Tiger Team, Assemble!

“The top decides a strategy, and they expect people to go out and execute on it,” says Sanjay Khosla, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing at the Kellogg School.  

But that’s not always the best approach. “Change doesn’t just come from the top; change can come from the middle, too,” he says. 

To achieve this, Khosla encourages leaders to deploy tiger teams.  

Tiger teams are small, cross-functional groups that are convened to tackle a specific challenge before being disbanded. Perhaps the most famous tiger team was the group of specialists assembled to safely bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to earth. 

But a tiger team isn’t a magic bullet. Company leaders need to set it up for success. Khosla, who works as an executive coach, has helped a number of businesses through tiger-team-led transformations. When done right, tiger teams help solve problems, drive change, and develop future leaders. 

Here, he lays out best practices for building and getting the most out of a tiger team—and explains how participating in those teams can also give individuals a career boost. 

Keep teams focused, small, nimble, and temporary 

Before you draft your tiger team, it’s important to have a clearly defined objective for it. 

Khosla gives an example of a company that was investing heavily in AI but wasn’t sure what was working. So it assembled a tiger team with the directive to identify best practices for investing in AI—and how to scale them. That led the team to focus on the two units that were having the most success with AI and recommend how those successes could be scaled across the company. 

The most-effective tiger teams are kept small—Khosla recommends no more than five people. This means they are nimble enough to move quickly through ideation, testing, and refining of a specific, limited objective. 

Khosla worked with a successful direct-to-consumer firm that wanted to increase its growth from 8 to 15 percent annually. To tackle this, it formed a three-person tiger team, with one member from the insights team, one from the creative team, and one from performance marketing. 

The normal process for collaboration among these teams was for the insights team to gather its information, then polish it into recommendations for the creative team, which converted these insights into creative campaigns that the performance marketers would analyze to create their own reports and recommendations.  

Essentially, it was a very sequential approach where information was refined, then passed to the next team in a straight line. The more-streamlined tiger team shook this up.  

“Rather than go linear, they went triangular,” Khosla says. 

The three people didn’t worry about passing a “perfect” report to the next team. Instead, they gathered insights together, tested their hypotheses in real time, and learned as a group what worked and what didn’t.  

And, crucially, they knew they wouldn’t be judged for less-than-perfect ideas. 

“Here, the leadership were saying, ‘you’re not going to be judged. You don’t need to worry about perfection,’” Khosla says. “Pace over perfection—getting things roughly right rather than precisely wrong.” 

The tiger team discovered that certain zip codes represented much higher growth than others. So it recommended that the company stop thinking about the entire U.S. as its key market but instead zero in on the most-promising zip codes. 

But no matter how successful they are, tiger teams should also be temporary.  

A team may need 4-6 weeks to investigate a problem. Once it has a solution, company leaders need to decide if the team should disband or if it has more work to do. Perhaps the team should be in charge of scaling the solution. Or perhaps another tiger team should do that work. In some cases, one tiger team might need to splinter into several new teams that tackle different parts of a challenge or solution, each with its own specific objective. 

Scale what is working quickly 

Tiger teams aren’t just for solving problems; they can also build on successes. But doing so requires that leaders respond quickly to the teams’ recommendations.  

“To help tiger teams feel empowered, you have to respond quickly with feedback—yes or no,” Khosla says. “And if it’s no, you have to be very clear on why.”  

Khosla saw this happen at a company where one department had particularly high employee-engagement scores. A tiger team, led by human resources, was tasked with figuring out what was going so well in that department and how to spread that across the organization. 

The tiger team analyzed engagement scores and interviewed some employees to drill deeper. It discovered that, while good compensation certainly helped, the teams with the highest engagement and retention scores were ones where employees felt that their managers cared about them and invested in them.  

The tiger team was able to make specific recommendations to senior leaders that could be scaled across the full company. 

You can apply tiger teams to scale in all sorts of areas, Khosla says. “You can scale behavior. You can scale a product. You can scale ways of working.” 

Help your tigers grow 

Tiger teams don’t just benefit organizations as a whole, Khosla says. They are also a significant way to develop talent. 

Because tiger teams form and disband regularly, leaders can use them as an opportunity to test talent, and aspiring managers to prove their worth. Senior leaders need to make sure they’re using tiger teams as a way to develop promising new leaders. Doing so will convince more people that participating benefits both their career and the company as a whole. 

Khosla is currently coaching a software developer at an AI enterprise solutions firm. She is very well respected and is interested in rising into general management but hasn’t had much exposure to the organization beyond her department. So Khosla helped place her on a tiger team with some members of the sales department. 

At first, the sales team wasn’t thrilled to have her there, seeing her as an odd fit, given her role. But her natural curiosity led her to ask a number of insightful questions, leading her to a key revelation: while her development team was very proud of some “nerdy stuff” in its software that was technically clever, the salespeople explained that those bells and whistles were not clicking with users.  

“Customers were looking for simplicity and convenience and speed,” Khosla says. “So the software was pared down to what customers really wanted.”  

But the benefits went both ways. The salespeople on the team realized that their focus on closing deals was getting in the way of the larger goal of the product itself. They agreed that the sales team should focus on figuring out their customers’ challenges and then demonstrating how to solve them. 

“Do not go for sales,” Khosla says. “Solve pain points, and you get the sales.” 

By recognizing this woman’s talent and empowering her natural curiosity and ingenuity, the whole firm has transformed the way it approaches sales. At the same time, the employee feels more engaged and excited about her career trajectory at the firm, and the company sees her as being on the path towards general management. 

“People want to be on a tiger team because they get exposed to the bigger enterprise, and their views are taken seriously,” Khosla says. “The people you put into tiger teams can plant the seeds for quite dramatic changes.” 

“The goal is to create a culture of permanent dissatisfaction. That’s when tiger teams become a movement.”