Last month, I had my regular 1:1 with one of my strongest engineers. Smart, reliable, ships clean code. The kind of person you build a team around.
I asked the usual: “How’s your motivation this week?”
“Three out of five.”
I paused. This was the same person who voluntarily rewrote our deployment pipeline over a weekend six months ago. Something was off.
My first instinct was burnout. Too many late nights? Life stuff? I started probing. Sleep was fine. Workload was manageable. No personal fires.
Then she said something that stuck with me for days:
“I don’t know why we’re building half of this stuff anymore.”
Here’s what I learned: High performers don’t get demotivated by hard work. They get demotivated by meaningless work.
She wasn’t tired. She was lost.
Our roadmap had become a pile of features requested by various stakeholders. Each ticket made sense in isolation. But zoom out, and there was no story. No thread connecting it all. We had become a feature factory without a destination.
And I, her manager, had let it happen.
The fix wasn’t a motivational speech. It wasn’t a team offsite or a new Slack channel for “wins.” Those are band-aids.
The fix was clarity.
I went to our product lead and asked a simple question: “What’s our north star for this quarter? Not the OKRs. The actual outcome we’re chasing for users.”
It took three conversations to get a real answer. That delay was the problem.
Once we had it, I brought it back to the team. We mapped every active project to that outcome. Two projects didn’t fit → we paused them. The rest suddenly had context.
Within two weeks, her motivation was back to five. Not because the work got easier. Because it made sense again.
If you manage engineers, remember this: Your best people don't want to be busy. They want to matter.
When motivation drops, don’t assume it’s the person. Look at the system around them. Look at yourself.
Sometimes the absence of a “why” is louder than any workload.