What is a mission?
A mission is a bounded piece of work a Digital FTE takes on beyond its daily rhythm: a goal, a subset of targets or items it applies to, a deadline, a budget carved from the role's own budget, and progress that the manager can watch in the Missions tab. Closing the month, refreshing a cluster of pages before a launch, answering why pipeline fell this quarter, and assessing a market for entry are all missions.
The word is chosen against the alternatives. A project implies a team and a plan document; a campaign implies marketing and a separate mental model. A mission is what a manager asks a capable direct report to go and do, with a clear end, and report back on.
What are the three modes?
Production missions produce a defined output: reconcile the period and prepare the close, publish the pages for a product launch, screen the applications for a hiring round. Progress is measured in items done against items in scope, and the output passes the usual gates: the fact gate for anything written, the approval gate for anything that acts.
Diagnostic missions answer a question: why is cash lower than forecast, why did ticket volume rise, why are candidates dropping out. The answer is ranked hypotheses with the evidence for each, never a single asserted cause. Strategy missions propose a plan for approval, such as a go-to-market design or a content cluster, with every assumption labelled sourced or inferred.
- Production: a defined output, progress by items done
- Diagnostic: a question, answered with ranked hypotheses and evidence
- Strategy: a plan, proposed with labelled assumptions
How does a mission work on ftes.ai?
On ftes.ai a manager launches a mission from the Missions tab, or approves one the Digital FTE proposed, setting the goal, the scope, the deadline, and the budget. The FTE plans the work, runs it as tracked background jobs so the workspace shows progress mid-run, and surfaces anything that needs a decision in the morning brief under waiting-on-you.
When the mission completes, the FTE writes a short review in the first person against the mission's own goal: what was delivered, what was not, what it recommends. Spend against the mission budget is visible throughout and in the review, and the whole run is in the audit trail.
Why are bounded pushes missions and not campaigns?
Because two primitives for one idea confuse the manager. A seasonal push, a launch, a cluster refresh, and a close are all the same shape: a goal, a subset, a deadline, progress. Calling some of them campaigns would create a second place to look and a second way to budget. The workspace standard keeps every bounded push as a mission, so the manager learns one thing and the Missions tab is the one place to look.
It also keeps governance uniform. A mission's actions pass the same approval gate and autonomy ladder as the daily work; there is no campaign mode that runs looser.
What is a mission often confused with?
It is confused with the remit, which is the standing scope; a mission is a push inside that scope with an end date. It is confused with targets, which are the ongoing accountability contract; a mission may serve a target but ends when its goal is met. And it is confused with autonomy: launching a mission does not change what the FTE may do without approval.
It is sometimes assumed to be expensive by nature. A mission's cost is bounded by its budget, which sits inside the role's budget, and the brief warns as it approaches.
Where do you see missions in the workspace?
The Missions tab lists active and completed missions with progress, spend, and the review for each. The morning brief reports mission progress and anything waiting. The Performance tab shows what missions contributed to targets. Every step is logged.
Related terms: remit, targets, per-FTE budget, diagnostic, morning brief.
In the first month, launch one small production mission before any diagnostic or strategy one, such as refreshing a handful of pages or closing a short period, so the manager sees how progress, spend, and the review behave on something bounded and low-stakes. The diagnostic missions are the ones managers come to value most, because a ranked list of hypotheses with evidence is a better answer to why did this happen than any meeting produces, but they are easier to read once the production mission has shown what a mission's review looks like.