Mission teams can double your company’s productivity

“Mission teams make success predictable and repeatable”

In 2016, Azimo faced a problem common to technology businesses old and new: no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t move fast enough. Despite strong Agile culture and a growing world class team, we were struggling to put enough of our best ideas into hands of our customers. Mission teams changed that.

What is a mission team?

In the old world, Azimo divided up its resources into areas of domain expertise. We had a mobile team that built things for mobile, a web team that built things for the web, and a platform team that looked after our platform.

As we scaled, it became clear that this silo structure was unsustainable. With multiplying priorities and an increasingly complex tech stack and product, productivity slowed. Teams passed work back and forth, releases were delayed and nobody seemed to have a common, motivating goal.

By contrast, mission teams bring together people from different disciplines into a single unit with a single, quantifiable business metric to focus on. Instead of Scrum teams working on a multitude of competing priorities and a due date of yesterday, a mission team is a self-sufficient unit with a clear goal and a time period in which to pursue it.

A typical mission might look something like this:

Team members:

• Product Manager
• Designer
• Web engineer
• Mobile engineer
• Platform engineer
• Data scientist
• Experts (we’ll get to these later)

Goal:

• Increase customer referrals by 50% (we actually did this, btw!)

Mission duration:

• 3 months

Autonomy without anarchy

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. — George S. Patton

Autonomy is a key factor in the success of a mission. By giving teams a metric to move but not telling them what to go and build, you make them masters of their own destiny. It’s down to the team to come up with their own hypotheses, to decide what they’re going to test and ultimately what to build and ship.

At the end of the three months, the team comes back and presents their results to senior management. They get the chance not just to present their numbers but also how and why they did what they did. That’s a drastic and empowering change from the days of top-down decision making.

No distractions, more variety

The most successful teams are 100% focused on their key metric. That means minimising disruptions and refusing to allow any “oh, can you just…” requests. Sure, sometimes there’s a critical outage that can’t be ignored, but otherwise the rules should be clear: if it’s not moving the mission metric, it’s not mission critical.

Variety is another huge benefit of working in a mission team structure. With three-month mission durations and new goals appearing each quarter, your talent is more likely to stay fresh and energised. People don’t get stuck working on one thing for years on end. New challenges are always in plentiful supply.

Bring in the experts, learn from the masters

As we built Azimo’s approach to mission teams, we mixed in ideas from other approaches to rapid product development. By including some of the techniques used in design sprints (as outlined in Jake Knapp’s brilliant book Sprint), we were able to increase our velocity even further.

As well as using games such as How Might We during our discovery phase at the start of each mission, we learned to enlarge our mission teams beyond the traditional engineer/PM/designer/data scientist setup. If a mission team was tasked with reducing customer complaints, for instance, then a customer service agent would be embedded in the team as an expert voice.

As well as increasing overall speed and quality, embedding experts in a mission team also empowers other departments and takes them on the product development journey. Rather than a product manager sending out a boring summary email each week that nobody reads, experts go back to their teams and tell them first hand about what the mission teams are doing.

What was the impact?

Mission teams have been running for 18 months at Azimo and the results have been little short of spectacular. In the old days we could run a maximum of three projects concurrently. Now we can focus on a maximum of six, depending on size.

In terms of results, two missions so far have managed to double the performance of their business metric. No mission has failed to make a statistically significant impact. While we can’t share precise numbers, it is no coincidence that Azimo’s customer acquisition growth has accelerated exponentially during the mission team era.

Finally, mission teams have created happier teams. Team members report being better motivated, more focused and having an increased understanding of Azimo’s direction as a company.

While we’re constantly asking ourselves how we can work better, smarter and faster, mission teams have proved an invaluable tool in Azimo’s quest to democratise financial services all over the world.

Towards financial services available to all

We’re working throughout the company to create faster, cheaper, and more available financial services all over the world, and here are some of the techniques that we’re utilizing. There’s still a long way ahead of us, and if you’d like to be part of that journey, check out our careers page.