A new mission statement for Spiria!
Companies must evolve to adapt to changing market conditions. With 18 years’ experience, Spiria has certainly been through its fair share of transformation. While our foundational value has remained immutable — namely, to serve companies rather than a software product — we have matured and deepened. Let’s face it, we’ve gone from two dudes in a basement to over 175 people in four cities, and we’ve incorporated new skills and significantly expanded our service offering in the process. So yes, you could say we’ve evolved!
To better reflect our current reality, it was time to rewrite our mission statement, which had not been updated in years. But first, let’s clarify what we mean by a mission statement.
Merriam-Webster defines a mission statement as “something that states the purpose of a business or organization.” It’s pretty basic, concise and straightforward. But things get more complicated when you get into the practical details. Most articles relating to mission statements say that they should answer the following questions at the very least:
- WHO are your key customers?
- WHY do they seek out your products or services?
- WHAT main products or services do you provide?
- WHERE do you do this?
The problem, in my opinion, is that this makes for a wordy mission statement that is too much trouble to memorize. Our old mission statement, which checked most of the items on this list, was indeed quite long. Even I couldn’t remember the whole thing.
And what is the difference between mission statement and vision statement, you may ask? Well, while the mission focuses on what an organization does day-to-day, the vision, as the name suggests, focuses on the future. Where does the company see itself in five, ten, fifteen years, or any other relevant time period?
This begs the question of when to revisit the mission statement, to which there is no definite answer, truth be told. The general guideline is: “When the company’s activities have strayed far from the mission.” This naturally occurring phenomenon is common and can’t be underplayed. Certainly, no one trades digital product development for fast-food retail overnight, but it’s completely normal to diversify and try out new things, ideally in a deliberate manner and after analyzing the impact on clients and staff.
We decided it was time to amend our mission statement, not because we had diverged from our service format, but because the statement was lacking clarity, purpose, and energy. True, we now offer a wide range of competencies undreamed of five years ago, but it still revolves around the creation of digital products that serve our clients. So, without further ado, our new mission statement is… (cue drum roll)
We engineer digital products to simplify the world.
We debated a bit about which verb to use. Creating, designing, fabricating, the list goes on and on, until we narrowed it down to engineering. The verb encompasses most of what we do at Spiria, and it also implies a certain difficulty, a complexity behind the things we do. You rarely engineer something for a simple task, you just … do it.
Next, we were using the term digital solutions, which seemed out of date. Now, it’s all about products. You have product teams, product owners (POs), product everything… we had to get with it. So though we’re still a full-service company, reminding ourselves that we work on digital products day-in and day-out marks a shift in perspective.
Finally, simplicity is one of the hallmarks of our customer experience. Working with Spiria should be uncomplicated, and the products we create must also be easy to use and understand, both for end users and for those who will need to tweak the code in years to come.
Also, our digital products should be useful. From back-office systems for a limited number of operators to applications and public sites used by millions, we want our users to ultimately be thrilled, and to be left with a feeling of “Wow, that was easy!”
Since these users come from all over, why wouldn’t we just simplify the world?
