Give your team a purpose

Why does your team exist?

Your team members need a reason to get out of bed every morning. Ultimately, they want to know:

Why are we creating this software?

If you don’t have a good answer to this question, I’d recommend that you and your team craft a Mission Statement.

I know, I know. Mission Statements are old and stodgy; the kind of thing big enterprise companies put on the wall, but don’t actually follow.

But a mission statement can provide your team with something crucial: a higher purpose.

How does this apply to creating software? Your team is made up of human beings, and they’re going to be motivated by having a raison d’être. Yes, we’re building software, but why? Why is it important?

As an example, I like Ryan Carson’s mission for his Treehouse team:

We’re bringing affordable education to the masses, which equips them to change their lives.

Later, Ryan told me that working with this purpose has really created the culture at Treehouse. I’ve talked to people who became Treehouse customers because of their culture!

As a leader, having a well-defined mission will help you:

  1. Attract the right people to your team: when you can articulate your purpose, you’ll attract people that care about that purpose. These people want more than a paycheck — they want to make a difference.
  2. Work with purpose: as individuals, we get motivated when we’re presented with a mission that excites us. What would make a developer care about well-tested code? A mission they believe in! Are we pushing pixels, or are we creating a difference in the world?
  3. Focus: a mission answers the “what and why” for your team; anything outside of that is a distraction. Keeping this front and center will help your team move forward, towards a common goal.

This is the mission statement we developed at Sprintly:

We’re bringing software business intelligence to managers: making development processes transparent, and helping teams deliver high quality software on time.

How to craft your team’s mission statement

In his paper “Industrial Firms and the Power of Mission,” Christopher Bart provides a framework for writing a good mission statement. It has three parts:

  1. Key market: Who is your ideal customer? What is your niche?
  2. Contribution: What service are you providing? What pain are you solving?
  3. Distinction: What makes your approach different? What makes you unique amongst your competitors?

Don’t hire an outside consultant to do this work for you. Instead, get your team involved. Book a day to ask the above questions, and craft a statement together.

For your mission statement to be effective it should be concise, free of corporate lingo, and should specifically outline what makes your team unique.

A good place to start is with this template:

We’re giving (people) (this benefit) so that they can (do this).

Is this worth doing? Jason Collins, Director of Engineering at Quick Left, thinks so:

Everyone should know why they are getting out of bed each day and what they are putting their energy into. Much of this comes from the leaders of an organization being able to tell a story and paint a vision for their team.

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