Drafting up values, mission , vision and the elevetor pitch for product and product team.

I was leading a development of a product with a very lean team. We had a general idea about the problem statement the product team was trying to solve.  The product team themselves were coming up with features to build into their MVP to address their problem statements. However, I instantly detect the shortcomings of such a approach of product development with my experience in XP in past projects that I had led.
I decided to align the team's values , mission and vision such that team could better judge the features to develop and strategically plan their competitive landscape as well.

Building our core values of product teams first.
I used management 30's Big value list for the project .
I had each team member select 4 values from the list . Then had them read that out loud to rest of the team members. If few values were common between all members then those values were instantly selected. For remaining we used the comparision tables and voting. We would compare each value with others and score against or in for other values . This way we were able to select final four values for the product team.
We then decided to build out short instroduction of these values on what it means to each team member first, Then draft up a common meaning for each of the values for the product team.
Here were the final results.

TEAM Values
Accountability: Taking responsibility for what is committed and followed through.

Commitment: Putting forth maximum effort to accomplish what was initiated.

Collaboration: A place where individuals can gather,share their thoughts and ideas, and work together towards a shared objective.

Team Work: Working together in a way that enhances and completes each other, in order to achieve mutual growth and development.


Building mission statement:
After this, We moved on to drafting up our mission statement. We used asana's Mission statement framework for this.  The process were simple, Each team member wrote up their own version keeping in mind the values we just created. Then read it loud to the rest of the team. Then they came together to write a single team mission.

Mission Statement:

Building Vision statement:
It is very important for the coach to differentiate and explain difference between mission and vision of any company / product or team. After that we used the agile product vision template with process same as before , Each member will fill in as individual first, then come together as a team.

This is what the team came up with:
Product Vision:
To connect people and teams with meaningful purpose.

Now the team needed to describe their work, and the meaning for their work. For this we employed elevator pitch model. This will help the team in accurately describe their product and their work.

Following the same process like before, The team came up with following:
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After this we wanted the team to be constantly reminded of these values, mission and vision as well as the elevator pitch. So we put it up on the wall.