You're leading a mobile app development team. How can you keep them motivated?

Setting a clear vision, scope, and objectives for the project is essential for motivating the team and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Communicating these aspects clearly and consistently helps team members understand their roles and responsibilities, fostering a sense of ownership and purpose. Aligning the project goals with the values and interests of the team members can increase their motivation and engagement. Setting realistic and measurable milestones and deadlines provides a roadmap for progress, and tracking and celebrating achievements along the way boosts morale and maintains momentum.

One should start with understanding what interests the members of their team. - Multiple informal discussions, random coffee chats etc. - What brought them to development and mobile apps. - Why are they still in the same role? A formal 1:1 meeting is just to initiate the conversation. Then explore how you or the organisation can help them, suggest them to see if any interests them like a tech stack, more interaction with business teams etc. Once you have some thing to work on, then you work together to map their development with your projects and goals. A manager's only role is to help the team become better.

Just like a ship needs a destination, our team needs clear goals. Tell everyone what we want to achieve and what's expected from them. This way, everyone can work together easily and we build fantastic apps!

Additionally, foster a supportive environment where team members feel empowered to ask questions, seek guidance, and collaborate on projects. Encourage cross-functional learning by organizing internal knowledge-sharing sessions or pairing team members with different expertise levels on tasks.

Promote collaboration and mentorship as much as possible, with the right team members of course. Nothing else motivates a senior engineer, than delegating simpler tasks to junior devs and mentoring them and spending time themselves on more complex work. It is excellent growth hack for them, and they know it. Junior devs on the other hand get a head start and feel good that they are being trusted with the work and don't have work on stale code.

Motivation is intrinsic. Accountability is a great motivator. Intrinsic accountability comes when engineers buy into the decision-making. They buy in, when they feel heard. They feel heard, where there is a team environment that promotes honest and constructive debates. Constructive debates are possible when there is trust, which comes overtime when team members are vulnerable and open about their strengths, mistakes and weaknesses. It’s then, there is no fear of being 'exposed'. It is the responsibility of the leader of the team to lead by example and be vulnerable about their own strengths, mistakes, weakness. If you want to know more, read ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ by Patrick Lencioni. It has been my inspiration for over a decade

I've led dev teams for over 5 years. My approach involves not taking breaks from a task until I solve it efficiently. This sets an example for junior devs, who then work with similar dedication and motivation. Additionally, I stay advanced and up-to-date, ensuring I can answer any question from juniors, fostering their learning. I constantly try new things, motivating my team to do the same. No matter how challenging a task is, I maintain a positive attitude, believing it can be done. This optimism boosts my team's morale and motivation.

Listen to their needs and address what is causing the delays. In software development if a project takes more time than usual, it then becomes a headache and developers starting to get demotivate from it.