Walk into almost any major tech company and you can feel the hum of scale. Systems, processes, approvals – everything is built for reliability at massive volume. It’s impressive. It’s also slow. Good ideas often crawl through layers of sign-off before they ever reach a customer. And by the time they ship, the problem they’re meant to solve may have shifted.
Startups don’t have that problem. A three-person team can spot a user issue in the morning, prototype by lunch, and ship a test the same week. For years, large enterprises have envied that pace. Now many are borrowing directly from the startup playbook – by forming small, cross-functional “mission squads” designed to move with far fewer constraints.
A Startup Inside Your Company
A mission squad is essentially a tiny company embedded within a big one. It’s a small, diverse group – engineers, designers, QA specialists, a product owner – aligned around a single mission: ship this feature, solve this problem, test this idea.
But the real shift is ownership. Unlike traditional org structures, these teams don’t hand work off to other groups. They plan, build, test, and ship together. No waiting for another team’s backlog to open up. No dependencies are slowing release cycles. Everything happens within the squad.
And when people build together, their behavior changes. A designer and developer solving a problem side by side cut through the documentation overhead that plagues siloed workflows. When the person writing the code is also responsible for deployment, quality isn’t someone else’s job – it’s personal.
The Startup Mindset – Without the Existential Risk
The best squads don’t just share a mission; they share a mindset. Daily standups keep focus tight. Short sprints keep progress visible. Early user tests replace months of assumptions. Missteps aren’t failures; they’re data points.
This mirrors how startups operate, as they often have no choice. When you have six people and three months of runway, slow feedback loops are deadly. Mission squads channel that urgency – but inside an enterprise that actually has money in the bank.
What Makes Mission Squads Work
Mission squads thrive when a few conditions are in place:
| Success Factor | Why It Matters | Practical Example |
| Executive Sponsorship | Gives teams authority and shields them from bureaucracy. | Leadership cuts friction in the deployment process – speeding up safe releases without touching the non-negotiables like privacy and security. |
| Clear Missions & Metrics | Maintains focus and prevents scope creep. | “Reduce checkout abandonment by 30% by Q3.” |
| Coaching & Tools | Helps teams adopt agile habits and collaborate across regions. | Agile coaches support sprint planning; teams use shared comms, version control, CI/CD. |
| Cultural Permission to Experiment | Encourages learning and reduces fear of failure. | Teams A/B test new designs—even risky ones – because insights are valued. |
The Friction You Can’t Ignore
Mission squads aren’t a silver bullet. They introduce new challenges:
- Coordination gets tricky. As more squads form, overlapping work becomes a real risk. Some lightweight program management or architecture oversight is essential to maintain alignment without killing autonomy.
- Resources get stretched. Pulling talent into mission squads creates pressure on functional teams. Leaders must set clear priorities – and decide what not to work on.
- Not all work fits the model. Core infrastructure, highly specialized domains, or long-term maintenance may still need dedicated platform teams or rotating experts.
And then there’s the most challenging part: culture. Declaring “we’re agile now” doesn’t make a company agile. Real change requires:
- Redefining success for engineers – owning outcomes, not just tasks.
- Creating psychological safety to modify code across team boundaries (with reviews, of course).
- Building cross-discipline, peer-level partnerships – not just colocating roles on a squad.
Why This Model Works Now
Mission squads reflect how modern software is actually built: collaboratively, iteratively, and across time zones. Cloud-native tooling makes distributed teamwork seamless, while competitive pressure demands faster delivery and bolder experimentation.
Companies adopting this model consistently report:
- Shorter delivery cycles
- Higher engagement and ownership
- Better product quality
They’re discovering how to retain the benefits of scale – resources, data, and distribution – without the bureaucracy that traditionally accompanies it.
The Bottom Line
Small, empowered teams with clear missions simply move faster. The challenge isn’t rolling out a process. It’s scaling a mindset – one that values autonomy, experimentation, and end-to-end ownership.
For engineering leaders drowning in approvals, or product managers weary of handoffs, mission squads offer a practical path back to momentum. Ironically, the biggest companies are rediscovering what startups have known all along: the smaller the team, the faster the innovation.
By Svyatoslav Babinets
Svyatoslav Babinets is a Software Engineering Manager with a background in applied mathematics and over a decade of experience building and scaling real-time, high-load systems. He has grown from an individual contributor into a senior engineering leader, managing organisations of more than 100 engineers and working at the intersection of technology, product, and delivery at scale. Alongside his industry work, Svyatoslav actively shares practical insights on engineering leadership, system design, and scaling teams through talks, long-form conversations, and mentorship.
