From Mandates to Invitations: The Hidden Power of Intrinsic Motivation

How Curiosity and Empathy Foster Real Adoption

Setting the Stage: Why Clear Strategies Often Fail

For over ten years, I’ve navigated the complexities of platform engineering. Each role—team lead, group lead, architect, technical lead—brought invaluable lessons about organizational change. But the past five years at AppsFlyer sharpened those lessons into something deeper.

At AppsFlyer, we faced immense complexity supporting 65 engineering teams, over 400 developers, and roughly 1500 microservices. Major strategic initiatives were essential: migrations from EC2 to Kubernetes, shifting observability from on-prem solutions to Datadog, and transitioning artifact management from on-prem Artifactory to SaaS, among others. Each initiative was logically sound, strategically necessary, and backed by technical expertise. Yet, despite our best efforts, we consistently encountered unexpected resistance, emotional fatigue, and ultimately burnout.

Some of our most talented engineers, brilliant people I admired deeply, found themselves caught between strategic mandates and daily practical realities. After two intense years leading these efforts myself as group lead and total of 5 years in the platform organization, I personally chose to transition into a different role internally, hoping to uncover a better way.

Gregor Ojstersek

wrote about this also in his blog post Not Communicating Your Impact is Killing Your Career.

These experiences led me into deeper reflection. How could clearly beneficial, strategically sound initiatives still consistently struggle? What critical factor were we missing?

In this post, I don’t claim to offer universal solutions or a new management framework. Instead, I humbly share reflections from my lived experiences, inviting you into a thoughtful exploration of intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and psychological safety as keys to genuine, lasting change.

Because after a decade in the trenches, I've learned one clear thing: true transformation rarely comes from mandates. Instead, it emerges organically when leaders carefully cultivate environments that invite change rather than impose it.

Let’s explore together how we might do just that.

When Top-Down Mandates Hit a Wall

One of our most strategically critical projects at AppsFlyer was migrating 1500 services from EC2 to Kubernetes. The vision was clear and compelling: improve reliability, consistency, and scalability and reduce significant costs (we were running around 20K EC2s) . On paper, we had everything aligned, detailed roadmaps, strong executive support, documentation, tooling and dedicated engineering teams.

Yet, from day one, we encountered friction that went beyond the technical. At ground level, teams faced realities we'd underestimated. Each of the 65 engineering teams had distinct workflows, languages, practices, and constraints—Java, Scala, Python, Go, Ruby, Node.js—and each required different considerations. Our carefully crafted strategy and clear timelines unintentionally felt like disruptions rather than support.

In one memorable meeting, one group lead openly shared his frustration:
"I completely understand why we’re doing this. But our team’s setup is intricate. What seems straightforward to you means weeks of rework and disruption for us. We’re already behind schedule, and this feels impossible."

His sentiment was echoed by many others privately, leaders who felt deeply committed but increasingly overwhelmed. Back at the time, I found it hard to understand. But after honest conversation with one of our group leads, he shared with me that his group has 43 different cross organizations initiatives that they are involved in, not including the work that they want to deliver.

Despite strategic clarity and technical rigor, emotional resistance emerged clearly. Engineers, talented, passionate individuals who had previously thrived, began showing signs of burnout. Over the months, this fatigue grew increasingly visible. I watched as some of our best engineers quietly stepped away from their roles or even left the company, exhausted by the gap between our strategic intentions and their daily struggles.

This wasn't an isolated event. Another large-scale initiative, migrating observability from an on-prem, non-standardized solution to Datadog, revealed a similar pattern. Again, despite strong logic and clear intentions, the reality was complex: 7000 repositories, 1500 services, diverse languages, and deeply entrenched processes. Teams felt mandates didn't fully address their nuanced needs, creating similar emotional resistance, fatigue, and frustration (took us around 2.5 years to fully complete this migration).

Reflecting deeply on these experiences, I recognized a critical pattern clearly: Even the strongest strategies, clearest roadmaps, and most talented engineers can struggle under imposed, top-down mandates. The underlying issue wasn't strategic clarity or technical expertise, it was how we led these initiatives. When changes felt externally imposed rather than intrinsically meaningful, emotional resistance and practical struggles inevitably surfaced, eroding trust, energy, and morale.

These challenges led me to a critical realization: if top-down mandates consistently fall short, what other approach could genuinely unlock alignment, intrinsic motivation and enthusiastic adoption?

This question began reshaping my leadership perspective dramatically, leading me to discover a different, more empathetic approach to organizational change.

Why Carrots Outperform Sticks in Organizational Change

After repeated frustrations with top-down approaches, something unexpected happened when AppsFlyer faced a critical, company-wide security initiative. The task was straightforward on paper: we needed every team to remove sensitive secrets from our on-prem GitLab repositories. Traditionally, such an initiative would mean strict deadlines, formal mandates, clear penalties, and top-down pressure. It felt like another looming challenge, likely to trigger resistance and burnout all over again.

But this time, reflecting on past struggles, we decided to try something different. Instead of enforcing mandates, we connected the removal of GitLab secrets directly to a powerful intrinsic incentive: unlocking team access to advanced AI tooling, specifically Cursor AI. Rather than pushing teams toward compliance, we aimed to pull them forward with something genuinely valuable, something they wanted and saw clear benefit in for their everyday work.

The difference was immediate and remarkable.

Instead of resistance, we saw enthusiasm. Teams began proactively reaching out, asking questions, clarifying timelines, and eagerly adopting the required changes. Engineers didn’t just comply; they embraced the change, driven by a clear intrinsic desire. The transformation in attitudes was strikingly visible. Leaders who previously viewed similar platform mandates as interruptions suddenly approached us to speed up their adoption. Engineers across the organization actively took initiative and collaborated organically, energized by the tangible reward they deeply valued.

This success clearly illustrated the power of intrinsic motivation over external mandates. When the outcome was something engineers desired, change no longer felt imposed. It became naturally compelling, something they actively pursued. In providing a meaningful incentive instead of penalties, we inadvertently fostered an environment of psychological safety, curiosity, and enthusiastic engagement.

I realized a fundamental truth about organizational change: intrinsic motivation dramatically outperforms imposed mandates because it taps directly into what teams genuinely want and value. By linking a clearly defined benefit, access to valuable AI tools, to a critical organizational goal, we unlocked a completely different level of alignment and adoption.

Witnessing this firsthand made me question even more deeply: what if we consistently applied intrinsic motivation and psychological safety as intentional strategies for change, instead of treating them as secondary or accidental?

What if, rather than pushing teams toward change, we invited them into it, by carefully aligning their intrinsic interests with organizational goals?

With this curiosity in mind, I began to explore a radically different approach to leadership and change, one based on cultivating intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and psychological safety.

Let me show you what happened next.

Sonic: Bottom-Up Magic

I decided to approach my next big challenge differently. Instead of leading with mandates, deadlines, or formal roadmaps, I decided to build something genuinely developer-first, something designed around solving the immediate, daily pains engineers faced.

That something was Sonic, a fresh take on our CI/CD and testing automation platform. But this time, I didn’t start with top-down rules or rigid frameworks. Instead, Sonic was intentionally flexible, developer-friendly, and clearly responsive to the daily realities teams were living. From the outset, Sonic emphasized the things that matter most to engineers: streamlined processes, delightful interfaces, clear, easy-to-follow documentation, open-source like landing page, actionable feedback directly inside their merge requests, and even a playful chatbot capable of answering documentation questions instantly. Instead of another enforced solution, Sonic clearly offered immediate, tangible value, wrapped in gaming-inspired feedback and intuitive experiences that felt joyful, not mandated.

Crucially, Sonic was built with flexibility in mind. I had strong opinions about how testing and CI/CD should look in distributed systems, but this time I chose to provide flexibility first. Teams could adopt Sonic in their own way, at their own pace, adapting it to their existing workflows without immediate pressure to conform. This intentional flexibility became a critical ingredient for adoption: it created psychological safety, making it easy for engineers to try Sonic without fear of breaking things or wasting time.

To introduce Sonic, I deliberately avoided traditional announcements or formal mandates. Instead, I opted for something much simpler: curiosity. During an internal R&D All Hands talk on how to leverage AI in novel ways (my Iron Man Mentality talk), I briefly and casually teased Sonic across just two slides. I invited teams to approach me directly after the talk if they were curious to learn more. No mandates, no pressure just a genuine invitation to explore.

The response was remarkable. Almost immediately, teams began proactively reaching out. They scheduled meetings, asked questions, and, most exciting of all, started inventing new ways Sonic might help them. Rather than resisting or begrudging compliance, they actively engaged. Soon, Sonic became a real, ongoing conversation between engineering teams, not something imposed from above, but something actively requested, adapted, and organically embraced from below.

Even more powerfully, this grassroots enthusiasm opened the door to deeper strategic alignment. Because teams felt intrinsically motivated, psychologically safe, and genuinely excited about Sonic, conversations about our more opinionated best practices suddenly felt natural and productive, not forced.

Engineers were curious and open to ideas they might previously have resisted, simply because Sonic clearly demonstrated genuine value from the start.

It became vividly clear to me that intrinsic motivation, psychological safety, intentional flexibility, and curiosity-driven invitations were far more powerful tools than top-down mandates. Sonic showed me how genuine alignment emerges when we respect autonomy, understand real pains, and offer meaningful, immediate value.

Seeing Sonic’s success firsthand sparked a new question for me: what if leadership isn't about carefully managing pieces on a chessboard, but about thoughtfully cultivating an environment, much like a gardener, where change can grow naturally and thrive organically?

Let’s explore this gardener mindset together and consider how it could reshape our approach to leadership and organizational change.

The Gardener Mindset – Cultivating Change from Within

After moving from my role in Platform (DevOps) to our R&D (Growth Platform group), I experienced a fundamental shift in perspective. Stepping closer to daily developer realities allowed me to see more clearly and empathetically what was missing in my previous approach.

Instead of enforcing strategic mandates, what I now see as the "Chess Master" approach, I naturally embraced a different style: the Gardener Mindset. A gardener doesn’t control each plant's growth directly; instead, they cultivate the right conditions—sunlight, water, good soil—to enable growth to happen organically. In organizational terms, this means creating an environment that nurtures intrinsic motivation, psychological safety, curiosity, and genuine alignment.

Through the development and adoption of Sonic, five core principles clearly emerged as essential ingredients to this gardener mindset:

1. Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation consistently outperforms imposed mandates. By solving real, immediate developer pain points such as simplifying testing, automating tedious tasks, and streamlining CI/CD processes, Sonic naturally motivated teams to adopt it, not out of compliance, but out of clear, intrinsic value.

2. Flexibility vs. Opinionated Solutions

Offering flexibility first, rather than immediately enforcing opinionated standards, greatly reduced psychological resistance. Sonic was designed intentionally to allow teams autonomy to adapt the tool in their own way and at their own pace. This freedom reduced fear, encouraged experimentation, and paved the way for deeper strategic alignment later.

3. Psychological Safety & Shared Goals

Removing top-down pressure and cultivating psychological safety transformed team attitudes. When engineers felt safe, trusted, and empowered to choose their approach, they aligned naturally and willingly with our broader strategic goals. Psychological safety became a foundation for genuine, lasting change.

4. Invitation & Curiosity

Rather than imposing solutions, inviting curiosity through teasers and subtle communication led to immediate, enthusiastic engagement. Teams proactively reached out, asked questions, and started conversations. Genuine curiosity became the primary driver for innovation and enthusiastic adoption.

5. Developer Experience (DX) as Strategic Infrastructure

Prioritizing developer experience, clear documentation, intuitive interfaces, helpful automation, delightful chatbot interactions, and playful gaming-style feedback, sent a clear message: we genuinely empathize with developers’ daily realities. This empathy unlocked sustained adoption and became an strategic advantage.

This gardener mindset clarified a critical insight for me: sustainable, authentic change emerges naturally and enthusiastically when we focus on creating the right conditions, rather than trying to control every outcome.

Let’s explore practically what this might look like in your own teams and organizations.

Cultivating Your Own Garden: An Invitation to Reflect

I’ve shared these experiences and reflections from my journey, not to prescribe solutions, but to openly invite you to reflect on how these insights might resonate in your unique context.

When I think about leading change today, I see clearly that the gardener mindset consistently outperforms rigid, top-down mandates.

As you reflect on your own experiences leading teams or driving change, consider:

• Have your recent efforts felt more like gardening—cultivating conditions for natural growth—or more like chess, carefully controlling each move?

• How might focusing on intrinsic incentives reshape engagement and alignment within your teams?

• Where can greater psychological safety and flexibility unlock deeper innovation and genuine enthusiasm?

• What practical steps could you take to make empathy and developer experience strategic priorities in your next initiative?

I genuinely invite you to share your thoughts, insights, and experiences in the comments below.
What resonates with you?
What challenges have you encountered leading organizational change?
What have you learned from your own experiences?

Let’s keep the conversation going, I’d love to hear from you.