Tiger Teams: Training Wheels for Agilizing Your Marketing Organization
Organizations mobilize tiger teams when a valuable and difficult project needs to get done quickly. If you’ve participated on a tiger team, congratulations! You already have real-life experience in an important element of an agile organization.
What is a tiger team? A tiger team is a small group assembled to actualize a high-impact project. Organizations create tiger teams when ordinary operations can’t get the job done. Tiger team projects require breakthrough thinking, creativity, agility, and accelerated action. During the extraordinary business conditions triggered by the pandemic, special squads propelled events online, advanced ecommerce capabilities, accommodated new sanitation requirements, and overcame supply-chain problems. Companies assemble tiger teams for outsized ventures such as product launches or driving transformation. As a CMO, I ran a tiger team to rename and rebrand a multi-billion-dollar company in five months. My firm had sold a large chunk of the company along with the established name. Our charter was to research, design, and completely launch a new company name and brand before the legal cut-off date.
Tiger teams are usually temporary. Once the big push concludes, there is a sense that things should “get back to normal”. People fatigue. Working on a tiger team is exhilarating but can be exhausting. Teams work under the microscope of an urgent, often bet-the-company, mandate. Wrangling bureaucratic roadblocks heightens tension. Some teams do double-duty, participating on tiger teams while working their “day job”.
However, the creativity and accelerated action of tiger teams doesn’t have to stop. If you have participated on a tiger team, you already have experience that will help respond to shifting market conditions or coach customers on their bewildering journeys and improve customer experience.
What Makes Tiger Teams So Effective
Tiger teams are multi-disciplinary: Tiger teams mobilize trapped talent. Meaningful missions require cross-functional capability that business-as-usual operations lack. One CMO scaled his account-based marketing (ABM) program with eight-person teams formed around role-based personas (such as the chief data officer). Each team had a leader plus seven specialists (analytics, content, web/inbound, outbound, communications, sales enablement, and social).
Multi-discipline teams act faster. They prioritize effectively because people in different roles get exposed to everything everyone else is doing. Tasks with long lead times still start earlier but the rest of the work doesn’t have to wait. They experience fewer delays for approvals or to negotiate service-level-agreements (SLAs) with other silos. Multi-disciplinary teams are innovative and adaptive. People with similar backgrounds and training tend to think alike. When new thinking is required – to adapt to change, to breakthrough barriers or free bottlenecks, to come up with new solutions – variety stimulates a wider range of ideas.
Tiger teams are mission-driven and measured as a team. A tiger team does a lot of work. The task list of tasks can run several pages. However, the tasks ladder up to a single mission. A tiger team isn’t side-tracked by competing for individual performance metrics or gaming their compensation plan. The CMO ramping his ABM program collectively measured all team members on closed deals within an identified account list.
Tiger teams are empowered and accountable. Tiger teams are given a lot of latitude. Important communication and decisions don’t travel up, down, and across the management chain. While not every tiger team project is a bet-the-company initiative, tiger teams are extremely transparent about their progress and activity. The branding tiger team I ran shared email called the Daily Big Mouth with the entire company. Employees could engage in “spontaneous volunteerism”, raising issues and often solving them independently. Other teams acted readily whenever called on, eagerly awaited the new brand, and had fun. We also provided a daily red-yellow-green report to the executive team and updated them weekly.
Getting Started
Creating a longer-term tiger-type team that is multi-disciplined, mission-driven, empowered, and accountable is within every company’s capability.
Start small. Then tweak, tweak, tweak. Take a tip from complexity science. Big step-changes rarely succeed in a complex, adaptive environment. Make the first step small enough that no one gets upset. But commit to a chain of continual small steps towards your goal. Choose one or two tiger-team-experienced people to seed a longer-term pilot team then add a couple more. Give the pilot team motivation, opportunity, and aircover by assigning them to a high-impact project but one that no one is fighting for. Later, add more to their plate and establish additional teams.
Staff the team. Marketing leaders often ask me how to find the staff for something new. If you start small and build up the effort a few people at a time, it’s easier and you’ll get farther than a mass reorganization. You may need to help managers with the temporary anxiety of dealing with gaps and rearranging work. However, the tweaking of staff will become familiar within a couple quarters.
Proactively Rearrange: Examine your current staff for high potentials. These folks are your best bet for a pilot team. Imagine you are hiring everyone back from scratch. Forget about their history, location, and level. I guarantee you’ve got hidden gems.
Forward Fill: When someone leaves your team, add different capability instead of routinely backfilling the empty spot.
Retrain: It’s easier to train for new hard skills than for soft skills. Maybe you have a high potential tiger team leader on your marketing ops team. Or a potential content specialist on your PR team.
Hire New: If you have the opportunity to hire, look for capability on cross-skill type teams rather than narrow specialists. There aren’t a lot of “perfect” people standing around waiting for jobs. Take a risk with someone who gets close and has potential.
Train in Agile Marketing. Speed up the team’s effectiveness and reduce exhaustion by adopting work methods purpose-built for fast-paced, uncertain environments. Agile Marketing offers methods prioritizing projects in a world where there is never enough time or resources, how to communicate most effectively, and how to experiment and iterate. These methods are now tried and true.
Increase communication and transparency. Develop the narrative supporting why this team is necessary and valuable. Develop channels for constant conversation which will keep everything humming. Teams are most effective when they get lots of information from each other and the outside world. Communicate liberally with adjacent groups and executives.
Provide services. Help your pilot team make the work sustainable by continually building up the technical infrastructure and operations support. Invest in collaboration, communication, and resource management applications. Gain inspiration from leaders of other kinds of teams working in high-change environments – sports teams, surgery teams, first responders, military missions, agile software developers, and film crews.