feat: new principle "Complete the Mission" #12
Conversation
A new principle about ownership
README.md
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| ## Complete the Mission | ||
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| With Freedom and Responsibility comes trust, and it's almost certain you will end up leading a squad or initiative at some point, with individuals around you to support. | ||
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| As a leader, people look up to you as an example, and you look up to them. It’s your job to set them up for success and ensure they have the focus and clarity to execute. | ||
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| At the same time, a leader must complete the mission—delivering results while balancing the long-term health of our codebase, user experience, and sustainability. This means making trade-offs between speed, quality, technical debt, and customer value, ensuring we don’t optimize for short-term wins at the cost of long-term failure. | ||
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| ### Why? | ||
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| - **Ownership**: In the end, it’s your job to set the team up for success—not just today but in the long run. | ||
| - **Risk management**: You deeply care about the team, and sometimes you will have to make difficult decisions. Risks are necessary sometimes—but they should be taken deliberately, not recklessly. | ||
| - **Balance**: Fast execution matters, but so does avoiding technical debt, maintaining quality, and delivering a great user experience. Completing the mission means balancing all of these. | ||
| - **Accountability**: Risk is inherent in decision-making. When things go south, leaders don’t deflect blame—they step up and own the outcome. | ||
| - **Transparency**: A strong leader makes the mission clear, aligns the team around priorities, and ensures urgency without chaos. |
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Are we making this principle too much about just good leadership in general?
In my mind the core idea of "Complete the mission" doesn't necessarily have to do with leadership at all, but rather a reminder that the details don't matter if you don't actually deliver the mission you committed to.
You don't get style points. You don't get to have excuses. You don't get a reward if you quit early.
To me it's more about setting a clear mission for yourself, a drive to achieve something, not caring about what boundaries need to be broken to deliver. We're not striving for correctness and perfect execution, but rather being pragmatic and doing whatever it takes to deliver the mission.
I would try get rid of the leadership language here and consider maybe rethinking "Progress over perfection" with this new principle.
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💯 agree, I like the way your frame it, I can relate with that! Let me take some time to think this through and come back to this 🙏
Thank you!
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@anttiviljami added a new version, let me know if you like it better.
What should we list under Why? do we even need it? It's clear to me, but maybe I'm biased.
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@jpinho I think this overlaps too much with "Progress over perfection". Can we merge these two into a new "complete the mission" principle?
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@anttiviljami I see, I decided to keep it separate and, therefore, made it clearer so it conveys the message I intent to pass.
Complete The Mission is all about ownership, accountability and delivering results, while Progress over Perfection is about trusting the process, moving fast, iterating based on feedback and so on.
…ith Progress over Perfection
A new principle about ownership:
Engineers constantly navigate trade-offs: speed vs. thoroughness, risk vs. safety, and innovation vs. stability—balancing fast execution with long-term sustainability.
Intentional decision-making means knowing when to move fast, when to refine, and always communicating trade-offs clearly.
Engineering is about delivering high-quality, maintainable software—unfinished work and unmanaged debt break trust with both the team and customers.
Which is why I believe the principle of Complete the Mission is extremely important. As a leader you must care for the team, but also complete the mission, your prime directive.
E.g:
And most surely, we should not let an opportunity to give the example to our team be wasted. You should use the situation to take action and reinforce that we have an high bar and that, specially the leaders, are there to deliver when they must and complete the mission.