Every startup begins with a close-knit team. Imagine a dozen people sitting in the same room where everyone knows what everyone’s doing, and everyone is aligned on what’s most important. There’s a deep understanding and sense of shared responsibility for the company vision.
One team, one purpose.
Then comes growth.
Early success drives innovation, excitement, momentum, and more success. Additional roles are opened to sustain growth and teams rapidly expand. And as teams get bigger, one of the first things to fray is the shared vision.
In an attempt to drive efficiency, silos naturally begin to form and bureaucracy quickly follows to slow erosion of that singular shared vision. Soon after, people are pining for the good old days where teams were tightly aligned, but still had autonomy to move quickly.
Luckily, there’s a solution — and you’ve likely already heard of it. It’s a core component of Netflix’s well-known culture manifesto called “Dream Teams.”
Tom Willerer spent six years leading product teams at Netflix where he had a chance to learn and practice this concept — in the very place where it was invented. He then went on to implement and evolve this team building approach at several other fast-growing tech companies like Coursera and Opendoor.
In this article, you’ll learn Tom’s tips for setting up fast, aligned teams to drive growth at your company. You’ll also get a chance to explore common mistakes and strategies for troubleshooting so you can build off of Tom’s Dream Team experience instead of starting from square one.
As you read along, take notes in the Dream Team Model Worksheet to help apply these learnings to your team.
About the Authors:
Tom is an Executive in Residence at Reforge and was previously Opendoor’s Chief Product Officer. He oversaw the company’s product and design teams to launch new products, acquire companies, and led teams of over 150 Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, and operators. Prior to Opendoor, he was Chief Product Officer at Coursera, where he helped to scale the company from $1 million to $100 million in revenue. He also led product teams at Netflix as VP of Product, where he helped to expand the company’s subscribership from 8 million U.S.-only users to over 40 million globally.
Before joining Reforge as an Operator in Residence, Kevin led brand and product marketing teams at high-growth startups like Upwork and Workrise. He began his career in nonprofit education, first as a classroom teacher and then with charter school networks, scaling marketing and operations to fuel growth.
What is a “Dream Team”?
The definition of “team” in this case is a group created by a leader to achieve a specific goal. The tenure of this team can be indefinite or relatively short-lived (six months or even less). It all depends on how long it takes for the team’s goal — or purpose — to be achieved.
These teams form across departments, in addition to, and outside of, traditional org charts.
Why might you want to create Dream Teams? To get things done quickly, through highly aligned and loosely coupled groups. These teams operate on a shared understanding of company strategy that unlocks — and unblocks — them to charge ahead without the need for frequent check-ins, approvals, and realignments that can kill momentum and autonomy.
Dream Teams are a strategic leader’s holy grail.
While it’s a simple concept to grasp, implementation takes practice.
The 4 Critical Components of Every Dream Team
Every Dream Team has a few essential components. People and relationships are the foundation that unlocks teams to grow a business quickly without the need for incessant check ins, debate, and corporate bureaucracy that can easily stall even the highest-achievers among us.
Here’s a high level overview:
People: Executive Leadership
Executive leaders are the folks who are ultimately responsible for bringing the company’s vision to life. Their main role in the Dream Team framework is to set a clear and compelling strategy, drive alignment, and liberally share context.
This type of loosely coupled team requires a heavy upfront investment from leadership to ensure everyone is aligned on their mandate — and can avoid the roadblock of daily or weekly debates to clarify company priorities.
The leadership team at any given company should spend a disproportionate amount of time on setting strategy, allocating resources, and developing roadmaps. If set up correctly, fast, aligned teams relieve leaders from wasting time and energy on ongoing approvals.
People: Informed Captain
The informed captain is the designated team leader. They should be an expert in their field and have both the confidence and authority to make judgment calls to ensure their team achieves its goals.
The definition of expert varies by discipline, but here’s a good pressure test:
Skills: Do they have the skills to independently make judgment calls? Do they have experience working on similar problems? Do they have the knowledge to make technical decisions? The business acumen to make P&L decisions? The empathy and understanding to make decisions that impact customers?
Trust from leadership: Do they have the trust of the executive leadership team? Do they have sufficient cultural, customer, and business understanding? Have they demonstrated their capacity to act in the best interest of your company’s mission, vision, and purpose?
Trust from team: Do they have the trust of the cross-functional team they’ll lead? Do they listen to their teammates and seek out opposing viewpoints? Have they demonstrated their ability to build relationships with stakeholders across the company?
The captain owns their team’s mission, mandate, and metrics; ensuring clarity and understanding across the team. (We’ll go into detail about the 3 M’s later in the “how to”section.)
The most critical thing an informed captain does is to make sure the team is solving the right problem for the customer.
People: Cross-Functional Team Members
The team you assemble depends on the team’s purpose.
Most teams have representation across departments. A typical team at a tech company will have a product manager, designer, and a few engineers. B2B saas companies will likely include folks from sales and marketing. The makeup of a Dream Team depends on what’s required to achieve their mission, mandate, and metrics.
Opendoor’s residential real estate business relied on non-digital processes — like inspections and repairs — alongside product and engineering. In Tom’s experience, the team didn’t consider a team to be fully staffed and autonomous unless they had representation from Operations, too. They called these teams EPODs — engineering, product, operations, and design.
Regardless of title, each person has a responsibility to deeply understand the customer, especially as it relates to the specific problem they’re solving for this customer (Tom refers to it as “the mandate”).
Relationships: Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
The way teams interact with each other is the key to this framework’s success. If each player (leader, captain, team member) plays their role, and each team understands its role in achieving the company vision, the organization will be set up for maximum engagement and productivity.
It’s important to point out that there are two key components to this relationship: high alignment and loose coupling. One cannot exist without the other in this framework.
High Alignment: After deep debate, the team has agreed on the right strategy — and that strategy has been written down and shared broadly. There is little to no gray area in its interpretation, and therefore no need to rehash key initiatives while executing.
Loose Coupling: The team is given autonomy to make judgment calls on how to solve their assigned customer problem. Executives regularly share relevant updates to make sure that team-level decisions are made with the right context but without the need for frequent cross-team check-ins and read-outs.
Leaders of rapid growth companies tend to overemphasize loose coupling and skimp on alignment. Many leaders want autonomy and find the communication (and debate) needed to truly achieve alignment onerous.
Another common misconception is that loose coupling doesn’t require collaboration or communication. Most organizational goals require multiple teams to achieve, so the fundamentals of teamwork are still very crucial to this framework’s success.
Alignment is critically important because it keeps everyone moving in the right direction, solving the right problems for customers. Without alignment, there’s a huge need for coordination, unnecessary meetings, and burdensome reporting.
Now, try filling out the “people” and “relationships” section of this worksheet for a team at your company.
How To Build a Dream Team in 5 Steps for Fast, Aligned Results
Now that we’ve covered the core components, we’ll walk through the five steps to creating fast, aligned teams. The steps below lay out a clear path to getting started and will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls that Tom has encountered throughout his career.
Step 1: Set Strategy
There are seemingly endless problems to solve for your customers. It’s up to the executive leadership team to identify the most important solutions that will have the greatest impact on customers and therefore greatest impact on the bottom line. You’re not done when the solutions are identified and agreed upon.
Leaders then need to allocate resources and develop the roadmap to ensure the most efficient path to delivering on this strategy.
There are several frameworks that can help define and capture company strategy. Reforge’s Strategy Map and Vision Narrative are two comprehensive, yet simple, tools to communicate your strategy across all levels of your organization.
In Tom’s experience at Coursera, he used collaboration to gain understanding and alignment on company strategy. The executive team had set three areas of focus: subscriptions for career-relevant content, building out an enterprise product, and partnering with universities to offer accredited degree programs. Although he had a clear idea of what he thought they should focus on over the next 2-3 years, he and the executive team solicited ideas from the broader team. Anyone could pitch an idea to the executive team. They confined the process to 2 weeks and it was hugely successful. It got the team energized, they felt heard, and they picked up a few innovative ideas that were added to the roadmap.
Step 2: Establish Teams
Once the entire company is aligned in a strategic direction, you can assemble your teams. In Tom’s experience, the very best companies and the very best teams are maniacally focused on who their customer is.
Aligning teams based on specific problems to be solved for core customers — using the Jobs To Be Done framework — gives teams a discreet reason for being and reinforces the overall company strategy.
Each team should have one Informed Captain and representatives from each of the core functions required for success.
In Tom’s time at Coursera, several of the company’s Dream Teams were focused on university partnerships. So naturally, those teams all included at least one representative from the partnerships team.
Step 3: Get Aligned
Now comes the most crucial step: ensuring alignment across teams. Once each team understands which part of the business they’re responsible for and what their peer teams are focusing on, they can begin to charge ahead, loosely coupled.
Gaining alignment is complex, but not difficult. A mission, mandate, metrics framework can help to ensure teams get clarity on the role they play within the broader organization.
Mission: A concise, specific explanation of a team’s reason for existence (ideally, the specific customer problem they’re solving for)
Mandate: The product surface area this team is directly responsible for (there should be little, if any, overlap in surface areas between teams)
Metrics: The specific, measurable accomplishments the team is expected to achieve to advance their mission and improve their product surface area
Your teams should now have everything they need to move forward with maximum productivity and engagement. So what’s next for you as the leader? The right execution is just as important as the right preparation. You have two main roles to perform while supporting your Dream Teams: ensuring context and getting out of the way.
Step 4: Ensure Context
Strategy is something that should be set, agreed on, and then not materially changed for months, if not a year or more. On the other hand, the context in which the strategy is being implemented is continually evolving. The most important thing you can do as a leader is to make sure your Informed Captains have the necessary context to make the best judgment calls along the way.
Details matter. As a leader, you can only give good feedback to your Captains if you know the details of what’s actually going on across the business. Now that you’ve delegated decision-making authority to this person, your duty is to give them the best feedback possible — and the only way to do that is to immerse yourself in the details.
It’s not about micromanagement. It’s about a strong orientation to and deep understanding of the metrics and the customer. The more intimately a leader knows the Jobs To Be Done and the metrics their team is responsible for impacting, the more prepared that leader will be when they’re consulted for input.
Detail orientation looks different for different leaders, but it usually manifests itself in a daily, weekly, or monthly routine to make sure there’s a regular cadence for keeping tabs on a wide range of metrics across the organization. At Opendoor, for example, Tom’s routine was:
Weekly Metrics Review: Opendoor ran a weekly meeting to review metrics across all areas of the business. Each captain gave a voiceover on their metrics, focusing on what’s working well/not well.
Weekly Customer Insight Review: Tom implemented a coordinated weekly review of a customer call or interview. Opendoor recorded all customer interactions so they could find relevant examples and share them through the entire organization. Everyone at Opendoor reviewed the same customer interview that week. In addition, Tom would read most of the research that was done on Opendoor’s customers as it was produced.
Weekly Product Reviews: Tom instituted weekly product reviews for each cross-functional team. These meetings weren’t decision making forums. They served as a forum to debate the logic of a team’s plans, ensure alignment to the company’s strategy, provide feedback on early product concepts, and share context on what each team is working on.
Weekly 1-on-1s with Captains: Tom ensured Captains had a check-in with Executives on a weekly basis. This meeting was led by the captain and the Executive’s goal was to provide context and help unblock the Captain so they can move even faster.
Step 5: Get Out of the Way
The hardest step for a leader to take is a step back. As a leader, you’re accountable for your team’s results. Pair that with the speed and high-stakes nature of work that is highly aligned, loosely coupled, and it’s only natural for a leader to feel pressured to lean in.
It may sound contrived, but you need to trust the process. Once you’ve set the strategy, assembled the team and ensured alignment, you’ve effectively given decision-making authority over to the team. You’re now freed up to go deep with the details and trust that your teams — which are closest to the problem — have the most and best information available to make the right decisions for the customer and for your business.
The most effective thing you can do as a leader at this point is to get out of the way.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Setting Your Team Up for Success
On its surface, the maxim of “highly aligned, loosely coupled” is simple to grasp and attractive to anyone who’s looking for increased productivity and engagement. But there are a few common problems that people run into when implementing this for the first time.
Don’t be fooled, this isn’t a “set it and forget it” program. “I’ve implemented the Dream Team framework at three high-growth companies and counting. Each time I learn something new.” says Tom.
As his understanding has evolved, Tom has identified three common problems leaders encounter when getting started:
Deprioritizing Alignment
Transferring Decision Authority
Embracing Learning as an Outcome
We’ll dig into each problem and share some suggestions for addressing them below.
Deprioritizing Alignment
Most leaders find the allure of this framework is in removing corporate bureaucracy. Who wouldn’t want their teams to be able to move faster without the constraints of process, frequent check ins, and internal politicking to get approval?
But the biggest mistake leaders make when implementing this framework is skipping over alignment and jumping to uncoupled teams so they can move forward as quickly as possible – even at the expense of high alignment. This rarely works, even if it might produce quick results in the form of features being shipped. Eventually someone looks at the entirety of what’s being built and realizes it doesn’t fit together. Because of the lack of alignment, an ineffective frankenstein experience gets built.
The key is to invest the time to get alignment before setting up teams. Make sure executive leadership understands who the customer is and agrees on the biggest problem your company will solve for those customers. This alignment is critically important because everyone should be moving in the same direction and solving the problems that everyone believes are the right ones to solve.
How do you know you have alignment? It looks different at every company, but for Tom, he knows he has alignment when he isn’t being pulled in to make daily or weekly decisions for the teams he’s managing or being asked to unblock a team because they can’t get the resources needed from another team. In addition, he knows there is alignment when his teams are maniacally focused on uncovering new insights for how to better serve their customer, rather than spending hours upon hours in meetings to create buy-in with Executives.
Transfering Decision Authority
In order for Dream Teams to have the autonomy they need, the Informed Captain needs to have full decision-making authority. This can be particularly challenging for leaders ceding control and equally challenging for captains, as traditional corporate culture conditions us to defer to executive leadership.
It’s important to note that this transfer of authority won’t happen overnight. It’s a gradual process. In Tom’s experience, a new Informed Captain might cede 100% of their decisions to leadership, but it reverses course as they get up to speed.
How long does that take? There’s no hard and fast timeline here. The general idea is that once the Informed Captain deeply understands who the customer is and what problem is being solved, they’re ready to take over the reins. Carving out time for this transition will ensure both the leader and the captain have both the confidence and context when making judgment calls while teams are moving forward.
Embracing Learning as an Outcome
Across his career, Tom has seen new leaders over-index on short-term results to define their success. But setting your captains up to run blindly towards results means discounting another equally important outcome.
Learning matters just as much as results. Over time you want the quality of decisions to improve, from the CEO all the way to the intern. Board meetings, quarterly business updates, and employee performance reviews tend to skew a leader’s orientation towards an over reliance on metrics. But at the end of the day, these are just mechanisms that help a business deliver for the customer. The most successful leaders are focused on getting smarter about who their customers are and identifying the right problems to solve for them.
As leaders, we all want the business to be as quick and efficient as possible. It’s the main driver for setting up highly aligned, loosely coupled teams to begin with. But as your company scales, make sure to prioritize turning it into a learning organization along the way.
Now It’s Your Turn
The secret to building highly aligned, loosely coupled teams is to let customer obsession drive the decisions. The purpose of this framework is to quickly and efficiently deliver for your customers, so your key to success is not losing sight of this purpose as you execute.
If you’re interested in learning more about getting alignment using the Strategy Map and Vision Narrative, Tom is leading Reforge’s Mastering Product Management program this summer.
A free worksheet to apply everything that you’ve learned in this article so far.