The Engineering Leader

Chapter 11. Mission and Strategy

The mission and strategy are how you define what you’re going toward and why. They help you directionally orient your team and build a shared purpose and identity.

This is the kind of conversation people often love to have but often resist resolving at the level of concreteness that is actually useful. It’s easy to get everyone to agree on something like “let’s build a great product” and much harder to get that agreement on who the “great product” is for and who it is not for, which is often a pretty fundamental question to answer.

The strategy layer is where your mission becomes real. Determining a strategy is making decisions about how you are going to deliver on the next phase of the mission and how you will evaluate if those decisions are working out the way you expect them to or if they are not.

In this chapter, we will cover how to identify and clarify the purpose (or mission) of your team and develop a realistic strategy to execute on that. Each section includes some case studies showing how these concepts were applied in a particular situation. To give you a broader perspective, I asked some people I admire to tell stories from their experiences.

It’s worth noting that the mission and strategy of a team cannot and should not be developed in a vacuum or by one individual. The team mission needs to fit into the needs of the broader organization and be agreed upon with stakeholders. Similarly, stakeholders, like the product managers and designers ...