Starting with the Mission

Tags: Management, Organization, Strategy

Mission statements are a very important piece on a team's journey. Well crafted statements that capture the ideals and purpose of the team are powerful, those guide, galvanize, break ties and arguments. Good statements along with good leaders provide enduring missions that survive the test of time and inspire confidence. The work means something.

On the other hand, generic, weak statements are felt as bland, uninspiring and contribute nothing to a team. It is not the downfall of a team or organization, I have been in teams with weak o invisible mission statements but still with a very strong culture, it is still a missed opportunity.

I always liked one of the mission statements given to our teams by my manager and mentor Mike A.; "Accelerate Customer Value Creation", it became my tagline, at the time it felt that our team had a good roadmap, adding features and services to the platform for engineering teams, improving their onboarding and experience, but it was never articulated what the impact was or the benefit of doing that, productivity was claimed but not well understood, engineering time was not very appreciated.

Things changed, engineering time now was recognized as a very valuable resource as the org was trying to gain velocity and compete. This clarified our role, engineering teams needed to create customer value at a faster pace, and it was our job to assist them on their journey, remove all obstacles, expedite their cycles, minimize the toil and the repetitive tasks, eliminate concerns and cognitive load, all in an effort to accelerate them in their quest to build value for our customers.

Once set, our mission statement was used frequently, it would help us define, disambiguate, redirect. Provided focus and alignment at a high-level, it felt good to have it. It was complemented by other things of course, mission was still a very important component of our success.

These days the statement seems some times too generic, a friend said recently, feels like it means that we are the "betterers of things", and some leaders prefer more "precise" terms, a recently used statement is "Improve Developer Productivity and Platform Reliability", I still prefer the original, the inspiration, the customer focus, the call to arms.