Two months.
Two months was the time the morale bar stayed on. I got back from work one afternoon, looked at the code, looked at the app, and decided to take an ax to it.
It was the moment painters know. The painting that just isn't working, where you stop adding paint and start scraping. Sometimes you scrape almost the whole thing.
But at least there was a lesson. With everything I'd been learning and the deep dive I'd been doing, the morale bar didn't make sense anymore. Worse, it was doing the opposite of what I was trying to build. And it had just been sitting there. Sitting in the middle of the screen, staring at me, for two whole months. Nope. You're going out.
To be fair, it wasn't only the morale bar. A lot of features got the ax that day. Some things had started to feel like a game instead of a simulation. I wasn't in the PM's seat anymore. I was gaming.
I'd built it because I wanted to track how a team feels and reacts. How the team responds to the decisions we as PMs make. They feel worse when you crunch. Worse still when it's always overtime. And you know what?
They deserve to feel good.
The internet is saturated with inspirational quotes about what a leader should be. Pulling the sled instead of weighing it down, that kind of thing. But what it really boils down to is this: we work with humans, and humans genuinely deserve to feel good. So consciously or unconsciously, we keep a morale bar for our team in our head. We watch their reactions to a tough decision, their smile at a shared achievement, the way their face lights up when we acknowledge their success (and yes, we saw you take a second serving of pizza, no shame, maybe I should have ordered more). If we're paying attention, a successful PM weaves the KPIs and success metrics through this mental morale bar. We can't ignore it.
Resource management is project management.
So I built the literal version. In the team tab, next to each member's name, a yellow bar on a dark background with a value out of 100 displayed just below it. It moved up and down based on your decisions. Not only your decisions, but how you spoke, how you connected, how you ran meetings. Based on the personalities of their colleagues, the behavior of their manager, the calls coming down from the executives, even shifts in the industry. Morale goes up. Morale goes down.
And then, just to add insult to injury, I built a really nice form. Pick the support type, set a cost, type a note, hit the green button. Buy pizza.
Press the button. Morale goes up. Tiny cost added to the project expenses. That's it. Press, watch the bar climb.
It was too easy.
It was a game.
I just kept clicking free lunch until the red went away.
In a real project, you care about the morale of your team. You read social cues, you have conversations, you stay aware of each individual, their preferences, how they work, how they talk. You don't have a little bar over their foreheads telling you how they feel.
Sure, a pizza day once in a while makes people feel better. But it doesn't work that way in real life.
So when I say I took an ax to it: one day I decided, no more gamification. I didn't want anything remotely feeling like a game feature to make it in my simulation.
Keeping your team happy, at its core, is instinctual. That doesn't mean it's easy, or that everyone does it, but we send and receive social cues all the time, and they're right there to be picked up if we pay attention. The visible bar did the opposite. It trumped the instinct, the gut feeling. You unloaded your emotional awareness onto a little yellow bar that told you how you should feel about how your team felt.
But hiding it? Back to feeling it. Observing it. Forcing interaction and introspection. In a way, hiding the bar brought morale to the foreground. Why was my colleague short with me? Why are their deliverables slipping? Why do they never join outings with the team? The answer isn't always low morale. But now we have to be hyperaware of it, instead of glancing at the bar to see if it went up or down. The numbers must go up.
I'm sure we all share this experience: sitting in a room looking at numbers and KPIs, discussing trends and reporting, arguing impacts and decisions, and something feels off. The numbers align. We're trending green. And yet, something feels off, and you start sending messages or walking over to your team members to ask questions.
The morale bar, along with many of the other features I removed, tried to condense these ambiguous realities into my own little KPIs. The experience suffered for it. There was no depth. No emotional impact. No real incentive for commitment or involvement.
Once it was removed from view, it didn't need to be understandable at a glance. It didn't need to be clear, or sanitized for the human eye. In the depth of the engine, I could make it as complex as the reality it was modeling. Internal and external forces acting on each simulated team member: their personality, their background, their skills, their relationships with peers, the decisions of the executives, the behavior of their manager. All of it recalculated as often as needed, reacting to everything that could affect them, and then triggering actions or reactions through a carefully prompted AI inside the engine. Giving room to natural interactions that let you read into your team.
Maybe Joe has been way off recently in his time estimates. By speaking to him or his colleagues you'll find out he was late on a deliverable that mattered to a specific stakeholder, and the stakeholder booked a 1-on-1 behind your back to admonish him. He's been over-padding his estimates ever since, as a way to protect himself from it happening again. So you reassure Joe, and you let the stakeholders know that if they have an issue, they go through you before going to the team members.
Joe, the stakeholder, his colleagues. All part of the simulation. But the involvement needed to appraise and deal with the situation? Real. Real in a way that a KPI or a morale bar cannot express.
Thank you, morale bar, for what you taught me.
And thank you for disappearing forever.