Seeking purpose – intrinsic motivation at ASOS
Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the three core components to intrinsic motivation. How do you embed these into your technology function/department? Read on to explore these concepts further and how we go about it at ASOS…
The book Drive by Daniel Pink is an international bestseller and a commonly referenced book around modern management. If you haven’t read it, the book essentially looks at what motivators are for people when it comes to work.
Some may immediately assume this is financial, which, to a certain degree is true. The research in the book explains that for simple, straightforward work, financial rewards to motivation are indeed effective. It also explains how we need to understand this as being an ‘external’ motivational factor. Motivation from these external factors is classed as extrinsic motivation. These factors only go so far and, in the complex domain such as software development, quickly lose effectiveness when pay is fair.
This is where we look at the second motivational aspect of intrinsic motivation. When pay is fair and work is more complex, this is when the behaviour of the person is motivated by an inner drive that propels a person to pursue an activity. Pink explains how intrinsic motivation is made up of three main parts:
- Autonomy — the desire to direct our own lives
- Mastery — the desire to continually improve at something that matters
- Purpose — the desire to do things in service of something larger than ourselves
When people have intrinsic motivation, it motivates people to do their best work. So how do we try to bring intrinsic motivation to our work in Tech @ ASOS?
Autonomy
Autonomy is core to all our teams here at ASOS. From a technical perspective, teams have aligned autonomy around technologies they can leverage. We do this through things such as our Patterns and Practices group, which looks to improve technical alignment across teams and agree on patterns for solving particular problems. We then communicate these patterns both internally and externally, which makes our software safer to operate and reduces re-learning effort.
As a team of Agile Coaches, we uphold this autonomy principle by not prescribing a single way of working for any of our teams. Instead, we give them the freedom to choose however they want to work, but guiding them around ensuring this way of working aligns with agile values and principles.
From books such as Accelerate, we know that enforcing standardisation with working practices upon teams actually reduces learning and experimentation. When your target market is fashion-loving 20-somethings, teams simply must be able to innovate and change without having what Marty Cagan would call ‘process people’ who impose constraints on how teams must work. You cannot inhibit yourselves by mandating one single way of working.
To bring this to life with a simple example, we don’t have any teams that use all elements of Scrum as per the guide. Do we have teams that take inspiration and practices from Scrum? Yes. Can they change/get rid of practices that don’t add value? Of course. Do they also blend practices from other frameworks too? Absolutely! For instance, we have plenty of teams who work in sprints (Scrum), love pairing (eXtreme Programming) and use flow metrics (Kanban) to continuously improve, all whilst retaining a core principle of “you build it, you run it” (DevOps). Autonomy is therefore an essential factor for all our technology teams.
Enough about autonomy… what about mastery?
Mastery
Mastery exists in a few forms for our teams. A core approach to mastery our teams use is our Fundamentals. These are measures we use to drive continuous improvement and operational excellence across our services. Our own Scott Frampton discussing the history and evolution of this in detail in this series. In short, it comprises of four pillars:
- Monitoring & Observability
- Performance & Scalability
- Resiliency
- Deployability
Teams self-assess and use this as a compass (rather than a GPS) to guide them in their improvement efforts. This means we are aligned in “what good looks like” when engineering and operating complex systems.
The levels of the respective measures are continually assessed and evolve quarter to quarter, in line with industry trends, as well as patterns and practices, so teams never “sit still” or think they have achieved a level of mastery that they will never surpass.
Similarly, mastery is something that is encouraged and celebrated through our internal platforms and initiatives. ASOS Backstage is our take on Spotify Backstage, another tool in our toolbox to better equip our teams in understanding the software landscape at ASOS. We also have our Defenders of the Wheel group — a collection of engineers who work to support the development and growth of new ASOS Core libraries and internal tools.
To encourage mastery, individuals across Tech are able to achieve certifications relevant to their role(s) and/our contributions to these internal platforms/groups:
This means that there are frequent sources of motivation for individuals in our teams from a mastery perspective.
What about the final aspect of intrinsic motivation, purpose?
Purpose
This is probably the most challenging area for our teams, as often this may be outside of their control. As an organisation, we’re very clear on what our vision and purpose is:
Similarly, our CEO José recently reminded us all about what makes ASOS the organisation it is, covering our purpose, performance and passion at a recent internal event:
The challenge is that in a tech organisation, this doesn’t always easily translate into the specific work an individual and/or team is doing. If a team is working on a User Story for example, it’s not an unfair question for them to be asking “Why am I doing this?” or “What impact will this have?” or even “Where is the value?”. One of our efforts around this has been introducing and improving what we call ‘Semester Planning’, which Paul Taylor will cover in a future post. The other main effort has been around portfolio transparency.
Portfolio transparency, as a concept, is essentially end-to-end linkage in the work anyone in a team is doing so that they, as an individual, can understand how this aligns with the goals and strategy of the organisation. Books such as Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart bring this concept to life in visuals like so:
The key to this idea is that an individual should be able to understand the value in the work they are doing. This value should be as simple as possible – i.e. not via some Fibonacci voodoo or ambiguous mathematical formula (e.g. SAFe’s version of WSJF). The acid test being that can anyone in the tech organisation understand how a given item (story, feature, epic) contributes to the goals of the organisation and the value this brings. My own ‘self-imposed’ constraint for this being that they should achieve this in less than five clicks.
At its core, this really is just about better traceability of work end to end. We have high-performing teams who regularly showcase technical excellence, but how does that fit into the big picture?
With the work we have been doing, a team can now take a User Story that they will be working on and, within five clicks, understand the value this brings and the strategic alignment to the goals of the organisation (note these numbers have been modified for the purpose of this blog):
Of course, this is dependent on quality data entry! Not everything (yet!) in our portfolio contains this information, however, this is the first positive step in making visible the purpose and value in our work.
How do you do this in your organisation? Can teams easily see the value in what they are doing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below…
About Me
I’m Nick, one of our Agile Coaches at ASOS. I help guide individuals, teams and platforms to improve their ways of working in a framework-agnostic manner. Outside of work, my new-born son keeps me on my toes agility-wise, here’s me trying to influence him to share his dad's interest in sneakers…
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