How should leaders create and celebrate wins to motivate their team, especially during difficult periods?
4 recorded positions from 3 people, first said Sep 29, 2023. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Manufacture and escalate small or artificial wins in early days
Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023
To unlock a team that isn't shipping, have them ship something very small and then celebrate it heavily
Non-shipping teams are usually stuck in fear or tweaking mode after bad feedback or an outage, and a celebrated small ship restarts the feedback loop of delivering for customers
Scope: applies to the not-shipping state
11:31 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio
Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2024
In a company's early days the CEO's job includes manufacturing small or even artificial wins and escalating them into bigger ones, to carry the team through stagnant periods.
Early on there is genuinely not much to celebrate and things don't look good, so wins have to be created.
Scope: specific to the early days
36:42 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid
Also on the record
Zach Perret · Oct 16, 2024
Leaders should not celebrate output that is factually bad, but should celebrate the progress and trajectory toward good — and failing to do so actively discourages the team.
Going from a two out of ten to a four is genuinely twice as good and usually part of a trajectory to ten, but a four out of ten deliverable is still objectively bad and shouldn't be praised as an outcome; his COO pushes him on this and he sees the discouragement it causes.
35:10 Celebrate progress and trajectory not objectively bad output
Zach Perret · Oct 16, 2024
After setting a big hairy audacious goal, teams should be asked 'what's the first thing you can celebrate that proves you're on track', which is a big unlock for motivating them.
He has always set BHAGs but never asked for the first celebratable milestone; it lets you build a celebration around proof of direction.
37:00 Ask teams what first celebratable milestone proves youre on track
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.