Your Dev Team Needs A Mission

Teams exist to complete a mission. If you are a software team leader, you must ensure that the team’s mission is well defined and clearly communicated. Without a clear mission, your team’s ability to make decisions is grossly impeded, as is your ability to set goals and measure progress.

Yet, I have encountered many software shops in which the mission is unclear or absent. Failing to clearly communicate a mission is a leadership mistake of the highest order.

Surprisingly, some teams are formed without thought for their missions. I have been placed in management and leadership positions on teams where there was no clear mission. I surmise that the senior leaders placing me on those teams thought that the team name (e.g., “the computing infrastructure team” or “the data engineering team”), along with the business context, was somehow sufficient to act as a guide for strategic decisions. It was not.

Example Decision

To understand how a defined mission is required to make good decisions, consider this: Suppose that you are tasked with leading a software team in a computer vision company. The company sells software and services to industrial manufacturers. You discover that your team is making a software product similar to one that already exists on the market — it is produced by a competitor. Should you discontinue the development of your company’s new product and instead grow your team’s expertise in that already-existing product? Or, should you continue to expend serious budget on the continued development of your company’s new software product, elongating the timeframe for sales? The right answer can only come from a clarified team mission.

If your team’s mission is to develop a software product to compete with that of the already-existing product, regardless of timeline, then you should continue with development. If your team’s mission is to solve your customers’ problems expeditiously and to make sales as soon as possible, then you should grow your team’s expertise in the competing company’s product.

These are drastically different courses of action.

Define Your Team’s Mission

Without a clearly defined mission, you may make the wrong decision. It is impossible to ensure that leadership decisions are made correctly in the absence of a mission.

Define the mission for your team and make it prominent. Make decisions in the context of mission fulfilment.