Defining Vision and Mission: The Foundations of Strategy | Oboard (2024)

Your company’s Vision and Mission are the foundational elements of your strategy, determining the entire approach you will take toward setting and achieving your goals. However, it is also an important exercise that shows whether or not you have a clear understanding of your company and its goals.

If implementing OKRs is Step 1 of Project Management, defining Vision and Mission is Step 0. So get a cup of coffee and check out our step-by-step guide!

What is a Vision Statement?

Imagine you’re sending a postcard from the future; that’s your Vision statement. It’s a vivid description of what the world will look like once your project or company has achieved its ultimate goal.

In less poetic terms, The Vision Statement is a forward-looking declaration of where the company aspires to be. It serves as a guide for choosing current and future courses of action.

Here are three famous Vision statements from companies you may have heard about:

• Tesla: “To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles.”
• Twitter: “We believe in free expression and think every voice has the power to impact the world.”
• Alphabet (Google): “To provide access to the world’s information in one click.”

NOTE: Did you notice the difference in specificity between Tesla and the other two? As a company grows and gets into more and more industries, its mission statement tends to become more abstract. So it’s entirely up to you how specific you want to be in your Vision — as long as you can get everyone behind it, anything goes.

What is more important in the context of OKRs is that Vision sets the direction and inspires everyone involved to aim for the same endpoint. The endpoint to which your OKRs will align the entire company. If you get the Vision wrong, you might lead everyone astray. No pressure!

Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Company’s Vision

Generally, every company is founded with a particular Vision. After all, the ultimate goal of any business is to solve a customer’s problem. The founder just may not know that this is the Vision, and therefore, they may not communicate it enough to employees.

So, the trick here is not to develop a drastically new direction. It is to make everyone realize what they have been doing all along.

1. Identify Long-Term Goals. Consider the impact you want to have in the future, let’s say 20 years from now. Actually, how about 50 years from now? 100? Dream big.
2. Focus on Possibilities. Imagine the future without the constraints of the present. Think broadly about the ultimate impact or end-state you desire.
3. Create Several Drafts. Articulate your long-term goals in a concise statement. Make it inspiring and aspirational. Ensure it is broad enough to allow for growth and change.
4. Validate the Final Draft. Test the vision statement with stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, advisors). Refine it to ensure it resonates and is clear to all audiences.
5. Communicate. Once the Vision Statement is solidified, communicate it via all available channels. Integrate the vision into all strategic decisions and operations.

If you need inspiration, consider the Company Vision examples above. Alternatively, check out this Vision statement for a SaaS company: “to become the leading data analytics platform and revolutionize the way businesses interact with their data.” It is just generic enough to give your company a goal to strive for without pigeonholing your decision-making process.

Because the latter is what the Mission is for.

What is A Mission Statement?

If the Vision is where you’re going, the Mission is how you plan to get there. It outlines the purpose of your project or organization and the key strategies you will use to achieve your Vision.

Once again, without waxing poetically, the Mission Statement describes the company’s current objectives and approach to reaching those goals. It serves as a roadmap for achieving the Vision.

Here are three Mission Statements from some of the world’s top companies:

• Tesla: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy through increasingly affordable electric vehicles in addition to renewable energy generation and storage. .”

• Twitter: “Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue-generating Internet companies in the world.”
• Alphabet (Google): “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

In the context of OKRs, consider the Mission Statement your top-level Objective. It still shouldn’t be as specific as Key Results since it will restrict your decision-making too much.

Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Your Company’s Mission

The Mission does not tolerate the abstract and undefined and exists to clarify and crystallize your Vision into an actionable plan. Unlike the Vision, which allows us to dream big and consider long-term goals, the Mission is about here and now.

So, when creating the Mission Statement, you need to focus not only on what you want to do but also on how you can do it.

1. Analyze Your Unique Value. Understand what your company does best. Identify the value your company provides to customers.
2. Define Your Key Markets. Clearly define who your customers are or who you want them to be. Consider the demographics, geographics, and psychographics of your target market.
3. Define Your Contribution to Stakeholders. Determine how your company serves its stakeholders—this includes customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and possibly more.
4. State Your Core Values. Identify the principles and beliefs that guide your company’s culture and decision-making processes. These should be actionable and evident in the daily operations of the company.
5. Write the Mission Statement. Combine the information from steps 1-4 into a coherent statement. Keep it clear, concise, and actionable. The statement should include what the company does, how it does it, whom it serves, and why it serves them. Keep the language clear and jargon-free; the statements should be understandable by anyone.
6. Review and Refine. Evaluate the draft with a diverse group of stakeholders. Involve a mix of people from different levels and departments. Refine the mission statement until it accurately reflects the company’s purpose and is practical.
7. Finalize and Implement. Confirm the final version of the mission statement. Communicate it to all stakeholders. Embed the mission in all aspects of your business operations, from marketing to internal decision-making processes.

An example of a Mission Statement for the same small SaaS company would be “to empower organizations of all sizes to make data-driven decisions and deliver real-time insights and analytics with unwavering reliability and customer support.”

The Difference Between Vision and Mission Statements

The vision and mission statements serve complementary yet distinct roles in an organization.

The vision statement is aspirational, outlining a future state of what an organization ultimately wants to achieve; it’s the destination on the company’s journey. This statement should be inspiring and serve as a north star for long-term planning, giving everyone a clear idea of the direction the company is heading.

On the other hand, the mission statement is grounded in the present. It defines the organization’s purpose, including the scope of its operations, its primary goals, and the key strategies it uses to achieve them.

While the vision statement is dream-oriented, the mission statement is action-oriented, detailing the path the company will take to reach its vision. Together, these statements provide a strategic framework for an organization, guiding decision-making and ensuring that all levels of the company work cohesively towards a common goal.

How to Connect Vision and Mission to OKRs

As we’ve established, the Mission is essentially your top-level Objective. So, linking OKRs to your company’s Mission is a powerful way to ensure that all efforts and resources are aligned with the fundamental purpose of the organization.

So, let’s take our Mission — “To empower organizations of all sizes to make data-driven decisions and deliver real-time insights and analytics with unwavering reliability and customer support” — and connect OKRs to it.

Step 1. Understand Your Mission

Ensure that the Mission statement of your company is clear, concise, and well-understood across the organization. The Mission articulates your company’s purpose and the reason for its existence.

Step 2. Break Down the Mission

Disassemble the Mission into its core components to understand the areas it touches upon, such as customer satisfaction, innovation, market leadership, etc. Each component of the Mission can be translated into a high-level objective.

For example, part of our Mission is to empower companies to make data-driven decisions — so an objective could be to “Launch a practical, innovative analytics platform.”

Step 3. Set Strategic Objectives

When setting strategic Objectives, ensure they serve the purpose articulated in the Mission statement. Objectives should be ambitious, actionable, and provide clear direction.

TIP: If you want to learn more about setting Objectives, check out our article How to Write OKRs That Help You Succeed.

For example, let’s write some Objectives for our Mission:

• [O] Launch a practical, innovative analytics platform
• [O] Improve Customer Success Outcomes
• [O] Cultivate a Data-Driven Culture Internally

Ensure that Objectives are cascaded down through the different levels of the organization. Each department and team should have Objectives that contribute to the overall Mission.

TIP: We explain OKR cascading and breakdown in our OKR Alignment and Breakdown Guide.

Step 4. Define Key Results

Key Results should be quantifiable and measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward each Objective. They also must be directly related to the Objectives and, thereby, to the Mission. If the Key Result doesn’t clearly support the Mission, it should be reconsidered.

Let’s take one of our Objectives and write some Key Results for it:

• [O] Improve Customer Success Outcomes
  • [KR] Achieve a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) of 90% by Q2.
  • [KR] Reduce average customer support ticket resolution time by 25% by the end of Q3.
  • [KR] Increase customer retention rates by 10% by Q4.

TIP: OKR Alignment and Breakdown Guide gives several examples of breaking Objectives into Key Results.

And you can take it all a step further and connect your Key Results to your Jira Epics and Tasks with OKR Board for Jira! It’s a powerful OKR platform that automates your OKR management and reporting, making the entire OKR management process much easier, faster, and more straightforward.

Conclusion

Defining your company’s Vision and Mission is the first step on the road to goal-setting, and it’s a step you must make. It’s not going to be easy or quick — in fact, sometimes finalizing the Vision and Mission can take weeks — but it’s necessary. They are essential to aligning your teams and ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Establishing these cornerstones may seem daunting, but remember that they are dynamic and can evolve as your company grows and adapts. The key is to start with a solid foundation that genuinely reflects your company’s core intent and desired future state.

Suppose you’re ready to move beyond the foundational Vision and Mission towards a robust implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). In that case, Oboard OKR Consulting can provide the expertise and guidance you need. We provide free OKR reviews and have extensive courses on every aspect and level of OKRs.

We approach OKR implementation with a no-nonsense, pragmatic methodology tailored to your unique business context. Our focus is to translate your mission into actionable objectives, ensuring every key result is a stepping stone toward your vision.

Let us help you craft OKRs that not only reflect your mission but make your vision an achievable reality. Reach out to Oboard OKR Consulting Team — where strategy meets execution and ambitions become outcomes.