How to run a mission statement workshop with a product development team
About a year ago, I transitioned from a creative project manager role on a marketing and branding team to a project manager role on a web development team within an IT organization. One of my last accomplishments in my previous role was successfully creating and facilitating a workshop with senior VPs and managers to define a new vision and mission statement. It dawned on me that I could reuse the same workshop to help our development team write a mission statement for the new product we were going to build together. Below is the workshop I created and facilitated.
Purpose & goal
Why is a development team writing a mission statement? This isn’t a branding or marketing team, after all.
The goal of the workshop is to help the team collaboratively write a mission statement that can be used as a framework for decision-making and serve as the guiding principles for building the new product.
Set the guidelines
Lay some ground rules for the workshop to create a safe space that is inclusive and inviting for everyone to participate.
Here are some guidelines I modified* from this Brand Workshop by Ignite Your Brand:
- Be Positive — everything is possible
- Be prepared to participate — everybody’s ideas are of equal worth
- Be open minded — postpone and withhold judgement on ideas
- Be creative — encourage radical, lateral and innovative ideas
- Don’t keep your thoughts to yourself — share them and build on other ideas put forward
- Have fun — because no one likes a grumpy cat
*added cat reference
Format
I decided to use Trello as our virtual whiteboard because several of our team members work remotely. Trello has a quick learning curve and allows you to easily move cards around just like you would with sticky notes on a whiteboard. Each of the following exercises can be found on the Trello board here.
Exercise #1: What’s in a mission statement?
(20–30 min)
This exercise defines the term “mission statement” for the group and provides examples that can spark ideas or inspiration.
Setup
So what’s really in a mission statement? Let’s look at some examples of mission statements from established companies. First, I will read the mission statement and not reveal the company it belongs to yet. Then, we will try to guess what company it is.
Example:
___________* is a camera company. Our products empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.
*Spoiler alert: The answer is Snap (as in the parent company of Snapchat).
Discussion
What do we think makes a good mission statement? From these examples, what works and what doesn’t quite hit home for us? (e.g. is it too vague? does it use subjective language? Is it too serious or too funny?) What kind of mission statement do we want to write together?
Example outcome:
We want our mission statement to be authentic, convey a sense of purpose, be specific about our product, and align with our core values.
Exercise #2: Attribute/values card sort
(60–90 min)
Head on over to branding.cards and purchase yourself a Brand Deck for a whopping 20 bucks. First of all, the Brand Deck is awesome and simply defined as “a tool that helps you figure out who you are”. While it was originally designed to help “identify your brand’s characteristics,” I like to use this deck to help create a common language with a list of words that we all agree align with our values and attributes for the product we are aiming to build. I also recreated these cards in Trello so we could run the exercise virtually.
Setup
The Brand Deck instructions describe how to run this in more detail but the gist is to follow these steps:
- Select
- Sort
- Narrow
- Prioritize
Discussion
As the Brand Deck suggests, discuss the choices with the team along the way.
Exercise #3: Write Insights
(30 min)
This exercise was adapted from Design Kit’s “Create Insight Statements”
Setup
Finally, everyone on the team will write an insight statement (or two!) using one or more of the words the group selected from the card sort exercise. Select attribute(s) to use in a sentence about how you want to contribute to the product. Some examples are below:
Be an ambassador for accessibility best practices in order to provide a [welcoming] and [inclusive] environment for our users.
Provide a [clear] and [consistent] experience to our users through quality assurance and thorough testing.
Discussion
Have everyone read their insights aloud. Identify and discuss any patterns or themes across the insights. If possible*, narrow them down to a 2–3 sentence mission statement.
*Or if that’s too hard you can simply list all of the insights as bullet points.
Just for fun
Design a fun poster for the mission statement and print it out to hang in the office or at everyone’s desks to keep the team motivated! When you come to a crossroads on a team decision, look back to your mission statement to help guide a final decision.
