How do you maximize impact with limited resources? In this powerful session from Prodacity 2025, Jason Fraser introduces the Mission Ratio, a framework for quantifying mission effectiveness and identifying leverage points in mission-driven organizations.

Fraser shares the story of Max, an Airman who transitioned from combat operations to software development, realizing that his new role delivered exponentially more impact than his original mission. This insight led Fraser to develop the Mission Ratio, a tool for measuring how much real mission value is delivered per unit of effort, time, or resources.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• The Mission Ratio: A new way to measure mission effectiveness
• How to identify leverage points that drive greater impact
• Why zombie projects drain resources & how to eliminate them
• Confounding constraints: How to optimize around time, money, and staff limits
• Impact mapping: A tool to systematically improve mission outcomes

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: How Max’s story reshaped Jason Fraser’s perspective on impact
[04:31] - Defining the Mission Ratio: Inputs vs. outcomes
[06:03] - Why visibility leads to action in mission-driven work
[07:04] - Measuring effectiveness when profit isn’t the goal
[08:57] - The biggest barriers to scaling mission impact
[10:06] - Case study: How U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services improved processing by 30%
[12:53] - Identifying zombie projects that waste time & resources
[14:00] - Why killing zombie projects isn’t enough—you must optimize what remains
[15:54] - Impact Mapping: A tool for increasing mission leverage
[19:59] - Case study: World Central Kitchen & the power of smart resource allocation
[21:49] - Why software teams must align with end-user mission outcomes
[23:13] - Final challenge: What is your mission ratio & how will you improve it?

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Jason Fraser (00:03):

Hi. So my story today starts with my friend Max. Now I met Max back in 2017. He was assigned to a team who was building software for the Air Force and we were working out at same office. I was a contractor at the time supporting the Air Force teams that were building software and we're working away. And here's this kid who just brought so much energy and light to everything that he did. I was just really impressed with Max. So I wanted to get his story and really I wanted to find out how did he end up here working with this team of Renegade people who were building software instead of doing all of the things that we think of the Air Force as doing typically. So I invited Max to lunch. We go out to lunch, and it turns out Max didn't join the Air Force to build software.

(00:58):

Max joined the Air Force to be a para rescue trooper. Now, pararescue is one of a very few special forces careers in the Air Force, and it involves jumping out of an airplane into hostile environments, potentially surrounded by hostile people with guns and providing lifesaving medical care to downed pilots while waiting for an extraction team. And Max told me, and still it just kills me, he told me he wanted to protect, freedom, fight the bad guys and save lives. I'm like, that's a kid who knows his mission. It's amazing. Sadly, with just a couple weeks left in his training, max was seriously injured in a jump. He was removed from his program and told that he would never jump again. Now, max had had some experience with software before joining the Air Force, and he had a background with design and things like that. So he was offered a position working with this team of people who were building software.

(01:59):

And some of you might know the organization that this team eventually became. In fact, probably some of you still worked for that organization. Oh, max was heartbroken, left that part out. He had worked so hard for this thing and then found that he wouldn't be able to do it, but his experience brought him to this place. The organization that these teams eventually became was called Kessel Run. And it is, it is that, that's the punchline. It is a team of uniformed Air force personnel who are writing software to support the Air Force's mission. And it was a career defining moment for many of the people who worked on that team and probably many of the people who still do. So I asked Max how he felt about this radical shift from being someone who is out there in the action, like actually in the fight for real to somebody who was about as far away from that action as he could be.

(02:59):

And he told me that after the physical recovery, which was very difficult, and after getting over the emotional letdown of letting go of this thing that he had really, really wanted to do, he said he was actually pretty happy about how things had turned out. And I asked him why that was and what he said next, set me on a path that would change the way I not only think about my own work, but how I think about all work ultimately bringing me to the concept that I'm going to share with you today. And it all boiled down to leverage. He said to me, "Jason, when I was in pararescue, if I wanted to save a life, I had to jump out of a plane, one life, one jump. What I'm doing with software I know has much more scale than that. I know that I'm impacting hundreds or thousands of lives. So a day at work could mean saving thousands of lives instead of saving just one." And this absolutely blew my mind. Remember this kid is 19 or 20 at the time. I was like, wow, this is amazing. And from that point on, I was thinking about leverage because what Max had said without actually saying it directly, was that building software gave him more leverage on his mission to protect, freedom, fight the bad guys and save lives than jumping out of a plane with a med kit. And an M four did.

(04:31):

So after years of thinking about leverage and applying concepts of leverage to critical decision making in all kinds of software teams and writing mad scribblings in my notebook, which this is a sample of the mad scribblings in my notebook, I finally came to this concept of the mission ratio and I want to share it with you today, and I'm going to share a tool with you as well that will help you improve it. And I think it aligns with all the other tools that folks have shared with you so far and probably what's upcoming in the next couple of days. All of these things together are going to help you do good better because what you are here to do is to deliver mission value and the missions that you deliver are critical to people's lives. So as we're getting into the mission ratio first, we'll talk about what ratios look like.

(05:22):

So ratios have two components, right? There's an antecedent and a consequent to the ratio and the terms don't really matter that much, but ratios express the numerical relationship between two things, right? So we'll take an example from the zoo. There might be five penguins and three seals. The antecedent is penguins, and there are five. The conseque is seals, and there are three. This is just a statement of fact. There's no causal relationship between these two things. But what's cool about ratios is that they show these facts if they make things visible. And by making things visible, we make them actionable.

(06:03):

So ratios are more frequently used to show things that have a direct relationship with each other. For example, if we burn 20 gallons of gasoline, we will, or one gallon of gasoline, sorry, we will get 20 pounds of CO2, one to 20, there's a ratio. Or if I make one jump, I can save one life. So what is a mission ratio? Then? Mission-driven teams measure their success by the outcomes that they deliver in the world. It could be something as big as taking a giant company to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 or something as small as getting one person who needs in-home medical care the care that they need. It's the mission that matters. Success is measured by delivery on that mission. So for-profit companies have an easy tool for this. They use things like gross profit to measure operational efficiency. Their goal is to make the most money for the smallest expense.

(07:04):

And because they work in currency, those are always expressed in numbers and it's very easy to understand what those numbers are. We've had some really interesting conversations about metrics and numbers and how much they really matter and how to massage them in different ways. And all of that stuff is relevant here too. But the ratio that for-profit companies use is basically money spent to money earned. And gross profit is just an expression of that ratio after you've done the math on it. But when making money is a secondary or a tertiary concern or it's not a concern at all, the calculus is less obvious. But the impetus is the same. We want to maximize the valued outcome per unit of investment or effort, and this is the mission ratio for the resources that we have. How much impact can we generate? So input to outcomes, and it's a way for you to think about the health of your mission delivery engine.

(08:04):

So you can slot a lot of different things into the input or outcome side of this for input. Things like resources or effort are really just proxies for more real things like shovels or staff members or money. For the outcome side, it's useful to be as specific as you can be. And this should be your mission. Maybe it's latrines, maybe it's meals for people who are in crisis situations or maybe it's hours of in-home medical care delivered. And each of these things is now formulated as a ratio, and it gives us that lens into our operation so that we can see how we might tweak it to make that ratio better, delivering more outcome.

(08:57):

So I like to think about mission ratios in relation to confounding constraints. And confounding constraints are the things that inhibit your mission delivery every day. These are the things that you never have enough of. It could be time or energy or money or space or equipment. I can't click fast enough or people. All of these things are things that you never have enough of to really fully deliver on your mission. And by placing any one of these things on the input side of your mission ratio, it allows you to think about how you might maximize your outcome in spite of that constraint. Okay, so here's an example using time on the input side. Now, back in 2016, the president at the time tasked US citizenship and immigration services with processing and additional 85,000 refugee and asylum applications over and above their normal quota. And this team that I'm talking about today was the team that was actually taking handwritten forms and inputting them into a system so that these forms could be reviewed.

(10:06):

Now, that team did not receive any extra budget. They didn't receive any extra staff, and when they were given this directive, they did not believe for a second that it could be done. So the ratio at play here was staff hours to applications processed. And the exploration that they had to do was how could we process more applications with the same number of staff hours? So what they did, one of the leaders in this organization decided that she would treat each section of the application form as an experiment going back to David's talk on experimentation. And the experiment was that she could find someone who used that section of the application for some administrative or security value in the process. So she went out and she found all the people who actually used each section of the application. And what did she discover? She discovered that about 30% of the application was used by no one for anything, and her team was wasting their time putting it into the system.

(11:12):

So she told her team to stop processing this section, this section, this section, just cut 'em out completely. And so she reduced the team's workload by about 30% and they were able to make up those extra applications that needed to be processed. So instead of increasing staff hours, which is the thing she was constrained on, she was able to decrease the amount of work per unit without harming the mission and get the extra work done, which I think was very creative of her. So when the ratio is time to outcome, the question you have to answer is, how might we do more with the same amount of time?

(11:54):

So here's one with grant money. I work with a nonprofit in the healthcare space, and their mission is to deliver in-home medical care to people who need in-home medical care. And they do this by providing a website that allows care seekers to find qualified care providers who take Medicaid. So they operate primarily on grant money that's given to them by states. And the ratio that we've worked with at this team is sort of a higher level ratio, but I think it's still useful for them. And that is dollars of funding to service hours provided. So by placing dollars of funding on the input side of this ratio, it guides the team to seek the activities that actually produce the biggest return on their investment. So they had a hypothesis a couple years back that if they got more people into the field of providing in-home medical care that that would drive more service hours at home.

(12:53):

So they worked with a state, actually a state approached them with this idea, asked them to engage with this, and they said, sure, that sounds aligned with the mission. So a state funded this and they did a bunch of work on it. And it turns out no one's actually using it. It's not actually driving any increase in people who are joining this field of in-home medical care, which means it's not contributing to the mission of delivering service hours of in-home care. So this is a case where funds that could be used more effectively to drive real mission value are actually funding a zombie. Now, zombies are projects that were started with the best of intention, but really just aren't delivering what they could be delivering, right? And often no one has the heart to kill them, or even worse, no one is paying attention at all, or these things are just entrenched. We've heard about things like this earlier today. So these things just shamble along, sucking the brains and the money away from your organization.

(14:00):

The big problem here is that your organization is just a mill for turning resources into mission outcomes, right? And if zombies are sucking away your brain power and your money and your other resources, that means that you are not delivering as much mission value as you could be. And when your mission involves real human beings, real lives, it means people are suffering because you are allowing these zombies to live. How many of you have zombies in your organization? Yeah, okay, I see you. When the ratio is money to outcome, the question that you have to answer is, how might we do more with the same amount of money? I should actually say though, that while killing zombies is absolutely essential, you definitely should do it. There's a limit, right? You can only kill off so many projects before you actually start cutting into real mission value.

(15:00):

If you want to deliver value, you have to do something, right? And so it's like a race to the bottom. Killing zombies for-profit organizations will cut expenses, but you can only cut expenses down to zero, and then you can't go any further. So the real gold lies in looking at the missions or the projects that you're actually going to keep and finding ways to optimize in those projects and make them deliver the most mission outcome that you can. Okay? So let's take a look at a little tool that will help you with improving your ratio. Impact mapping was created by Ingrid Dominguez and was popularized by Gojko Adzic in his 2012 book. Some of you might have the book, it's a little thing, but it's great pack-a-punch, and it's a great method for exploring your way around these confounding constraints that I talked about and improving your mission ratio.

(15:54):

So an impact map looks like this. You've got a goal on one side and connected to that goal, you have actors. These are people who can work in support of your goal. Each of those actors has associated with them impacts. These are, it's kind of named oddly, these are things that the actors can do in support of your goal. So things that will impact your goal, but the actors do them. And then finally, there are deliverables. These are the things that we can do to support the actors to deliver the impacts that will improve our goal. Okay, so you kind of hop around a little bit. An example will suit, I'm going to talk about World Central Kitchen. So World Central Kitchen was founded by Jose Andres in 2010, and their mission is to provide meals to people in crisis. So they've been delivering food aid in Ukraine and Gaza in Florida after Hurricane Helene and Milton went through last year and even in Los Angeles after the fires of just a couple weeks ago.

(17:00):

And they have a pretty novel way of delivering on this mission, which Chef Andres refers to as a software not hardware approach. So World Central Kitchen only has about 140 full-time staff, yet they are able to deliver thousands of meals a day in crisis locations around the world. And they can do that because they've got a system, they've got a program, basically an operating system that is able to handle a food preparation and distribution network. And so they come into a place and they use the resources in that location, and they use their system to coordinate all their resources together to deliver on their mission. So the hardware part then comes from local restaurants, but there's still a limit because you might be working in a place where there's no power. Maybe the gas has been shut off. It's possible that roads leading to some of these restaurants might be inaccessible or maybe the restaurant has been completely destroyed, whether by flood or whatever else might destroy it.

(18:08):

So the confounding constraint that we're working with here is still cooktops. There's a limited number of cooktops available. So the ratio that we're looking at is cooktops to meals provided, and we know that we want to maximize the meals provided. So here's where the impact map comes in. Every impact map starts with a goal, right? So we're going to take this mission ratio and just turn it into a goal and jam that in the front of our impact map. So we know meals provided is what we want to do. We know that cooktops are limited, so we need to do more meals per cooktop. So there are three actors that are associated with this transaction. There's the World Central Kitchen staff who are on the ground coordinating things. There's the restaurant staff who are actually doing the food preparation. And finally, there's the meal recipient.

(19:04):

These can be thought of as the who here, this who can affect our goal. So then we have to think about how the restaurant staff could affect our goal by cooking faster, or maybe they could increase volume of cooked stuff per increment of cooking. And that'll make more sense when I give you the next thing. The World Central Kitchen staff could maybe source more cooktops, maybe there are portables available. There's something that they could do to increase the input side there. Finally, the meal recipient could potentially cook for themselves. So the next thing is, what is it that we could do to support these things that our actors could do to help the restaurant staff cook faster? Maybe we could acquire pre-prepped ingredients so they spend more time cooking, less time cutting. Maybe we could find volunteer prep labor for them to increase volume. We could give them bigger pots.

(19:59):

You put a bigger pot on the same stove, you get more soup, right? For World Central Kitchen staff who are trying to source more cooktops, maybe we could print flyers for them or we could run a social media campaign that could support that effort. And finally, for the meal recipients who could potentially cook for themselves, maybe we should just give them meal kits. And this is in fact what they did. And I think this is very, very clever because what they realized was that if there are working restaurant kitchens, there might also be working home kitchens. And if there are working home kitchens, maybe those people don't need to burden this restaurant infrastructure that we've set up. And remember, world Central Kitchen's goal is to provide meals to people in crisis, not to cook meals for people in crisis. So they can increase their mission delivery by providing meals to people who can cook for themselves.

(20:55):

And then again, it reduces burden on their restaurant infrastructure. So it's almost like cheating. They found a way to cleverly increase the input side of the ratio this time. Okay, so then there's been a lot of talk about strategy. My take might look overly simple to you. I like abstractions. So every mission-driven team needs to be thinking about the line that goes from their mission through the actions that they do to the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. This is just basic strategy. What are you here to do? How are you doing it? What are the outcomes that come out the other side? And the impact map is one way to find tweaks to improve all of this. All of the other tools that you learned about this morning are also great ways. And all of these things can work together. You're going to learn some stuff tomorrow as well.

(21:49):

It's going to be really useful. Karen is going to talk about value stream mapping, which can probably help you identify mission ratios by working through your value stream. So it's your job as attendees of this conference to think about all of the things that go through each of these talks and make the connections between them. Find the things that resonate with you and then do the work to make it better. So I'm going to leave you with three questions. And the first is, what is your mission? And if you are on a team that builds software for someone else, that's someone else their mission, that's the mission that you're trying to solve for. So think about that too. But if you cannot articulate an answer to this question quickly and easily off the top of your head, you're not even in the game yet. So focus here first. The second, what ratios could you examine to find leverage on your mission so that you can fine tune your mission delivery engine? And third, when will you get started on this? And I'm going to suggest that if there is any question in your mind about whether the activities that you are doing every day are fully in support of the mission outcomes you want to drive, you should start thinking about this now because there are real humans who depend on the outcomes of your mission.

(23:13):

So we'll go back to Max for a second. Max wanted to protect, freedom, fight the bad guys and save lives. And Max found a place of leverage so that he could deliver more mission outcomes and you can too instantly. I found one picture out of hundreds of pictures from this era that has max in it, and I only have the back of his head, but I love that kid and really he did inspire a change how I think about everything. Some of you might also recognize that guy. He's been on stage a few times here. Anyway, that is it for me. Please come and find me upstairs after the next talk. I'll be up there. I'll be signing some copies of my book Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama Farther and giving them away for free. And also, I'm really curious to learn about your mission and the ratios that might apply in your mission. So come talk to me about that. Thanks very much.

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