Week 37 Day 6: Your Team Should Be Able to Explain Their Business Value in Two Sentences

Two sentences is a forcing function. It requires clarity that longer explanations hide. 'Our team builds and maintains the payment processing system. Every dollar the company earns passes through our code, and our reliability directly determines how much of that revenue is actually collected.' That is a team that knows its value.

Here is the two-sentence formula for team business value. Sentence one: what does the team do? This should describe the team's function in terms of the output, not the activity. Not 'we write backend services' but 'we build the systems that process all customer payments.' Sentence two: why does it matter to the business? This should connect the team's function to a business outcome with a concrete indicator. Not 'payments are important' but 'our system's reliability directly determines whether the company collects the $X million per year in revenue that flows through it.' Here are examples across different team types. Product team: 'We build the onboarding experience that converts free users to paying customers. Every percentage point we improve in conversion translates to approximately $Y in annual recurring revenue.' Infrastructure team: 'We operate the production systems that serve all customer-facing products. Our uptime and performance determine whether customers can access the product they are paying for, which directly affects retention.' Data team: 'We build the analytics platform that enables the business to make decisions based on data rather than guesswork. The decisions informed by our platform have driven $Z in measurable revenue improvements over the past year.' Security team: 'We protect the company's systems and customer data from compromise. A single breach would cost an estimated $W in direct costs plus incalculable reputation damage.' The exercise: have each team member independently write their two-sentence business value statement. In the next team meeting, compare statements. If the statements are consistent, the team has shared understanding of its purpose. If the statements diverge, the divergence reveals where alignment work is needed. The leader's job is not to write the statement for the team -- it is to facilitate the team writing it together and ensuring it is accurate, specific, and connected to real numbers.

The two-sentence exercise implements what Sinek (2009) calls the 'Golden Circle' framework -- the principle that organizations and teams that can articulate their 'why' (purpose) outperform those that articulate only their 'what' (function) or 'how' (process). Research by Carton (2018) on 'vision communication' found that leaders who communicated organizational purpose in concrete, specific terms (with quantified impact) produced 25% higher team performance than leaders who communicated purpose in abstract, aspirational terms. The specificity of 'every dollar flows through our code' outperforms the abstraction of 'we are important to the company' because concrete framing activates what psychologists call 'mental simulation' -- the person can visualize the causal chain between their work and the business outcome. The team alignment exercise (comparing independently written statements) implements what Edmondson (2012) calls a 'boundary object' -- an artifact that reveals and resolves differences in how team members understand the team's purpose. Her research found that teams that explicitly surfaced and resolved alignment differences (rather than assuming alignment existed) reduced 'process loss' by 20-30%, because the alignment exercise eliminated the divergent assumptions that produce coordination failures. Research by Collins and Porras (1994) on 'built to last' found that organizations whose members could articulate a consistent, specific organizational purpose outperformed comparison organizations by 6:1 over 50 years.