Do you really know why your team exists?

At TransferWise we are working in independent and autonomous teams. Every team starts with a vision. Everything else follows.

Strong teams revise their vision regularly as their product and their understanding of customer needs evolve. I’ve seen examples when teams narrowed, broadened or moved their vision. There have been even two examples when teams disbanded themselves after accomplishing their goals, which is a great sign of maturity and courage.

Last time our team revised our goals we come up with a simple exercise that helps to define your vision in 3 steps:

Step 1. Generation. Each team member writes down their version of the vision as they currently perceive it, in free form, using one or two sentences only. Avoid discussions at this step; personal definitions should not be affected by others thoughts.

Step 2. Decomposition. Gather all the results in one place (we used google docs since it’s simple for collaboration). You will notice a pattern of same or similar words and combinations that occur more than others. In some sense, they are logical “atoms” of your team vision. Split all the sentences from the previous step into these “atoms.” We used bright colors to mark different “atoms.”

Step 3. Synthesis. If you sort your new “atoms” by a frequency of appearance in team member’s statements, you will get the building blocks for the new team vision. You can compose the new team goal using the most frequent ones. You can also use rare “atoms” to specify smaller sub-goals.

You can see below, how this process worked for our team:

This simple exercise can help in multiple ways:

• Improve the team vision. Two heads are better than one, the whole team’s view is the best perspective you can obtain. It’s fascinating how people see the same things from different angles. Some are more customer focused, some care more about costs and scalability, and some think how we should prevent incidents in product operations. Only working together you will find a complete picture.
• Align the team around the vision. You may find your team goals plainly obvious, especially if you state it on every second weekly plan. However, you may be surprised if you occasionally ask an engineer or customer support agent over lunch how they would phrase them. This exercise can help you understand if you all are on the same page.
• Find the key properties of the product. These are the properties of your product that customers use to define a quality and compare you with competitors. For example for international money transfers, key features are country coverage, convenience, price, speed, and trustworthiness. You can see key product properties constantly emerging in vision statements of your teammates. From my experience, customer support agents are especially good in defining them.

I hope you will find this exercise interesting and useful. I would be happy if you share your experience from using it in the comments.