Fieldway.org

Your team is busy shipping. Features are going out the door. The board sees velocity.

And users aren't engaging with any of it.

I've seen this pattern across companies for 20+ years — and it almost always traces back to the same thing: nobody defined the why behind the work. Not a mission statement pinned to a Confluence page. The actual, internalized "why" that teams make decisions against every single day.

When that's missing, teams default to building features instead of solving problems. They miss the users. They miss the real outcomes. Quarterly objectives take forever to write because nobody actually knows what they're trying to accomplish.

The work looks productive. It's just not connecting to anyone.

And this is a top-down problem. If leadership hasn't built a genuine vision and mission, teams have nothing to navigate by. The good news? You don't need a week-long strategy retreat. I've seen this done well in a couple of hours — and it changes how every decision on the team gets made after that.

Next time you're planning a quarter, step back first. Go back to the why.

What's your team's actual why right now — and does everyone on the team know it?

SaaS stocks slipped after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 last week. The investor narrative? People will just build their own tools now instead of paying $15/month for software.

I don't think that's what's actually happening.

Not everybody wants to build stuff, right? They want to pay their 15 bucks and move on with their lives. Same reason there's stuff around my house I'm not going to do – sure, I could figure it out, but that's not a skill I want to develop or how I want to spend my time.

I'm hearing a lot of doom and gloom from software developers who think their jobs are just going to disappear. There will be more competition, absolutely. But people who can actually build solutions aren't going anywhere.

Here's what actually matters now: You can't just stay in your lane doing one thing. The skill to develop is defining problems and building solutions end-to-end. Not just taking requirements – understanding the full problem, thinking it through completely, and creating what's needed.

The engineers who thrive aren't the ones who just code what they are told. They're the ones who can see the whole system, spot where things are broken, and build the fix. That's being a builder.

Can you do that? Then you're fine.

What's your take – are you seeing this shift in your team?