I was presenting in front of the room at our all-team meeting, thirty engineers in the audience, more on video. I talked about everything we were building that I was excited about. I couldn't believe we got to work on these problems. If you had asked me then, whether my team understood what mattered and felt connected to it, I would have said yes. Absolutely.

Weeks later, an engineer showed up in my office hours and told me that with everything we were doing, my team didn't know what mattered now.

I started watching the leaders who got this right. I interviewed more than 30 of them at companies like Google, Netflix, NVIDIA and Anthropic.

The mission is just one part of what your teams need. They also need the Why-Now: what part of the mission matters now and why. And a leader who keeps connecting both to the work in front of them, including on the teams whose work is several steps removed from anyone who feels it. This talk is about how to do that, drawn from my own mistakes and from leaders who got it right.

Key takeaways

- Leaders consistently overestimate how well their team understands what matters. Saying it from the front of the room isn't enough.

- Meaning doesn't require a big mission. Leaders who find what's real and make it visible can make build automation as urgent as a moonshot.

- There is no version of doing this well where you receive a strategy from above and simply pass it on. Your team builds their picture of what matters from how you connect it: from their work to the user, to the teams around them, and what they watch you do.

First delivered at LDX3 / LeadDev New York, 2026. Video available soon.

Duration: delivered as a 25-minute talk. Adaptable to 30 or 45 minutes, and to a 60-minute version with an extended Q&A or a short working exercise where the audience finds the why-now on their own roadmap.

Target audience: engineering & product leaders, teams and leaders of leaders, including directors, VPs and CTOs.