Is it needed for devs to know company mission?

The simplest answer to this question is YES. But the subject of course is little more complicated. There is a difference between knowing this few sentences and understanding it. Mission statement is the core which defines what an organization is. And if we say that the organization is made by people they have to know and understand it.

For me, mission and strategy is the main argument deciding about priorities what my team is doing. If there are doubts which initiative we should take next, mission and strategy should come to help with the answer. Going even further — the very existence of the roadmap of projects should be the result of mission and carefully planned strategy. Which is not easy. Sometimes those are designed so high level (or blurry) that no one from line staff understand how to map them on their daily job. Then the organization needs to organize a set of workshops, meetings and presentations which explains that to everyone. I had a doubtful pleasure to work for the company where mission and strategy was something known only to the board members (so they can explain that to stakeholders) but not to even line managers. Although everyone had full hands of work and each and every project was critical. Of course development team was not able to deliver what was expected as every time we had to ask for priorities. And no one (including the board) could give us a clear answer what was more important and what was less. We even had a measure of projects values but it was for nothing as when we were trying to choose ideas for estimations everything was critical. There was no clear guidance which direction we should go. So projects were jumping from CRM systems, through billing to sales support and games (sic!). There was no mission nor strategy to show us a path.

Fortunately I know positive examples too. At StepStone we have clear mission communicated to everyone often enough so everyone have a chance to know it by heart. We are also in the process to implement OKR framework which (among other things) would allow us to connect each ticket from a backlog of a team to given objective and key result. This gives clear view and understanding for a people what they are about to do and how it improves the performance of our company. Recently I had a pleasure to listen to the presentation of one of my colleagues who was showing new architecture developed in my team. Although the speech was quite technical he was able to stress few times how the solution is supporting company strategy. It was obvious for him and also for the audience. It was possible only because at StepStone we are communicating mission and strategy clearly and try to connect this on every level of the organization with work done. So every developer working for us is building better world by providing right job for everyone.

First example showed me clearly how important it is to have a mission and to communicate it properly on every level of the organization. And the second example how this mission simplifies daily life of each developer and manager in the organization. By knowing it we know what to do and, what is even more important, what not to do.

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