[austin-cheney]

Two things: rewards and separation of business concerns.

First, you need to properly motivate your people to take maximum initiative to build things. If there is time to spare there is time to improve internal automation and refactor existing internal software processes. Do it, because that churn is normally hard to financially justify but it’s how you build superior software.

Also, use that time to make massive advancements in documentation. The documentation should be human readable and not specs. Specs are technical documents created for either planning purposes or conformity in the wild.

You need to reward your people for small successes that increase automation, reduce tech debt, and so on. Rewards can be things like recognition programs, points for periodic evaluations, lunch coupons, PTO, awards, and so forth.

Separate out business concerns so that the developers are not churning on product decisions unless the developers are creating new original software tools. When managing open source projects there are many product decisions to be made but most of the energy is actually documentation and maintenance. If necessary bring a product owner into the mix to advise your developers on these internal initiatives.