The Mission Is the Magnet

Before I ever built products, I served in the U.S. Army as an Airborne intelligence sergeant. That experience of working in service of something larger than myself, of making decisions under pressure with lives on the line, shaped everything that came after. I learned early that the mission comes first, ahead of ego and ahead of recognition, and I have never found a reason to unlearn it.

That mindset followed me from the military into cybersecurity, and then into leadership roles where the stakes changed but the values stayed the same. Whether I was securing critical systems, helping build Elastic Security, or coaching in the gym, the goal has always been the same: real strength is lifting others.

One of the proudest chapters of my product career was building Endgame. We entered a brutally competitive market, going head to head with massive players like McAfee and CrowdStrike, and we carved out real ground. We didn’t win because we had more money or brand recognition. We won because we had something harder to copy, a clear mission: protect high-value targets from nation-state level attacks. That focus, and the small, fierce team who rallied behind it, made all the difference.

At the heart of it was Nate Fick, a Marine officer turned tech CEO, and later the U.S. Ambassador for Cyberspace and Digital Policy. He led with conviction, clarity, and a deep respect for the mission. In all-hands meetings, Nate would remind us that we were an “elevator asset company,” meaning that if the building burned down, the most important assets could still fit in the elevator. He did not mean the code or the tools. He meant the people, the ones who understood the user’s mission and had the passion to serve it.

That idea stuck with me. Nate’s example reinforced what I had learned in uniform: the success is the user’s success, and your mission is their mission.

Nate also brought something else with him out of uniform, a motto from the Marines. Three words from the patch of VMM-364, the Purple Foxes, a tiltrotor squadron whose pilots fly CASEVAC into enemy fire to bring wounded troops home. Give a shit. About the work. About the people. About the outcome. It became the working motto of my career, and it has been the spine of everything I have built since. I’ll come back to it in full when we get to the chapter on AI.

Metrics are the outcome of making your user successful. Yes, we need to measure them. But they are the result of serving the mission, not the reason for it.

There’s a moment in every product meeting when the question slides in like it always does: “How will we measure success?” It’s a good question, just not always a good first question.

In lifting it’s the same story. People chase PRs every week like the number on the barbell is the whole point, so they add five pounds, hit record, post the clip, and do it again the next week until something gives. Metrics without a mission are just noise, pressure with no direction behind it and goals with no guts. The weight on the bar isn’t the goal, it’s the evidence of progress, not the destination.

We’ve all seen what happens when this mindset takes over, and it is not a failure of talent so much as a failure of alignment. Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t initially flop because the devs didn’t care. Far from it. The development team poured years into building something ambitious, but the pressure to hit a holiday launch window, a decision made at the executive level, overrode the mission of delivering a complete, polished experience. The result was a rocky release, millions in refunds, a reputational hit, and a stock crash.

To their credit, the team stuck with it. Years later, after patches and a reimagined DLC, the game has earned back much of the trust it lost, which is what happens when talented people are finally given the space to do the work right.

But not every team gets the chance to earn trust back. Humane raised over $230 million to ship the AI Pin in April 2024, a wearable that was supposed to replace your phone with voice and laser projection. The reviews were brutal: battery life, overheating, latency, hallucinations. The mission of building something a user actually wanted got buried under the mission of shipping what investors had already paid for. Less than a year later, HP bought the company’s IP for a fraction of its peak valuation and shut down the servers, and every Pin in the wild became a brick on the same day. There was no mission left to recover.

And we’ve seen what it looks like to protect the mission, even when it means stepping back. Simone Biles did exactly that in front of the entire world at the 2021 Olympics. Under unimaginable pressure, she chose long-term purpose over short-term performance. She knew something was off, and she honored that instinct.

“I have to focus on my mental health… if you don’t, then you’re not going to enjoy your score and you’re not gonna succeed as much as you want to.” — Simone Biles

Her move wasn’t retreat, it was leadership. And in time she returned to competition stronger, on her terms, and more respected than ever: a different kind of comeback, powered by mission rather than metrics. Success is not about hitting every metric, it is about refusing to lose yourself trying.

More Than Just Good Intentions

Being mission-driven is not a poster in the break room or a bullet in a pitch deck. It is how you move, how you decide, and how you show up when it’s hard.

Velocity gets celebrated, the launch that went out and the number that went up this week. Mission is quieter than that, but quiet doesn’t make it weak. Mission gives you clarity when things get blurry and stamina when things get hard.

Patagonia famously ran a campaign telling customers not to buy their jacket unless they truly needed it. SpaceX targets goals across decades, not quarters. Mission alignment shows up in the timelines a company is willing to commit to, and it pays off: research shows people who believe in the purpose behind their work stay longer, burn out less, and deliver more.

When Metrics Eclipse Meaning

Metrics matter, and I am not arguing against measurement. They matter when they serve the mission, though, not when they become it. Here is where teams lose the plot:

• They ship fast instead of shipping right.
• They chase signups instead of learning why users leave.
• They brag about launches and ignore long-term usage.

When dates drive development, teams start cutting corners. Feedback loops close, energy fades, and you build momentum toward a number instead of toward value. In the gym this is ego lifting, and in product it’s just as risky. It looks like burned-out engineers, brittle systems, and growth that collapses the second you stop pushing it uphill.

The Fulfillment Flywheel (Powered by Purpose)

There’s a better model, and it’s as relevant in combat as it is in code or in the squat rack. It’s called the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It was developed for fighter pilots and adopted by startups, and it runs on clarity.

Without a clear mission, the whole loop spins out. With a mission, observation knows what matters, orientation filters cleanly, decisions line up with the work, and action carries resolve. Without one, you collect noise, over-prioritize the wrong metrics, chase vanity wins, and execute half-heartedly. In lifting, that means trusting the plan instead of maxing out because you feel good that day. In product, it means waiting to ship because your users aren’t ready, even if your OKRs are.

Mission turns chaos into clarity: it makes every rep count, every release matter, and every decision directional. This is the real flywheel of fulfillment: mission fuels clarity, clarity powers resilience, resilience drives real progress, and real progress reinforces the mission. That’s the through-line, and it’s what keeps us going. Metrics follow. The mission leads.