Our mission statement describes our current working expectations, the activities and attitudes we plan and expect when we engage with our customers (as well as when working internally). Engage’s mission is as follows:

Develop trust through collaboration and continuously deliver valuable software, creating meaningful, long-term partnerships with our customers. Create a flourishing environment for motivated teams through flexible, sustainable practices and a focus on technical excellence.

Our goal is to become trusted, long-term partners with our customers. We recognize that our customers are creating custom software because their expertise can’t be expressed via off-the-shelf products, and so our work together will be most effective when Engage is a full participant in developing and enacting the strategy around our partners’ custom software. Instead of a vendor relationship where we just do what we’re told, we use our collaborative partnership to work as a team, delivering value to the business through our expertise. Our partners set the direction and help us understand their business, and Engage helps our partners understand the options, costs, and limitations so that together, we can pick the right approach. We do this continuously, usually reassessing and adjusting the direction every week or two, so everyone is sure that we’re not missing any opportunities and we’re delivering the value we expected.

The second half of the mission statement is more focused on how we work together as a team, which encompasses practices internal to Engage, but also includes how we bring representatives from our partners into the team to provide continual guidance. As creators of custom software, we’re not content to keep making the mistakes of yesteryear or get stuck in the patterns and practices that worked for us in 1999. Technical excellence means that, just like with the business value we deliver, we’re always reassessing how we do things and how to make it better (including reassessing the process of reassessing, and becoming better at getting better). As each team learns better ways of working together and working with each individual partner, we have the flexibility to experiment with process and practice changes, leading to teams who avoid burnout and work to create sustained motivation. Ultimately, everyone on the team, from software developers to designers, to product owners and experts, experiences being a part of our team as rewarding, productive, and effective, and finds themselves flourishing.