[sarks_nz]

Thanks for that. I'm talking about the difference between hitting the deadline on Monday versus Friday. How to incentivise that? ie, do half an hour more work for a week, or skip the table-tennis when someone asks, etc.

As a developer, I was into making sure I hit my goals, and at work to work. As a manager I do struggle with how to emphasise that ownership of product, quality, time. Why should developers care about hitting Monday with effort, instead of coasting to Friday?

[closeparen]

You can’t and you shouldn’t. Pressing isn’t how you get more or better software engineering work done.

What can change the game is spending as lavishly as possible on the factors which make a project take extra days. Bad interfaces. Missing documentation. Sharp edges. De-prioritized bugs. Deferred refactors. Commit the greatest number of the most expensive people to work which is not connected to customers, deadlines, or business metrics, but to mitigating their own frustrations and sensibilities. Of course that is anathema to business culture so it’s rarely done.

[mattcwilson]

I think you might want to ask yourself: why do you want this? Do you think it will benefit them somehow? How? Are you orienting around results you care about, or around results they care about?

[afarrell]

This sounds like you need to be asking very different questions.