Building Effective Blended Teams: A Practical Guide for CTOs and Innovation Leaders

This post is an adapted excerpt from our latest research report, the Blended Teams Playbook. Download it here.

The promise of blended teams—a talent model that combines full-time employees with specialized freelance talent and early AI agents to form integrated innovation squads—has become increasingly clear as companies race to gain a competitive edge with AI. This new model offers several compelling advantages over traditional approaches:

• Speed and Agility: In a world where AI capabilities are evolving at breakneck speed, blended teams allow companies to rapidly assemble specialized talent and pivot as needed. Our research shows that 45% of corporate leaders report doubled organizational agility after adopting this model.
• Expertise On-Demand: Need an AI architect who's deployed large language models across multiple industries? There's a growing pool of elite talent choosing independence over traditional employment. These specialists often bring experience from multiple successful deployments—a crucial advantage when most full-time employees have limited experience with new AI technologies.
• Risk Mitigation: By aligning team composition with project milestones, companies can de-risk their AI investments. Start small, prove value, and scale up only when ready.
• Culture Catalysts: Beyond just skills, fractional talent often brings startup DNA into legacy organizations, helping to accelerate innovation and transformation.
• Cost Efficiency: Rather than committing to full-time hires or expensive consulting engagements before proving ROI, organizations can flex their team size based on actual needs and results.

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But how do you actually make this model work? After helping build nearly 1,000 blended teams, we've identified the key scenarios where this model thrives and the best practices that lead to success.

When to deploy Blended Teams

Let's look at three scenarios where blended teams have proven particularly effective:

1. When speed Is critical

Take Apprentice, a life sciences manufacturing platform. In early 2021, they had a unique opportunity to play a pivotal role in distributing over $400M doses of the COVID-19 vaccine with key partners like Pfizer. But to do this, they needed to launch an entirely new version of their product within 45 days—a product that spanned multiple technological stacks and incorporated machine learning and augmented reality headsets.

The task seemed monumental, if not impossible.

Apprentice partnered with A.Team and incorporated 25 specialized engineers that quickly scaled to meet the product's evolving needs. In the words of Angelo Stracquatanio, Apprentice's CEO and founder, the rebuild would have been "literally impossible" without fractional talent. Apprentice's rebuilt platform stepped up to the challenge, leading to its rapid growth and $100M Series C a few months later.

2. When traditional consulting falls short

A few years ago, McGraw Hill Chief Transformation and Strategy Officer Justin Singh realized something: Increasingly, students were searching TikTok and YouTube for study materials, bypassing textbooks and official study guides. He wanted to develop a studying app that incorporated AI and felt like the apps students love.

He started where most corporations begin: by going the management consultancy route. He found it slow and expensive. 

 Instead, Singh turned to A.Team to onboard a team of top Silicon Valley product and engineering talent who’d built iconic mobile experiences before—from iOS to Tinder.

“If you’re going to engage and do the same thing again and again, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get any groundbreaking innovation. We as a team wanted a more flexible, agile way to undergo product development,” said Singh. 

McGraw Hill integrated A.Team talent with its internal product team, flexibly growing from three A.Teamers to 27 as the new app, Sharpen, moved from the prototyping stage to full launch. 

After years of struggling to get Sharpen off the ground, McGraw Hill completed a 0-1 build and launched to viral acclaim as the app earned rave reviews and 1M+ downloads, catalyzing a 28% growth in digital billings for McGraw Hill. 

Said Singh of his blended team: “A.Team enabled us to prototype and iterate more efficiently. They gave us the agility to quickly scale up and down with the resources needed to get to market sooner.” 

3. When you need to de-risk innovation

When she was an executive at GoogleX — serving at the luminary moonshot factory’s “chaos pilot” — AJ Thomas worked with A.Team to build blended teams that would work on GoogleX’s most critical new products, onboarding specialized product, engineering, and design talent to fill gaps within the team. 

“We were looking at people who could add to the perspectives that we already had,” explained Thomas. “We needed multi-disciplinary people — folks who could assemble as a team because they were going after a moonshot. With A.Team, we were able to bring on people who came with multi-disciplinary perspectives that took us to another level. That was the allure.”

Since GoogleX’s mission was “taking sci-fi and putting it in front of people” to see what worked, workforce planning was impossible. By leveraging fractional talent, GoogleX was able to bring in the talent they needed without committing over the long term. “That was the important part,” explained Thomas. “We de-risked it because we had access to this top talent without putting a full-time job count there.”

This approach allows you to stagger your investment and commitment based on hitting key product milestones. 

Best practices for success

Through our experience building hundreds of blended teams, we've identified several critical success factors:

1. The mission is critical.

After helping build nearly 1,000 blended teams over the past three years at A.Team, we’ve noticed one universal key to attracting the top talent in our network: telling a compelling story about the mission of the product you’re building. Top fractional talent is eager to work on new and ambitious projects. 

Richard Abrich is an accomplished machine learning engineer and consultant in the A.Team network, and currently working with Sandow Media, a publishing holding company, to create and build an AI product for one of its subsidiaries based on its treasure trove of content and data.

“A big key for me is working on something that I find personally exciting because I see the potential,” explained Abrich. When you onboard new team members, reiterate your vision and explain how each team member brings unique, special skills to bring that vision to life. 

2. Make everyone feel like they’re part of the team, whether they’re contract or full-time.

The biggest mistake many managers make is treating fractional or contract workers as outsiders rather than valued team members. Onboard them and introduce them to the team just as you would a full-time hire. 

Advised one CTO who's working with A.Team to develop a new AI product in stealth: “My preference is to, you know, treat them like full-time hires. I think the investment in time up front pays off. Even if they don't continue as a full-time person, it just makes them a better team member and contributor.” The CTO even flew out some of his A.Team members to an in-person team on-site.

3. Build a knowledge center.

A resource hub makes the onboarding process much smoother. It should include:

• Company overview and mission statement
• Organizational structure and team introductions
• Product roadmap and current project statuses
• Technical stack documentation and architecture diagrams
• Coding standards and best practices
• Development workflow and processes (e.g., Agile methodology, sprint cycles)
• Version control system usage and guidelines (e.g., Git workflow)
• Testing and quality assurance procedures
• Deployment and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines
• Troubleshooting guides and common issue resolutions

4. Give regular progress updates and frequent feedback.

Maintain transparency by regularly updating team members on project progress and any changes to objectives or priorities. Regular check-ins on team and individual progress minimize surprises and ensure everyone is aligned and focused on achieving the project's goals.

5. Remove bureaucratic barriers ahead of time. 

Put in processes ahead of time to remove barriers to bringing on new team members — particularly if you’re working at a larger organization. At GoogleX, Thomas worked with procurement to set predefined rates for each role, eliminating the need for new approval processes each time she wanted to bring someone new onto a GoogleX team. “Do that work upfront, and then you’ll be able to scale up and build in as frictionless a way as possible,” she advised. 

The future of innovation teams in the AI age

The AI revolution isn't just changing what we build—it's fundamentally altering how we build it.

Traditional models of talent acquisition and team building are failing in the AI age. Inside many organizations, the talent gap risks transforming into a chasm that threatens to swallow entire innovation initiatives.

But this isn't just a problem to solve—it's an opportunity to seize. And increasingly, top innovation leaders are doing so through blended teams.

This isn't the outsourcing of the 2000s or staff augmentation of the 2010s. Blended teams represent a paradigm shift in how we approach innovation, particularly with AI. They're the secret sauce allowing forward-thinking companies to leapfrog their competitors and turn the promise of AI into tangible results.

This post is an adapted excerpt from our latest research report, the Blended Teams Playbook. Download it here.