We are redoing our engineering website and our blog (stay tuned).
In parallel we have worked on the Nitro Mission Statement (for 2017 and beyond) and have condensed it down to …
Our VP Product has also articulated a comprehensive, 2-step, “Elon Musk”-style master plan how to get there …
- Make edit, collaborate, share, sign … work!!! - for everybody (personal and business (wall-to-wall)), everywhere (desktop, browser, mobile) and anytime (always-on).
- Make it smart(er).
Going through this process made me think (again): Why do I work for Nitro?
The mission statement explains what we want to do and the masterplan articulates how we are going to do it (and there is a bigger masterplan that I am not sharing here :)). The last step is to understand why every individual in the company is motivated to deliver on the mission. Every individual needs to connect the dots.
For me personally there are two reasons why I work for Nitro …
- First, I want to save the planet
- Second, I think that innovation is good
Now let’s connect the dots. Let’s find out how to connect the why with the what.
The first one is easy. Two days ago, I was on a customer call and one of the users said “I like Nitro. Very easy to use. It helps me to become paperless. It helps me to print less”, means for me it is simple: Using Nitro helps large Fortune 500 companies to become (more) paperless and I am very excited and passionate about helping to make that happen and to save some trees and with that reduce the CO2 emissions and with that save the planet. With that (for me) the dots connect.
The second one is also not hard (to see). I am a big fan of innovation (because I think that we need innovation to safe the planet :)) and believe that innovation happens in environments that foster creativity and that these environments need to be heterogeneous in nature to create that kind of creativity and that monopolies are bad for innovation and that customers deserve choice. And here we are with Nitro keeping the market leader on its toes and providing the users and customers with a choice/alternative (and not a bad one, if I may say so).
These two reasons are good enough for me to get me out of bed every morning (and I have a couple more that have to do with my desire to build and run software engineering organizations that put value on the CV of the engineer and value into the hands of the customers), but there is a third reason that is more personal in nature.