If you're working at a start-up, war & battle metaphors are quite commonly used to motivate the team (or so we think). So are sports metaphors. I have been guilty of it as well. I followed folks around me thinking this is the right way to bring everyone in the team to a common ground, for a common mission.

During critical milestones, we name our meetings as war-rooms. In some cases, we find it okay to yell at people, publicly shame them, shout at them if the weekly metric or goal wasn't met.

Overtime, I have grown. Thankfully.

See, the thing is, we're not actually at war where it's literally a life and death situation. We're not playing sports where we have put in months of practice hours for the main event. We are building software. There are no practice days. Every day is main event. Software building is solving a real user problem. We constantly hope that while we're at it, we're making it delightful for users as well.

We can't make products of love with a war mindset.

Of course, we are all building a business as well and we have to keep track of the outcome but doing that with a constant war-like culture doesn't seem to be intuitive.

I hope we kill the war metaphors, sports metaphors altogether and create ones that truly are in context of technology, software, and users who are using digital products or their outputs.