Tiger team
group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems
A tiger team is a team of specialists assembled to work on a specific goal, or to solve a particular problem.
Origin of the term
A 1964 paper entitled Program Management in Design and Development used the term tiger teams and defined it as "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem or simulation". Walter C. Williams gave this definition in response to the question "How best can advancements in reliability/maintainability state-of-the-art be attained and used with compressed schedules?" Williams was an engineer at the Manned Spacecraft Center and part of the Edwards Air Force Base National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
The paper consists of anecdotes and answers to questions from a panel on improving issues in program management concerning testing and quality assurance in aerospace vehicle development and production. The panel consisted of Williams, Col. J. R. Dempsey of General Dynamics, Lt. Gen. W. A. Davis from the Ballistic Systems Division, Norton Air Force Base, A. S. Crossfield from North American Aviation.
Examples
A tiger team was crucial to the Apollo 13 crewed lunar mission in 1970. During the mission, part of the Apollo 13 Service Module malfunctioned and exploded.
The public source identifies “Tiger team” as group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tiger, team and group.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Tiger team”, the useful work is to connect “group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1413754. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1964 and 1970.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Tiger team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.