"Every team has to have a mission. If you haven't articulated it, the team, your organization, and your investors are probably operating under wildly different conceptions of the mission, and that will lead to failure." —Chris Vander Mey, Shipping Greatness My most valuable contribution in the early stages of startups and larger company projects has been to deeply understand the customer and their goals. Then, I transform this understanding into a compelling mission that galvanizes my team's motivation to ship a well-understood product. As circumstances change, I communicate to make sure everyone understands as we evolve the mission. I've crafted missions by writing initial PRDs, hosting structured discussion sessions (more on design sprints in ), and working cross-functionally to evangelize the mission-defining deliverables to sales, marketing, operations, and product design and engineering. Two Mission Examples Mission as company-wide elevator pitch At Rebellion Defense, I applied a process called "StoryBrand" to help everyone in that fast-growing company be prepared to describe the entire company mission the same way. Story Brand uses the classic formulation of the hero's journey to help employees position the customer as the hero of the story you might tell about what the product does. I led the company through an online (2020) exercise in collaboration with marketing and sales team leaders. The result was a capsule description: "Rebellion Defense builds AI-enabled products that allow our warfighters to understand, decide, and act faster and more accurately against national security threats." Mission as sales enablement At Mighty Ai, we started as a "gig economy" app that paid consumers to complete small tasks on their smartphones. These tasks cleaned up, organized, or gathered human feedback on enterprise data of many kinds. The company eventually focused entirely on generating labeled training data for autonomous driving (customers like Bosch, Daimler, Uber, Denso, and Valeo signed up). In 2016, "training data for AI" was a novel concept. I created the following sales enablement video both for our team in the field and to help focus the entire Mighty team on our pivot to this focused new mission: Vimeo Video (2:30) (Consider me for your next voiceover? 😬) Even with a strong mission in place, it's still possible to ship an incomplete and/or faulty product due to unexpected customer demands, market pressure to ship faster than the competition, and other real-world economic and regulatory gotchas. (GDPR, anyone?) To minimize risk, my product leadership approach is to tie desired business results closely to metrics measured during build, testing, and then launching the product, and to relentlessly communicate progress and challenges those measures are tracking. Also, I always have a take - even if it's based on super-rough data or mostly gut feel from reading the room - because a product leader must have a recommendation to confront doubt and hesitation that comes with the ambiguity of go-to-market adventures.

One of the best parts of co-founding multiple startups is each opportunity you get to carefully assemble your team. I have internalized the bedrock value of "hire slow, fire fast" — and have gotten much better at both (thankfully with far fewer fire-fasts). You also learn how to scale individual talent carefully, offering mentorship where your accrued wisdom can apply, but also how to let go and trust in the skill and accountability of others. In my 20s, I felt like if it needed to be done right I had to do it entirely myself. Big, exhausting mistake! All of the above applies to empowering and enabling talent in any company. I learned better interviewing practices at both Google (big) and Rebellion Defense (startup) because each took a culturally-specific approach to the process. Both concentrated on anchoring non-technical questions on themes driven by company values. Every company has values that guide its decisionmaking and determine its outcomes. I think you have to write them down, publish them, and authentically refer to them in conversation and debate. If you can't do all three, you are far less likely to be a successful organization based on a shared worldview. On product design: don't treat it as an ivory tower, whose practitioners are the only permitted, opinionated tastemakers. Make design cross-functionally inclusive. It'll lead to better products and better team dynamics. How do you do this? John Zeratsky and I outlined our FeedBurner and Google-influenced approach at Google I/O. The first five minutes hits the high notes:Google I/O 2010 - Creating positive user experiences