According to Marty Cagan, John Doerr has argued that “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
From Marty’s Missionaries vs Mercenaries post:
Teams of missionaries are engaged, motivated, have a deep understanding of the business context, and tangible empathy for the customer. Teams of mercenaries feel no real sense of empowerment or accountability, no passion for the problem to be solved, and little real connection with the actual users and customers.
When I first read this, a US missionary was being sued in Uganda, after she, without any medical training, had been running a medical centre, and 105 children had died.
In my head, “missionary” is associated with enthusiastic, unqualified novices doing things with good intentions but nonetheless leading to harm. Yes, engaged, yes, motivated but only the illusion of deep understanding and empathy only for an illusion of their customer.
Instead of a team of missionaries, I’d prefer a team of mercenaries, specifically professionals that are expected to be competent and accountable for the results of the job they sign up for and yes, are paid to do. They don’t need any particular passion for the specific problem nor even the actual users and customers per se; their passion is to the craft, to being good at what they do.
Teams of competent, professional mercenaries are motivated and accountable to do the job well. Doing the job well includes understanding the problem they signed up to solve. Doing the job well also includes handling all the boring, mundane parts that no one, not even missionaries, are passionate for. Their competence justifies their empowerment because you can trust that they’ll get the job done.
Teams of enthusiastic, novice missionaries are passionate about the mission. This passion does not automatically translate to deep understanding of context nor in competence in skills. This passion also makes them more easily exploitable to being overworked and other bad practices. Even if you can trust their intentions, this does not mean that you can trust that they’ll get the job done, never mind efficiently done.
