How to manage a team towards high performance?

You are already in a good direction.
I would ask one question: For the sake of what?

The goal to achieve a high-performance team should be a by-product of the bigger goal.

I would suggest thinking about the care of your engineers.

It is not ideal for focusing on getting the best output from them and triggering their motivation buttons. Let us treat them as humans instead of machines.

Genuine relationships are built on care and building trust. Can you be that manager they have been hoping for all their lives? Can you see beyond the performance and see them as humans who have challenges, ambitions, and concerns?

When this care and trust are established, you will be able to inspire them, listen to them, and help them in their career.

Happy engineers with back from a manager will give you all when needed. Take care of them, and they will take care of you and the company.

Care and trust are the starts; then there are other sensibilities you need to build afterwards, which I will post another time.

There's a lot of questions here (alongside a bunch of things that are already right directionally), so I'll split up my response into multiple parts.

So how do I motivate my team to work hard in a healthy sustainable way?

It's interesting that you don't have actual deadlines as a B2C company. I understand that B2B has formal contracts, but B2C is a tough space as well: Consumers are demanding, haha. Anyways, less "deadline culture" makes this a lot easier.

Tactically, what I recommend:

• Set the example yourself by not working late nights/weekends
• Having a lot of offsites and team-bonding events
• Encourage engineers, especially TLs, to add buffer to estimates
• Ask engineers in 1 on 1s how much they're working and tell them to slow it down if they're working themselves to the bone

At a high-level, if you want your team to be chill, then be chill yourself. 😊

How do I measure the progress and reward them fairly while creating a team focused culture and not one that is competitive and individualist?

This is actually 2 very separate questions rolled into one.

Measuring Progress

• Generally, major projects should have milestones. Use those and build a culture of regular project updates and open communication.
• The tech leads are generally responsible for this and ferry that information back to the EM (like you). I recommend this thread on the differences between the 2: "What are the commonalities and differences between tech leads and engineering managers?"

Fostering A More Collaborative Team

• Similar to my previous response, you encourage X by doing X yourself and championing X.
• This means that if an engineer on your team is helping others, reward them. Give them a shoutout in the team meeting and fight for them in performance review.
• From your side, you can do tactical things like encouraging others to speak up in meetings, organizing team events like brown-bags, and setting up pair programming among onboarding and more junior engineers.

In 1:1s how do you figure out what motivates someone

This one is straightforward: Build up trust. For resources on how to that, I recommend the following:

• [Masterclass] How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech
• Alex's Guide To Effective Communication

I also recommend the in-depth case study I gave about how I grew Meta engineers lightning fast: [Case Study] Mentoring Junior SWEs [E3] to Senior [E5] In Just 2.5 Years At Meta

The fastest-growing managers (i.e able to go from M1 -> M2 -> D1 very quickly) I knew were all able to get their reports promoted very quickly.

Lastly, I agree with pretty much all the bullet points you have in the original question about tactics you're thinking about. Just follow through on those and lead with empathy - I'm sure you've got this 💪

What's already been shared here is great and as you've seen some are motivated by different things. Work and money are my top most things and I think you're able to tell who has what motivations already. I'd focus the two interested on money bigger problems in the organization knowing they will wield the power responsibly and then make sure the others still get interesting work to keep them engaged.

Now, when it comes to deadlines, always make sure you have hard deadlines and tell the engineers that. This is how you get them to be reasonably motivated. Also keep in mind several realistic targets that I would do with statistical project management before I ever approached the team about this and ever even commit any dates to contract. In a sense, with these resources how likely am I to make the dates given and toy around with that before ever bringing the staff onboard. Once the deadlines are decided though, everyone needs to move in unison and its likely going to be hell for them. Support them in this, take their feedback and adjust the culture as the culture itself of the place is going to be inefficient for the goals you have outlined and so you get into debugging lots of cultural problems too. Along the way, you also have to learn how to help the culture learn to chart course in a very hostile, competitive free market.

Here's some books that I've found useful:

Navigating The Free Market

• Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
• Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

Project Management

• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

Hope this helps!