Of all the business jargon flying around these days, “tiger team” has to be one of the coolest. Even better, the cool name comes with a cool mission: bringing together a team of cross-functional experts to solve thorny problems. Read on for a tiger team overview, when and how to put a tiger team together, and a guide for how to use your business operating system tools to help a tiger team thrive.

What is a tiger team?

The tiger team concept originated in space and military industries. One of the most famous tiger teams worked on the Apollo 13 mission. When the Apollo 13 team told Houston they had a problem, a tiger team was the solution. A team of cross-functional scientists and engineers on the ground helped bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back down to earth.

Before that mission and since, NASA has been a fan of tiger teams. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) creates tiger teams that comprise specialists from across NASA centers and other industry and academia specialists. Institutionalizing the tiger team approach has been a great success, part of which is attributed to the “fresh look” a tiger team gives a problem.

When to put together a Tiger Team

We’re guessing that most people reading this blog aren’t trying to safely bring astronauts home. But most business owners and operators have run into mission-critical problems that would benefit from the tiger team approach. When should you let your normal teams and departments handle a problem, and when should you put together a tiger team?

Here are some signs that an issue could use a tiger team:

• It’s urgent. Tiger teams are designed to be temporary and focused on solving a singular problem as quickly as possible. If you have an urgent problem that touches a lot of departments, it might behoove you to put together a tiger team, rather than waiting for the problem to be solved by the usual processes.

• It’s been stagnant. As we noted, one of the benefits NASA has seen in their tiger team approach has been the “fresh look” a tiger team brings to a problem. If an issue has been a thorn in your business’ side for a while without much movement, throwing it to a tiger team could generate the new perspective it’s been needing.

• It’s a needle-mover. By their nature, tiger teams will draw important people and resources from across your company. Make sure solving your problem would be worth slowing down other initiatives.

• It’s cross-disciplinary. If you know at the outset that a problem will touch multiple departments, a tiger team will help speed up collaboration by bringing diverse experts together on a single project, rather than handing a project between siloed departments.

If the problem you’re thinking of has any of the above characteristics, it may be time to put together your tiger team!

How to put together a tiger team

The first step to putting together a tiger team is to home in on a specific problem. Make sure you’re identifying the root cause, not the symptoms. For example, if you’ve noticed that your monthly revenue has been flat or declining, don’t just name the tiger team’s mission as “increase revenue.” Look at the different factors for revenue — sales, pipeline, customer growth, customer size, churn, pricing, or something else could be the biggest contributor to your lackluster revenue. Look at your data and choose the one that has made the biggest impact for your tiger team to focus on.

Once you’ve identified a specific problem, identify the skills you need to solve it. In the above example, let’s say you’ve identified churn as the biggest driver in your revenue slowdown. Which skills are needed to identify, remediate, and prevent customer churn? You’ll probably want skills and expertise like customer success, service/product expertise, marketing/communications, finance/data, and sales, depending on what your offering is.

Finally, you’ll need to choose your tiger team members. You’ll want to choose people who bring a high level of expertise to each of your needed skill areas, as well as people who are strong in self-management and collaboration. Make sure the people you choose will have the bandwidth and enthusiasm to participate. For example, if your strongest salesperson would rather not take time away from their schedule because they’re slammed trying to hit a bonus quota, consider a sales manager or SDR who could represent the sales point of view without negatively affecting their compensation.

How a tiger team should work 

Now that you’ve put your tiger team together, it’s time to get to work! 

1. Start with a detailed problem to solve. Hopefully, you’ve gotten a very good sense of the problem before you put your team together. Now, it’s a matter of formulating the problem in as detailed a way as possible. 

In the churn example, let’s say you’ve identified that customers are most likely to churn between year one and two of their contracts. Your tiger team’s initiative could be to boost retention for that particular cohort.

2. Go into strategy. Now that you have a problem, it’s time to start some high-level thinking about the solution. Each member of the tiger team will have their part to play in strategy. 

As an example, here are some strategies that our fictional churn team might come up with. The finance/data expert will help you identify and build cohorts and how to focus on the ones that will mean the most for your business. Your customer success person will identify the biggest problems that come up for that group of customers. Your product/service expert will dive into operationally solving customer problems. Your marketing expert will devise a plan for communicating with this cohort. Your sales person will help identify customer objections that may be overcome in the sales process but come up again as a customer ages. And so on!

3. Clarify priorities. Is the tiger team’s mission more important than each team member’s normal day to day work? Do you need to slow down other projects to make way for the tiger team’s time? Since tiger teams are designed to work quickly, the more time you can give to let the team run with the problem, the better, but make sure run-the-business work doesn’t get totally neglected.

Execute relentlessly! Once the tiger team is up and running, let them loose to work quickly and get s*** done!

Tips for effective tiger teams using Strety

If you’re a Strety user, you can get an effective tiger team rolling in minutes! Stay organized and document your tiger team’s work with Strety’s flexible, customizable business operating system tools. 

You can create a new team in Strety with just a couple clicks.

Creating a new team in Strety.

After you create your tiger team (we suggest giving it an awesome name, like Project Scorpion 🦂), you can customize your tool setup to make sure you have everything you need to keep your tiger team on track.

Suggested tiger team tools in Strety

For every team you have in Strety, you can customize the tool setup. This way, your team’s space has everything you need without getting too cluttered. That being said, a tiger team is almost like a mini-org within your org, so we’d recommend using most of the tools we have available to you, excluding the vision organizer. A tiger team is moving fast and already has a well-established goal by the time it's created; you probably won’t need long-term goals or vision in there.

Team tool setup in Strety.

Org chart

Your tiger team will probably have a pretty flat hierarchy, since it’s a small team of senior experts. Still, it would be good to have a place to define the scope of each person’s role, and designate someone as the project leader who’s responsible for reporting progress out to company leadership/the wider org.

In Strety, you can now make an org chart for any team that doesn’t affect your company-wide Org Chart. It’ll be quick and easy to throw one together for your tiger team, and will help you stay on track and accountable.

Messages

Messages are a great place to keep conversations going between meetings. For our Project Scorpion 🦂 churn tiger team, maybe it’s a good place for the customer success leader to create a Message about the top customer complaints, so everyone can see them and brainstorm on how to avoid them. You can edit subscribers to Messages, so if a thread is only relevant to a couple of people on the tiger team, you can declutter everyone else’s notifications.

Agendas

You’ll definitely want to set a regular meeting cadence with your tiger team. Your Agenda is where you pull your tools together. The Agenda is flexible — if you want to have a daily standup, you probably don’t need to include every tool in there. Think about the purpose of the meeting, and include only the most relevant tools.

Rocks 

This is where we suggest housing the big initiatives the tiger team decides on. If you come up with a high level strategy that’s composed of three big initiatives, make each one into a Rock. The nice thing about the Rock structure is that while one person owns it, you can break it into Milestones and To Dos that can be assigned to other people. If you use Microsoft Planner, you can also connect a Strety Rock to a Planner project with a two-way sync. Then you’ll be able to see the percentage of progress automatically.

Scorecards

Keeping track of improvement is critical. Maybe your team identified 240 customers in the cohort most at risk of churning, and one of your initiatives is to attempt a call with each one of them over the next 8 weeks. Make a Scorecard for 30 calls per week to make sure you’re not slipping behind. You can also track things like early renewals to see if your team’s work is making an impact.

Headlines

This is a good place to share information that may not rise to the level of a message thread. Maybe one of you read a great article about mitigating churn and wanted to share it with the rest of the team. The cool thing about Headlines is not only can you share them with your tiger team, you can send them into other team agendas. Say you’ve hit a milestone you’re super excited about and wanted to share the excitement with your tiger team and also leadership. Add it as a Headline to your tiger team agenda, then cascade it to the leadership team, and it will automatically populate in their agenda!

Issues

This is the place for blockers and problems — but it’s way more fun than it sounds! You can automatically create an Issue from your other tools in Strety: maybe the due date on a To Do has been pushed back a lot and you want to know why, you’re not hitting the Scorecard numbers you agreed on, or a rock is off-track. You can also quick-create an Issue if there’s something not easily tied to your other tools, like an upcoming change in marketing communication compliance that will require a re-working of prior plans. 

By throwing Issues into your agendas whenever they arise, and having the right subscribers, you can sometimes solve them asynchronously before you even meet. And by the time you get to your meeting, everyone should be well-versed in the Issues, ready to talk them through and solve them fast!

To Dos

Finally, no matter what other tools you’re using, you can use Strety To Dos to get s*** done! You can quick-create To Dos, add them into Rocks, or create them from Issues, so you can keep track of where they came from. 

We would also highly recommend making use of To Do Lists! You can organize To Dos into Lists on the Tiger Team, and each person with assigned to dos can organize them into their own To Do Lists in their person space. This is super helpful for keeping organized in each context. 

For example, you can make a To Do List in your tiger team that has To Dos generated from customer calls. You can assign them out to anyone on the team, and each person can create custom lists in their own space, like “To Do Today” or “To Do This Week.” To Dos can also be prioritized and sorted by date, name, assignee, or priority, so you can always get the view you want!

Get your tiger team on the prowl in Strety!

Are you ready to tackle an intractable problem? Why not try putting together a tiger team with a unique set of skills to solve it once and for all?You can try Strety for free for 30 days for your first tiger team. Or, book a meeting with one of our experts to learn more about how Strety could help you.