Answer key assessment questions 

An assessment of a technology business comes down to a few core questions:

  1. Driving Growth: Are your tech team, R&D expenses, and hosting costs driving profitable growth for your company?
  2. Scalability: Is your technology platform and operational model scalable enough that you can continue to onboard customers without getting bottlenecked by out-of-control unit costs (e.g., AI token in/out costs), manual processes, or a poorly designed technical architecture and database strategy?
  3. Defensibility: How big is your tech product business's structural competitive moat? Is there a network effect (see also our emerging intrinsic value definition)?

Analyze the findings and outline a new plan of attack

Once you've completed the assessment, you have to outline aspects of the business and product mechanics, which include the following:

  • Risks and gaps in the tech, product, operations, or commercialization
  • Opportunities and timeline before they close
  • Roadmap and capital allocation shifts in the business that could be executed to reduce the risk and capture the opportunities simultaneously
  • Key growth areas that are ripe for continued investment because they are driving a steeper growth curve

Install a Tiger Team to accelerate results

Finally, once the plan is in place, the team needs to execute upon it. However, it's likely that they are already at capacity running the day-to-day business and don't have any extra cycles to execute a new plan in addition to the change management disruption.

Tiger Teams are small groups of highly specialized individuals who have executed these plans in similar environments with a higher probability of success on shorter timelines.

In almost every case, the additional investment required for the short-term Tiger Team pays off in higher ROI in the long term and the short term.

Back when IBM dominated the technology landscape, it had hundreds of thousands of employees running the day-to-day business and a handful of what they called "wild ducks" who could do anything and go anywhere in the organization, breaking the rules to achieve insane outcomes.

More recently, Palantir installed groups of individuals called R2D2s that functioned in much the same way, moving between other employee groups to solve hairy problems that the existing team wasn't getting done.

Today, we simply refer to them as Tiger Teams. The reason for their existence is simple: extreme focus and capabilities means better and faster execution.