The word tiger team gets used for any group of people pulled together under pressure. Most of them are not tiger teams. They are committees with urgency, which is a different thing and produces different results.
A real tiger team has three properties. It is small, five or fewer people. It has a specific, bounded problem with a clear done condition. And it has authority: the team can make decisions, not just recommendations. Strip any one of those three and you have a working group, not a tiger team.
At Roku, I stood up a tiger team to resolve a reconciliation gap that was blocking Finance sign-off on the migration. Three people, ten days, one deliverable: a working reconciliation report and a sign-off. I did not need approval to pick the approach. I needed to show Finance the output was accurate. That clarity of scope was what made it work.
Wind-down matters as much as stand-up. When the tiger team finishes, name what was decided, document why, and hand the output to whoever owns it long-term. Teams that dissolve without a handoff leave problems that resurface in the next quarter under a different name.
The most common failure is letting a tiger team run past its deadline. When the scope expands or the deadline slips, the team is no longer a tiger team. It has become a small program, and it needs to be managed like one.