Standing up a fully dedicated team for a big partnership initiative meant pulling from squads already running lean.
Big bets eventually demand their own team, if the customer value and business impact is there. This week we kicked off work for a consequential partnership initiative, and the staffing rule came to us naturally: fully dedicated members, no side hustles. One nearly unavoidable exception was called out by a sr. technical leader and it was time-boxed rather than waved through. Everything else was absolute, and the absoluteness is the point. A tiger team staffed with fractions of people is a committee with a cooler name. And not nearly as effective as dedicated staff with clear goals and a guaranteed handoff.
The objection came fast, and it was right: we’d be pulling from squads already running lean. The counter came just as fast, and it was also right: a tiger team means, by definition, prioritizing this over existing work. What made the meeting good was that nobody pretended those two truths cancel out. The room landed on the honest sentence instead: it will hurt. That sentence did more governance than the staffing doc.
If the tiger team doesn’t hurt, you didn’t staff it. You scheduled it.
Regular readers will recognize the shape from the piece on naming the swap: addition without subtraction reads as capacity, and unnamed costs get paid anyway, later, with interest. The upgrade this week is that the swap got named at kickoff, in the room, by the people paying it. The squads losing people heard the cost said out loud instead of discovering it in a staffing spreadsheet. Resentment feeds on the unsaid, and there was nothing left unsaid to feed it.
Two disciplines make the tax survivable. First, an end date and an escalation path, because tiger teams that drift become permanent org debt with a predator’s name. Our team flagged its own governance gap in week 1, asking who the true decision owner is when the work crosses another product’s territory, which is exactly the question you want asked before it’s urgent. Second, backfill honesty: if the donor squads’ roadmaps don’t visibly shrink, the org just learned the ask was free, and the next tiger team gets staffed with fumes.
The teachable part
Staff tiger teams with whole people, name the hurt at kickoff in front of the squads paying it, set an end date, and shrink the donor roadmaps visibly.