Why does your team exist?

I have run into many Software Development leaders who cannot crisply articulate why their team exists. They will tell me about the work they are doing and the services they maintain in production. I also hear a lot of noise about the volume of their work, lack of staffing, lack of appropriate tooling, blah blah blah.

I am sure the work they are doing is critical, however I come back to the question of ‘why does your team exist?’ As part of that answer, I like to hear articulation of the charter (mission, vision), a set of durable metrics and their top goals for the current year.

Establishing the charter with a mission and vision is the first step in the process. This will give purpose to the team. The metrics are measurable outcomes (input versus output metrics are a topic for another post) and act as signals for how the team is doing. The durable metrics refer to a set of metrics that don’t change every year– for example, if your team’s charter is to protect the company from bad debt, the amount of bad debt incurred is a durable metric tracked diligently. The goals for the year might include delivery goals and other metrics that improve customer experience or operational efficiency.

Using transactional risk organization (i.e fraud prevention from transactions) as an example, below are some samples of mission, vision and metrics (thanks to ChatGPT for help with the mission, vision statements)

• Mission : Protect customers and <company_name> from financial losses due to fraud by providing innovative and effective fraud detection and mitigation solutions
• Vision: Become best-in-class fraud detection solution that optimizes customer experience keeping the customer accounts secure and minimizes bad debt to <company_name>
• Metrics
  • Durable Metric: Bad Debt $$ (monitor daily, weekly, YoY)
  • Sample Goals (not complete, for illustration purposes)
    • Reduce bad debt from $X to $Y, a Z% percent reduction YoY while maintaining (or reducing) false positives
    • Reduce number of account from ‘x’ to ‘y’ for the year
    • Reduce the false positives for automated decisions from ‘x%’ to ‘y%’
    • Reduce the percent of manual reviews from ‘x%’ to ‘y%’

You can add many more metrics and set goals at different levels of the organization. This allows team members to align and to operate with clear accountability and ownership and also act as a framework to prioritize competing initiatives.

I have found that having something like above provides solid foundation to scale the team and allows the leader to empower their team and take on new challenges.