[lostcolony]

You're aiming for the same outcome in that example; it's just that your incentives for it aren't the same. That's okay.

Oftentimes different incentives imply different outcomes, though. I've been in environments where product's incentives were not "enable dev to get to work" but instead "create documentation/slide decks for upper management". So they were busy as hell, creating artifacts that did not help dev identify what problem they were solving (let alone what solutions might look like), and were extremely successful based on what they cared about, but meant that the dev teams had very little time or direction to be successful with, leading to low morale and high rates of burnout.

In the example you provide, if that leads to one person going off to play with new stuff while the rest of the team is focused on the project, that's a problem. Likewise if the person wanting to get promoted insists on taking on all the high visibility work (or worse, just taking credit for it), that creates a problem. As long as the desired outcome is the same and you can create a path towards it that aligns with everyone's incentives (project succeeds, people get recognized for their contributions, we use some new stuff along the way) you can be successful.