We want to share a real-world example of putting your mission statement to use for product and marketing decisions.

Intercom’s Mission In Practice

Raechel Lambert, Founder of Olivine Playbooks, worked at Intercom for nearly three years. While there, she brought Articles (Intercom's help center product) and Operator (Intercom's bot) to market. For both projects, she was involved from the very beginning all the way through launch and beyond.

One of her key learnings was how a strong company mission can influence product and marketing decisions—all the way down to feature scoping and landing page copy.

This is Intercom’s mission statement.

Here's a quick behind-the-scenes look at how that impacted the development and launch of Articles, Intercom's Help Center product.

Competitor research through the lens of the mission

When Intercom set out to make a help center product and the core team was chosen, we immediately found ourselves in a pickle. Sure, we had a big task to take on established market leaders in a crowded customer support space. But we were worried about something else: If Intercom's mission is to make internet business personal, and we're building a self-service help center product where the whole point is to find the answer by yourself and not have to talk to anyone, how are we going to make it feel personal?

The product manager and I set out to do competitor research to find out specifically what the market had to offer—all through the lens of "does this product feel personal?" During our search, we found lots of bad help center examples where you had to spend lots of time trying to find an answer and when you did, you weren't sure if it could be trusted. We discovered that if we couldn't find an answer in an article, we often had to leave the help center to contact support, only to define our issue through rigid dropdowns. All the while getting reminded to check the help center. When you finally talked to a customer support rep, they might refer you to the very same article that didn't answer the question in the first place.

On Slack's help center, which was arguably one of the best we encountered (powered by Zendesk at the time), they had great articles along with thumbs up and thumbs down emojis at the bottom to share if you found it helpful. The trouble was, if you hit the thumbs down emoji and little pop-up message appeared, it said something to the effect of "thanks! we'll take your feedback under consideration". Take what under consideration? Sure, you'll be able to see a count of which articles are performing badly, but you'll never know why, and if you did, you wouldn't have written the article like this in the first place.

Developing the product mission & story

Armed with a clear mission—to make internet business personal—and a clear understanding of the existing offering, we found our opening. Intercom's help center would feel alive, interconnected, and personal. We now understood that "personal" didn't necessarily mean that you were having a 1:1 conversation, but we would not include the frustrating experience of having dead ends and having to repeat yourself—something you would not have to do if a person was helping you. We decided we would find a better way to help customer support teams scale, without passing the burden on to the customer.

This promise—to make the help center feel alive, interconnected, and personal—was documented in the product mission/brief and was kept top of mind throughout product development. Taking it further than that, we also developed the product's marketing story that we intended to launch with. We will cover story-first product development in more depth in the Product Positioning & Messaging sprint.

Product design using the mission

With the goal of developing an alive and interconnected help center, the product design team looked for every possible way to make the product feel personal. Some of the features that resulted from this mission-driven product development:

Articles will show the author's name and face
Articles will display the date it was last updated
Articles will have emojis at the bottom for readers to rate the article, and if they give a bad rating, an auto message in the Intercom Messenger will pop up saying "sorry that didn't help, let us know here what you're having trouble with and someone will help you resolve it."
Not only will the analytics dashboard include article views and ratings, but it will also include a link to the support conversations that resulting from bad-rated articles. This way, the article author can understand what's missing and fix it for the next person.

Feature scoping using the mission

Because Articles was fundamentally different in that it would feel alive, interconnected, and personal, some tough feature scoping decisions had to be made in order to keep our launch schedule. The product team would have loved to have launched with nested lists and tables in the article composer, but the agreement was to prioritize building a personal help center, so those features were descoped from the initial launch.

Using your mission statement with marketing announcements

Intercom's mission to make internet business personal didn't just help us build a personal help center, it was the north star for marketing efforts too. Rather than trying to compete on features, our product story and announcement messaging leaned heavily on the new, innovative way the product was designed to be personal—unlike any products on the market. For the launch on Product Hunt, the message was "What a knowledge base should be—personal and intelligent." You can see there was a strong, positive reaction from day 1.

The product development and launch experience proved that a strong company mission isn't just fluffy words and pictures you put on the about page. It's a critical part of the company's direction, product, and marketing strategy. A strong mission has the power to help people make the right decisions, even when leadership isn't around. In Intercom's case—the mission informed decisions throughout the entire product development and marketing launch process.

Mission statement in action: Intercom