Results

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We do what we promised to each other, customers, users, and investors.

Measure results not hours

We care about what you achieve: the exam percentage you got, the client you made happy, and the team member you helped. Someone who took the afternoon off shouldn't feel like they did something wrong. You don't have to defend how you spend your day. We trust team members to do the right thing instead of having rigid rules. Do not incite competition by proclaiming how many hours you worked yesterday. If you are working too many hours, talk to your manager to discuss solutions.

Dogfooding

We use our own product. We utilise our learning methodologies as a team as do our students.

Our entire company uses Techmission methods to collaborate on this handbook. We also capture other content and process and manage them with Techmission.

When something breaks, doesn't work well, or needs improvement, we are more likely to notice it internally and address it before it impacts our larger community.

Give agency

We give people agency to focus on what they think is most beneficial. If a meeting doesn't seem interesting and someone's active participation is not critical to the outcome of the meeting, they can always opt to not attend, or during a video call they can work on other things if they want. Staying in the call may still make sense even if you are working on other tasks, so other peers can ping you and get fast answers when needed. This is particularly useful in multi-purpose meetings where you may be involved for just a few minutes.

Write promises down

Agree in writing on measurable goals. Within the company we use public OKRs for that (coming soon).

Growth mindset

You don't always get results and this will lead to criticism from yourself and/or others. We believe our talents can be developed through hard work, targeted training, learning from others, on-the-job experience, and receiving input from others. It is in our DNA as an company and individuals to look for opportunity, stay humble, and never settle. We try to hire people based on their trajectory, not their pedigree. We also strive to foster a culture of curiosity and continuous learning where team members are provided and proactively seek out opportunities to grow themselves and their careers.

Global optimisation

This name comes from the quick guide to Stripe's culture. Our definition of global optimisation is that you do what is best for the organisation as a whole. Don't optimise for the goals of your team when it negatively impacts the goals of other teams, our users, and/or the company. Those goals are also your problem and your job. Keep your team as lean as possible, and help other teams achieve their goals. In the context of collaboration, this means that if anyone is blocked by you on a question, your approval, your top priority is always to unblock them, either directly or through helping them find someone else who can, even if this takes time away from your own or your team's priorities.

Tenacity

We refer to this as "persistence of purpose". As talked about in The Influence Blog, tenacity is the ability to display commitment to what you believe in. You keep picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and quickly get going again having learned a little more.

Ownership

We expect team members to complete tasks that they are assigned. Having a task means you are responsible for anticipating and solving problems. As an owner, you are responsible for overcoming challenges, not other team members. Take initiative and proactively inform stakeholders when there is something you might not be able to solve.

Sense of urgency

At Techmission, time gained or lost has compounding effects. Try to get the results as fast as possible, but without compromising our other values and ways we communicate, so the compounding of results can begin and we can focus on the next improvement.

Ambitious

While we iterate with small changes, we strive for large, ambitious results.

Perseverance

Working at Techmission will expose you to situations of various levels of difficulty and complexity. This requires focus and the ability to defer gratification. We value the ability to maintain focus and motivation when work is tough and asking for help when needed.

Bias for action

It's important that we keep our focus on action, and don't fall into the trap of analysis paralysis or sticking to a slow, quiet path without risk. Decisions should be thoughtful, but delivering fast results requires the fearless acceptance of occasionally making mistakes; our bias for action also allows us to course correct quickly. Everyone will make mistakes, but it's the relative number of mistakes against all decisions made (i.e. percentage of mistakes), and the swift correction or resolution of that mistake, which is important. A key to success with transparency is to always combine an observation with questions to ensure understanding and suggestions for solutions / improvement to the group that can take action. We don't take the easy path of general complaints without including and supporting the groups that can affect change. Success with transparency almost always requires effective collaboration.

Accepting uncertainty

We should strive to accept that there are things that we don’t know about the work we’re trying to do, and that the best way to drive out that uncertainty is not by layering analysis and conjecture over it, but rather accepting it and moving forward, driving it out as we go along. Wrong solutions can be fixed, but non-existent ones aren’t adjustable at all. The Clever PM Blog

Escalate to unblock

We should be diligent to define Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI). DRIs are empowered to escalate to unblock. Managers at Techmission seek to increase the output of the work of those on their team, a core concept in High Output Management. Early escalation, delivered with context of the challenge, enables managers to function as an unblocker.

Customer results

Our focus is to improve the results that customers achieve, which requires being aware of the Concur effect, see the Hacker News discussion for a specific UX example. Customer results are more important than:

What we plan to make. If we focus only on our own plans, we would have only Techmission.co.za and no self-hosted delivery of Techmission.

Large customers. This leads to the innovator's dilemma, so we should also focus on small customers and future customers (users).

What customers ask for. This means we don't use the phrase "customer focus", because it tempts us to prioritise what the customer says they want over what we discover they actually need through our product development process. Often, it’s easier for a customer to think in terms of a specific solution than to think about the core problem that needs to be solved. But a solution that works well for one customer isn’t always relevant to other customers, and it may not align with our overall product strategy. When a customer asks for something specific, we should strive to understand why, work to understand the broader impact, and then create a solution that scales.

Our existing scope. For example, when customers asked for better integrations and complained about integration costs and effort, we responded by expanding our scope to create a single application for the DevOps life-cycle.

Our assumptions. Every company works differently, so we can’t assume that what works well for us will support our customers’ needs. When we have an idea, we must directly validate our assumptions with customers to ensure we create scalable, highly relevant solutions.

What we control. We should take responsibility for what the customer experiences, even when it isn’t entirely in our control. We aim to treat every customer-managed issue as a R1M a day problem.

Results Competency

Competencies are the Single Source of Truth (SSoT) framework for things we need team members to learn. We demonstrate results when we do what we promised to each other, customers, users, and investors.

Techmission Results Grade

Demonstrates Results Competency by…

Knowledge Assessment

Develops the skills needed to commit and execute on agreed actions. Knowledge Assessment for Individual Contributors

Knowledge Assessment for Individual Contributors

Applies commitment to results and demonstrates ability to execute on agreed actions.

Knowledge Assessment for Individual Contributors

Models a sense of urgency and commitment to deliver results.

Knowledge Assessment for Individual Contributors

Coaches team members to collaborate and work iteratively towards results with the focus on the outcome and not hours worked.