Empowering Teams to Make Mission: Impossible Possible

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it….”

That’s the way the original Mission: Impossible TV show and, later, the movie series drew us in. The bad guy’s operation was explained. The goal was clearly defined; infiltrate and destroy. And although the task at hand was extremely difficult and fraught with unknowns, the team of good guys was briefed and everyone understood what they were doing and why. Cut to the good guys succeeding despite the odds being stacked against them.

For most of us in product development, I think we’ve all faced—or are facing—our own impossible mission. We’re all working on “urgent” projects against some pretty tough odds. Except, unlike the old TV show, we often lack a clear goal. Sure, we’ve got our best team members on it—but does everyone understand why we’re doing what we’re doing? What, exactly, is our mission?

No Dossier, No Chance

In the frantic rush to “digitally transform” by churning out new products and features, the mission (if there ever was one) is often lost. Without context, developers can feel like order takers instead of outcome producers. This dynamic is a ticking time bomb; not just in terms of value delivery and business success, but for developer happiness, too. With a worldwide developer shortage and, more importantly, the fact that 80% of developers are reporting burnout, something needs to change. And fast.

Improving the software developer experience must be a priority. And a clear mission is a great place to start. When we’re not mission-driven, our chances of being innovative, experimenting with new ways of work and empowering ourselves to be at our best are severely limited. 

Liberated Mercenaries

By adopting a mission-oriented approach, development teams gain purpose. Bringing them in on the business problem that needs solving can motivate them and stimulate their creative thinking. And the cherry on top? We can even help reduce their workloads by removing meaningless blackhole tasks. We begin cultivating a work environment that helps realize the “joy;” part of one of Gene Kim’s Five Ideals. 

For those overseeing DevOps or other continuous improvement initiatives, we can improve our odds by creating our own Mission: Impossible-like teams. To cite John Doer, venture capitalist, we can build teams of missionaries instead of mercenaries. Folks who are motivated, passionate and outcome-driven. Those galvanized by the excitement of knowing that their efforts will impact the business in a big way will inspire greatness. 

It is the leader’s role to articulate the mission. When practitioners are empowered to use their creativity for problem-solving, innovation is unleashed and there is little room for misguided, wasteful activities.

Preparing your Mission Dossier

You are not alone if your answers to the following are no better now than they were five years ago:

• Are we prioritizing our customers’ problems first?
• Are we enabling customers to pull value rather than pushing what we believe is value?
• Are we providing abundant opportunities for customer feedback and pivoting with learnings from failures?
• Are we routinely surprising and delighting our customers with exceptional value?

These are the kinds of questions that indicate how well we understand our mission. If we are aligned with customers, then, by definition, we are aligned with the business since businesses only exist to serve customers.

So then, how do we articulate the mission so our teams clearly understand their purpose? Here are three steps to get you started.

Step One—OKRs

We must emphasize our focus on solving problems for our customers, both internal and external. The objectives must be clearly stated, as they were for Mr. Phelps. And, likewise, we must communicate the sense of urgency that this mission encompasses for the fleeting window of opportunity that exists before customers seek alternative solutions. 

One highly effective approach is to employ objectives and key results (OKRs) and an OKR tree so that everyone, from the trenches to executive leadership can have line-of-sight to the purpose of their work and their role in the mission. Since DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 in Europe, OKRs have emerged as a hot topic as leaders seek to translate urgent corporate objectives into meaningful goals for their business and technology teams.

Step Two—Focus on Flow of Customer Value

We must set the stage for the successful delivery of customer value. Our processes must be aligned with real customer needs while simultaneously capable of delivery excellence. The best way to do so has been proven out for over 40 years now, i.e.: adopting a continuous improvement approach to the activities which make up the value stream from customer request to fulfillment. 

That means capturing customer needs via our OKRs and accelerating the flow of work across the value stream against those OKRs. To do that, we must have a means to systematically and continuously remove impediments to flow across all key stages, before and after development

This approach encourages everyone—top-down, bottom-up—to become single-minded and obsessive about our mission.

Step Three—Tracking The Mission

With the mission clear and the teams aligned, we must also be prepared to react and preempt uncertainty. No mission runs perfectly. But we can put literal measures in place to identify danger ahead. Combining team performance metrics, such as DORA, with higher-level value stream management (VSM) metrics that focus on the flow of business value across the whole system can help everyone in the field and in the control room communicate effectively. For instance, if work upstream is holding our developers back from cracking the code, VSM metrics can help direct leadership to send support into the business analysis room.

With mission alignment and means of communication, accepting a mission becomes enticing for everyone involved and the chances of success improve dramatically.