A Passionate Team With a Common Purpose

A note from the CEO

There’s a reason we—and many tech companies like us—have employees who work remotely. It allows them and their families flexibility while opening the widest selection of talent for our team. But let’s be real. You never really get to know someone through a screen.

That’s why each quarter, we host a strategic offsite where we bring all of Mobilize together for a week to grow and collaborate (and obviously have fun).

Mobilize is growing fast! Since the last retreat, we more than doubled in size. So for many, last week’s retreat to the scenic, snow-capped mountains of Colorado was the first time they met anyone else on the team in person. Among a busy schedule of activities (not to mention the work that continued unabated), we did a classic exercise: Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’.

Our team is diverse. It’s made up of:?

• Veterans
• Technical experts
• Disruptive thinkers
• People from all walks of life

Going around the room and asking their ‘why’ was a highlight for me. What motivates this group of people to show up every day? Of course, their answers varied. But a common theme was knowing VISION is making a difference in the lives of service members and in the ability of the U.S. government to meet its toughest challenges.?

Allow me to adapt a quote from Professor Debbie Haski-Leventhal to something more suited to our mostly military audience:?

Passion is like the thrust that powers the jet, but purpose is the direction the plane is flying.

This team has passion for creating technology that empowers humans to push the limits of what’s possible. It’s clear in everything they do. Even during the offsite, they found time to brainstorm and add powerful new features to VISION—not because anyone asked for them, but because they know making the tool the best it can be has real-world implications.

Last week was about us coming together to align our common purpose and ensure we continue in the same direction going into the second quarter.

In that spirit, we reexamined and recommitted ourselves to our core values, informed by what each teammate brings to the table.

Think like others won’t

• To do what no one is doing, we must think like no one is thinking.
• We foster the fringe ideas, the bold notions, and the divergent thinking that leads to bigger, broader, and more effective solutions.

Let the experts be the experts

• We maximize our agility and quality when we prioritize the voices of experts.
• We look to the experts to bring insight to problems and value to solutions relevant to their expertise, and allow ourselves to be the experts we are or are becoming.

Fail fast but do no harm

• Failures are a necessary component of success.
• We embrace roadblocks, experiments, and unknowns while carefully measuring their impact against our values and the values of those they would affect.

Be solution-oriented

• Problems are opportunities to create possibilities.
• We orient our minds, our conversations, and our efforts around crafting effective solutions to the right problems.

Relentlessly pursue excellence

• A high purpose can not be achieved with low standards.
• The weight of our mission demands that our thinking and our work be of the highest quality. In everything we do, we deliver at an uncommon and uncompromising level.

I love this team, and just wanted you to know how awesome it is. As I repeat often - there is no technology without humans. That’s all.?

One team, one vision,

CEO of Mobilize, Jade Baranski