Mission, Strategy, and Tactics

Originally posted internally at Facebook on December 27, 2013

As organizations grow they run the risk of becoming hopelessly disjointed.

Teams end up working on projects that overlap or conflict, individuals struggle

to see how their work fits into the bigger picture, people fail to see meaning

in what they do and overall progress grinds to a crawl. Our ability to fight

this entropy determines our ultimate capacity, both in terms of bandwidth

(how many things we can work on) and velocity (speed at which work gets done).

Thankfully, we have many communication tools at our disposal to help us remain

connected while we grow.

MISSION

A long entanglement with corporate jargon has given mission statements a bad

name but a dense statement of the goal you are working to achieve over the

long run can be immensely valuable if you choose your words wisely.

• A mission statement should be short. It isn’t answering how or why but

  just saying plainly what you are trying to accomplish. (In fact the why is

  never really addressed as it should be implicit.

• A mission statement should take a stance. It should not be an unobjectionable,

  empty slogan. It should assert a point of view strongly enough that it is a

  useful tool in planning and prioritizing work.

• A mission statement should inspire people. You should be able to use it to

  recruit.

• A mission statement should probably start with a verb.

• A mission statement should describe something aspirational, hard, and

  probably not even obviously possible

• A mission statement should stand the test of time. Mission statements change

  very rarely and may never actually be achieved or even achievable.

Consider the mission of Facebook itself: “To give people the power to share and

make the world more open and connected” These aren’t obviously good things.

Does everyone want the world to be more open and connected? Taking a stance on

those is no small part of what has enabled us to have tremendous focus even as

we have grown, avoiding much of the random project investment that has bogged

down so many of our competitors at different times.

STRATEGY

A strategy prescribes a path to achieve the mission, answering the question

how in the most minimal way possible. Effectively we are mapping out a path

from where we are today to where we are trying to go in very broad strokes with

diminishing granularity we look further into the future. The standard for

something to be strategic is quite high; it means in order to succeed at our

mission we must do it and we cannot succeed at our mission without doing it.

Strategy rarely describes a straight line path to the goal. We may have to take

detours that appear to be orthogonal to our goal but are, in fact, the only way

to ever arrive there. The ads organization is a great example; Facebook’s

mission says nothing of revenue but we accept it would be impossible to

accomplish it without any. Revenue is a strategic imperative.

Strategy is generally created assuming good (but not perfect) execution. As a

consequence it is common to see a step in the strategy whose sole purpose is to

ensure execution. For example, if your mission is to build a platform then it

is common to include building an app on top of that platform as part of the

strategy because it just isn’t believable that someone would build the right

platform without this work.

Strategic risks are things that could cause you to fail you to achieve your

mission despite perfect execution. External forces rarely invalidate the

mission but they could have a dramatic impact on strategy in a very short

period of time, for example a new competitor entering the marketplace,

changes in geopolitics, shifting market conditions, or even changing

priorities within the company. Thus, the strategy to achieve a mission

changes over time.

Even without external forces, strategy may change as execution gets under way —

if you aren’t executing well enough in an area you may re-evaluate the

strategic assumptions you have made about what is possible.

TACTICS

Tactical concerns are those which aren’t likely to prevent us from achieving

the mission or enable it, but relate instead to how quickly we are able to do

so. If an ads team builds the wrong ad unit and nobody adopts it, that doesn’t

necessarily mean they can’t later get those revenues, it just means it will

take longer as they build something different. Developing a tactical approach

involves setting roadmaps and creating tasks in order to realize the strategy.

Teams establish goals and milestones along a timeline to track progress and

measure how well they are executing relative to expectations.

Tactical decisions aren’t unimportant but there are many orders of magnitude

more of them which is why it is critical that everyone involve agree on the

strategy.

When the goals set are not being achieved, or are not being achieved in

a timely manner, teams may have to revisit the strategy and develop new tactics.

Execution risk exists in areas where if failing to execute has

consequences to how soon teams can achieve our mission, but not necessarily

jeopardize their ability to eventually achieve our mission.

VISION

The word vision is thrown around often can be easily confused with mission

statements and strategy. I have come to see vision as any description of a

desired future state. For Facebook, if I were to describe what the world would

be like when we achieve our mission that is an example of vision. If I describe

the state of the user experience after a given set of strategic work is done

that is an example of vision. Well articulated and widely shared mission and

strategy should create vision that is broadly shared.

When someone asks you a question of the form “what will it look like when…” or

“how will it feel if…” or “how do you see this playing out after…” they are

asking you about your vision. When you say “imagine a world where…” or “I think

the way the market will react is…” or “I think it should feel like…” you are

describing a vision.

DEFINITIONS

Interestingly, this post is an example of something even more paramount than

having a mission: providing a common language for the team to use that everyone

understands. Ensuring people use terms consistently isn’t just pedantry, it

is potentially critical to scaling execution.