The 3 Words That Secretly Drive Developer Productivity & Motivation • Yanina Ledovaya • GOTO 2025

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph
https://gotocph.com

Yanina Ledovaya - JetBrains, DX Research Team Lead & Cognitive Psychologist@yaninaledovaya 

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
Three Words to Remember When Working with People’s Motivation and Productivity: Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness to Others

RESOURCES
https://x.com/ledovaya
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanina-ledovaya-088a0822

Links
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8643844
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8851296
https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3454122.3454124
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024
https://lp.jetbrains.com/stateofdevex
https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3675416

ABSTRACT
This talk will highlight the view of cognitive psychologists on developer productivity and developer experience. It aims to help developers and tech managers in their decisions about communication, 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 engineers’ subjective experiences 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 and teams, or about work and tooling, will boost satisfaction and productivity in your engineering organizations. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:38 Improving productivity is crucial for business
04:22 Agenda
05:01 Theory
12:17 Application
27:50 AI
35:17 Takeaway
37:44 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3799

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • http://amzn.to/3sVLyLQ
Ken Kousen • Help Your Boss Help You • https://amzn.to/3yCHnXf
Robert Axelrod • The Evolution of Cooperation • https://amzn.to/3BSvn67
Michael Jackson • Software Requirements and Specifications • https://amzn.to/3ql2T14
Geoffrey West • Scale • http://amzn.to/3eKMbpc
Donald G. Reinertsen • The Principles of Product Development Flow • https://amzn.to/3hJ2Ye2

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