Why refresh the mission and values of a 6-year-old company?
At its best, a mission and values statement exercise might be the epitome of a sleepy company retreat. At its worst, it could be a cringe-inducing scene from The Office.
So why did DeepBench decide to delete the old and start fresh after 6 years?
In short, it’s because so much has changed at DeepBench. We’ve pivoted and evolved our offering. Narrowed our focus, deepened our roots in the product research and innovation world, and expanded our capabilities. What used to take place for DeepBench employees at desks and conference rooms now happens on Slack and Zoom.
DeepBench has come a long way from a classroom at MIT, and it’s time our foundational statements reflected our true selves.
Don’t forget to memorialize what you already are
With 6 years and several thousand projects under our belt, DeepBench has put in the hours to build the culture and connective tissue of a high-trust, open, and growing business.
However, our mission and values (and those of many companies) were written well before that accumulated experience. What if there were things that became part of DeepBench’s mission and values in that time, that we hadn’t dreamed up and documented in the early days? Were those things any less part of who we are? Are we wrong to identify with them now?
And similarly, what if statements we had written 6 years ago no longer rang true to the DeepBench of today?
DeepBench needed mission and values statements that articulated both the existing and the aspirational sides of our business, instead of just the early sketch of where we thought we were going.
What to kill, keep, and create
Some value statements, like “Stay user-focused”, are timeless. There will never be a bad time for a company to commit to such a value. Another such value for DeepBench was “Seek learning”. Values like this carried over from our original statements into today.
Others needed to be abandoned. This part is hard. Erasing a value could be seen as a tacit indication that the company is going in the opposite direction. By erasing “Earn trust”, is DeepBench telling it’s employees and partners that it no longer cares about trust? Of course not. But we do view trust differently today and choose to articulate it through ownership and transparency.
Creating new statements is the fun part. For DeepBench, “Be transparent” has emerged organically as a core tenet of what we do and who we are. Especially in the shift to remote work, it has been critical to speak up about what is going on across all facets of the business. There is no longer the opportunity for picking up these sorts of things in bits and pieces around the office. They must be presented intentionally.
DeepBench’s Mission & Values
Today, we know what DeepBench is. We know what about our culture we want to hold on to, and what we want to improve upon. We haven’t lost sight of the aspirational, but also will not skip past acknowledging and memorializing what already exists.
With that, we present our new Mission and Values.
Mission Statement:
Providing access to first-hand insights that help our clients perform the highest quality research.
Value Statements:
Take ownership: Identify opportunities and commit to improving product, process, team, and company.
Be transparent: Build relationships rooted in open communication and accountability.
Stay user-focused: Keep the user’s experience at the forefront of decision-making.
Seek learning: Embrace new challenges and pursue opportunities to grow.
Respect others: Be thoughtful and give consideration to everyone’s ideas and decisions.
