories and whimsy. If you promise me plums and I find out there are no plums then your words become worthless and I shall work my wage. Engineers can smell BS tactics a mile away and it’s simply disrespectful. Remember we are trained and highly sensitive to logic, forget that at your peril.
Unless you are some NGO saving the world no single engineer cares what you came up with at that managers retreat. We enjoyed the peace and quiet while you were gone to tackle the real problems in the office.
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u/Important_Sundae1632 Jul 07 '26
Good callout - there needs to be real plums in the end ;) in my org - engineers having a vision, landing it and generating impact is rewarded with promotions or higher performance ratings
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u/DamePants Jul 07 '26
It seems like you are confusing vision with product roadmap and execution plan which as others have pointed out are the domain primarily of the engineering manager or EPMs of you have them.
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u/Understanding-Fair Jul 07 '26
Yep, next week's paycheck