Incentives...

Earlier today, I was musing about a culture we have at Community where people are encouraged to point out issues with our system or processes without the responsibility of fixing them.

The general idea is that if you spot it, you don’t have to fix it because you reported it. The goal is to incentivize people to freely report issues without the fear of being responsible for fixing them.

On the other hand, people are incentivized to fix issues we discover in our system. Every team is responsible for their services - their codebase and infrastructure. Overall, every engineer has a great sense of ownership of the system - we care about our customers, our stakeholders and our colleagues.

We have a culture were we all optimize to make life easier for each other. We are all incentivized to fix issues we discover in our system.

These two incentives has created a culture where issues are fixed promptly: on one hand, people are incentivized to report issues, and on the other hand, people are incentivized to the fix issues.

Interestingly, the culture of ownership, and responsibility to fix issues our teams own has impacted how issues are reported - people who report issues do sufficient research to ensure their reports provide context and are actionable.

They also provide suggestions on how to fix the issues, and sometimes offer to fix the issues themselves or pair with the team to fix the issues.

High level, the incentive for reporting an issue is vocal appreciation from the impacted team and members of the engineering org, however, the incentive for fixing the issue includes all of these, deeper respect + trust from the rest of the engineering org, a personal sense of ownership, and another line item on your performance review.

Appreciation for spotting issues is great, but we ensure the reward for fixing issues is even greater.

This is a great way to ensure people are incentivized to fix issues without the fear of being responsible for fixing them.

Incentives are powerful, use them wisely.

I’m curious to know how other companies handle this. Do you have a similar culture? How do you incentivize people to fix issues? How do you incentivize people to report issues?