[msluyter]

I've often speculated about a radical interpretation of this idea, inspired by a old video game (whose name I forget). In the game, you rule a kingdom, but unlike, say, Civilization, you don't directly manage things. You set goals and create quests, like "slay this monster and get some reward." And the quests would inspire heroes to join your kingdom, and things would grow from there. Iirc, you create incentives around your economy as well.

Imagine if there were product goals ("implement feature X") with some reward [1] attached and you could leave it up to teams or individuals to claim that goal if they desired. You could choose the goals you wanted to claim, recruit coworkers to help you, (eg, self form teams). PMs/Management would basically be in charge of allocating rewards for the goals.

I imagine it'd be a terrible system in practice for a number of reasons, but I enjoy thinking about ways you could attempt to make it workable. For example,

[1] rewards -- I don't think you could tie rewards directly to people's paychecks. Do that too much and I think you'd create perverse incentives. But perhaps things like swag, gifts, time off, or just bragging rights, honor, and glory might work.

[2] coordination -- a danger would people redundantly working on the same goal. You'd need a way to prevent that.

[3] other perverse incentives -- you might get an overabundance of folks choosing the "fun" goals, for example. (After all, engineers may be more motivated by that than other things.) Here I imagine the rewards for unsexy things would need to rise over time if nobody opted for them. Or, you make first dibs on some other "fun" goal the prize for achieving a less fun goal.

[Afforess]

Majesty I & II were implemented like your idea of this game…

[msluyter]

Majesty! That was it, thanks!