TigerData's Big Year: Scaling Agile Practices Across Diverse Teams to Support Research Activity

In May 2025, Princeton University launched TigerData, a research data management service designed to support storage, access, and evaluation of research data projects. This included the launch of the TigerData web portal, which supports service delivery and provides researchers with a UI to manage their projects. This paper examines the collaborative, multi-year process behind the portal's development, highlighting the sociotechnical challenges and organizational strategies required to deliver a production-ready service that spans across institutional boundaries. The project required sustained coordination among multiple departments at Princeton University as well as a cross-cutting governance group, each bringing distinct cultures, expertise, and operational constraints. We discuss early communication and coordination challenges, the impact of adopting a novel storage platform with a smaller preexisting community up front, and the need to integrate legacy projects that predated the mature service framework. We will also describe how intentional investments in trust-building, role clarification, and sharing experiences with agile practices at scale enabled progress. Key outcomes include a fully automated deployment pipeline and a workflow-driven project request workflow that supports efficient project provisioning. This case study offers practical lessons for library technologists designing complex, collaborative research infrastructure services at their institutions and beyond.