Three words to remember when working with people’s motivation and productivity: autonomy, competence

This talk will highlight the view of cognitive psychologists on DP and DX. It aims to help DPEs in their decisions about people and processes, providing them with a short and useful theoretical framework taken from social and organizational psychology.

In this talk I will uncover how the senses of being autonomous, competent and related to other people (a.k.a. The Self-Determination Theory’s three main pillars) influence satisfaction, efficiency, and communication dimensions, and thus overall developer productivity and experience.

I will dissect the Self-Determination Theory and discuss concrete strategies to foster developers' subjective experiences within your teams to boost their satisfaction and productivity based on comprehensive research data.

Here are a few examples how autonomy, competence and relatedness to others manifest themselves in everyday tasks of software developers:
- Developers' feeling of autonomy is higher when coding and lower when they are in meetings or writing emails;
- Developers’ feeling of competence drops when they are bugfixing;
- When developers help colleagues they experience higher levels of competence and relatedness to a team (Russo et al., 2023).

Having in mind three core subjective feelings – feeling of autonomy, competence and relatedness – when making decisions either about people problems or about tooling, will boost satisfaction and productivity in your engineering teams.