As digital marketing channels have proliferated over the years, marketers have become ever more specialized. We’ve been encouraged to pick our lane and stay there, because no two functions are the same.

Email isn’t like social, which isn’t like content or automation.

The skills you need to optimize for organic search aren’t the same ones you need to create high performing videos.

My digital advertising chops don’t automatically mean I can design a landing page.

The list goes on and on.

This trend is cool in a lot of ways, because it’s welcomed people with a wide variety of capabilities into the marketing profession. It’s made us more self sufficient and allowed us to become true experts in our functions.

Unfortunately it’s also created internal silos, disjointed customer experiences, and stunted marketing careers.

In place of all that, I propose that we center our marketing departments around the people we’re supposed to be working for: the customers.

It’s the Agile thing to do, and it’s going to solve a lot of our problems in the process.

Quick Takeaways:

• The old way of marketing as a function isn’t delivering value to customers anymore.
• Agile teams can prioritize marketing tasks, based on their usefulness to the audience.
• Agile marketing teams will automatically organize themselves around the customer, doing what’s best for them.

Functional Silo Fails

In a channel-centric world there’s little incentive to collaborate. This means there’s also little opportunity to make sure we’re sharing resources or reusing content.

In the most extreme cases teams will end up doing essentially the same work because they had no idea that another group had already done it.

B2B organizations, for instance, lose $958 million dollars every year creating content that goes to waste according to Gleanster and Kapost.

We can also make that classic (but entirely avoidable) blunder where multiple groups bombard customers with messages because they didn’t coordinate with one another.

Or, also common and avoidable, different functional groups promote contradictory offers on their respective channels, confusing the heck out of customers.

Think like a customer for a minute: you don’t care if you’re opening an email, seeing a social media update, or reading content on the website. All you care about is whether the information is valuable and the experience is enjoyable.

That’s the goal we as marketers should be organized around.

Cross-Functional Teams FTW

So what’s the alternative to our good old functional groups? Cross-functional teams.

Put simply, a cross-functional team contains a wide variety of skills. Ideally the team has all the capabilities it needs to complete its work, so there’s no need to depend on other groups.

Marketing teams may not fully live up to that ideal, but we can create teams that are focused on delivering value to a particular kind of customer. Doing so not only speeds up our delivery by removing the need for handoffs between teams, it also:

• Allows teams to say no to work that isn’t adding value for their customer.
• Expand their skills and grow professionally
• Get empathy for how hard their colleagues work
• Deliver real marketing ROI, not just check off channel-centric boxes

Let’s talk about each of those one by one.

Customer-Focused Agile Marketing Teams Can Say No

I’ve written about this before, but data shows us that marketers as a group are not empowered to turn down work requests, even if they don’t align to goals and priorities.

Marketing goals alone may not be strong enough to repel non-value adding demands, but when we do things in the name of the customer it should (hopefully) carry more weight.

So let’s say I’m a content creator on the top of funnel team. We generate demand, build an addressable audience, and generally get people interested in our products who didn’t know about them before.

Now when people swoop in and ask for my help on different kinds of content, I have a simple filter I can apply to that request: does it serve my audience?

If it does, maybe my team will put it in the backlog to be prioritized against other work (more on how that works is here). If not, now I have a simple, straightforward, respectful way to decline the request.

“I Had No Idea People Did So Much”

When marketers sit on functional teams, we often adopt an “us versus them” attitude. You hear things like:

“Content is always on top of things; design is slowing us down.”

“Our emails never go out on time because the martech team is always backed up.”

But when people join crossfunctional Agile marketing teams one of the first discoveries they make is that their colleagues work their butts off.

They see the daily evidence of hard work and strong skills, and they gain empathy for colleagues who were once seen as the slacker bottlenecks.

We can then go from us versus them to a real focus on team success.

Cross-Functional Agile Marketing Teams Grow Their Skills

Having discovered that their coworkers are hard workers just trying to stay on top of multiple demands and not deliberately lazy, the path is cleared for marketers to start sitting with those coworkers and learning about what they do.

Sometimes this happens during a formal “pairing” session, a term borrowed from Extreme Programming in which two people share a keyboard and do work together.

Other times it happens accidentally, as members of a cross-functional team gain insight into how other functions work and get interested in learning about them.

In both cases the upskilling benefits the team, because it removes dependency on one person to perform a particular function.

It also helps the marketers’ own career development, because marketing leadership needs a holistic view of the marketing function, not just expertise in one of its components.

Ways to Organize Around the Customer

“Organize around the customer” can sound nice in theory, but what does it really look like? We’ve seen Agile marketing teams achieve this goal in a few different ways:

1. Stages of the customer journey: This could be based on a typical buying cycle (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention), a marketing funnel (top, middle, bottom), or your own individually tailored journey stages. Depending on the size of your department and the number of stages you’re working with, you might end up with multiple teams serving one stage, or one team serving multiple stages.
2. Personas: If you’re marketing to several distinct groups of people with their own buying habits, marketing channel preferences, etc. then it might make sense to have Agile marketing teams focus on personas. This lets teams become experts in their chosen group and deliver extraordinarily tailored experiences for them.
3. Brands or business units: This one works best if the brands/business units have distinct audiences, different buying cycles, or are otherwise distinct in how their marketing would look. This one is last on the list because it’s easy for these kinds of teams to fall back into self-serving approaches that are about the brand and not the customer, but I have seen this kind of configuration work when it’s approached carefully.

Above is one illustration of how four teams serving different parts of the marketing funnel might join together to collaborate.

It Matters What Agile Marketing Teams Measure

As you start to reorganize teams, people, and maybe even reporting structures, it’s important to also consider how you’re measuring results.

If teams are trying to focus on delivering value to customers but marketing leaders still have to report on channel performance, you’re setting yourself up for conflicting priorities.

This kind of disconnect leads to channel leads and/or marketing leadership swooping in and demanding that a team focus on an underperforming channel even if it’s not part of the team’s core goal. Then we end up sending emails just for the sake of increasing an open rate, not in the name of better customer experience.

Keep in mind that this may be a longer game, and there may be time when you’ve rearranged teams but haven’t yet gotten buy in for changing the measurement approach.

During that in-between time focus on productivity improvements, team morale, customer satisfaction, and any other metrics you can get your hands on that prove that agility is working. This proof will make the eventual switch over to team- or customer-focused reporting easier to achieve.

Are People Really Doing This?

The short answer is yes. We’ve helped many of our clients create teams focused on customer journeys and stages of the funnel, and they’ve found it to be a powerful evolution of their marketing work.

That’s not to say this is the new normal just yet.

A CMO survey reports that only 28% of marketing teams are organized around the customer, a number that’s stayed flat since the question was introduced in 2013. Most of us are still making it all about us.

The post Agile Marketing Teams Should be Organized Around the Customer appeared first on AgileSherpas.com.

While startups may have an easier time adopting Agile principles, large enterprises can’t afford to be discouraged by the difficulty of introducing new processes into their organization. In fact, enterprises have an urgent need to tackle their process problems or risk disruption by emerging startup competitors. The good news is that leaders of marketing teams in established organizations are already paying attention to Agile marketing as a means to streamline their internal processes.

Twenty percent of respondents in this year’s annual State of Agile Marketing Report say they’re applying at least some Agile marketing practices in marketing teams of more than 70 people, and within organizations of over 5,000 members.

What does an enterprise stand to gain if it introduces Agile values, principles, and practices into its marketing department?

What about into the wider organization?

If you’re a company leader with a marketing team struggling to escape bad processes, Agile may be the key to your freedom.

Here’s what Agile can mean for an enterprise marketing group:

1. Noticeable Impact at Scale

Small, scrappy teams may have an easier time adopting Agile marketing methods. But, there are also natural limits to Agile’s progress in a startup environment.

Lack of resources, less simultaneous projects, and a natural ceiling to sharing knowledge in a tight-knit group means Agile can only go so far.

In an enterprise, adopting Agile may be more difficult and resource-heavy. However, the benefits have the potential to be more widely felt.

Enterprises have an opportunity to put greater resources behind their efforts and achieve greater impact, faster. In other words, if they support their Agile marketing efforts as powerfully as they’ve historically supported Big Bang campaigns the possibilities could be endless.

2. Faster Benefits to the Customer

Customers of established enterprises are also likely to feel the benefits of Agile marketing faster than customers of startups.

This is because customers of long-standing organizations already have a set of expectations regarding larger, more established companies.

When they begin reacting more quickly to change, producing higher quality work, and delivering more often (some of the key benefits of Agile marketing), the change is immediately obvious to their customers.

3. Innovation

Innovation has been a buzzword among organizational leaders for decades now, popularized by such catchy phrases as “innovate or die.”

This year’s State of Agile Marketing report queried 400+ marketers from startups and enterprises alike, and we found that 42% also had innovation on their minds and in their priorities.

In fact, “increasing innovation” was one of their top reasons for bringing Agile marketing into the organization in the first place.

In an increasingly competitive economy, established companies can’t rest on their laurels anymore.

Consistently increasing innovation can help enterprises attract the best talent, meet (and exceed) customer needs, stand out from their competitors, and grow at a healthy pace.

Although being Agile and being innovative are inherently different concepts, they are also intrinsically linked. The values and principles that come with adopting an Agile mindset result in encouraging innovative ideas to blossom and come to fruition among enterprise teams.

In a mature, self-organized Agile marketing team, the nurturing of a continuously improving process encourages all members to feel accountable for innovative ideas about the future.

Even in industries that appear to be stagnating, such as insurance, companies like ING in the Netherlands, have been promoting their use of Agile methods to bring more innovation into their business.

Faced with fast-moving disruptors, the connection between agility and survival is one they’re keenly aware of and actively exploring.

4. More Visibility

Building full process visibility into a team of ten or so people sounds daunting, but doable. Doing the same for a marketing team of more than a hundred members seems insurmountable.

This is one reason why the knee jerk solution is often to go straight to a massive reorganization.

The assumption is that existing structures need to be dismantled, which might be true, but jumping straight to the reorg often stymies Agile efforts before they really begin.

The daunting reorg is not a necessary first step towards agility, nor is it always necessary to achieving greater visibility across teams and projects.

There are many ways in which Agile encourages visibility without requiring the entire organization to turn on its head. Agile encourages visibility by:

• Introducing more feedback loops into the existing process
• Encouraging the visualization of work items and phases of progress
• Promoting more knowledge sharing for increased cross functionality
• Introducing a more collaborative process of prioritization
• Creating opportunities to bring together decision-makers (internal and external) with the team members who are closest to the work

Aiming for greater cross functionality and better communication between team members, and the teams they collaborate with, can go a long way.

Agile can offer steps towards eliminating the silos that naturally occur among teams and departments in a larger organization.

Even just the invitation to share feedback about “how things are done” can be a great motivator for better team performance.

Eventually, with more opportunities for visibility and better knowledge sharing about the goals of the organization, team members will feel more empowered to make decisions and lead, in addition to executing.

5. Faster Decision-Making

Most enterprises are facing an increasingly crowded market, regardless of how long they’ve been in business.

If they were once new kids on the block, their growing revenues and popularity over the years have made sure they’re now surrounded by competitors.

While enterprises may have bigger financial resources and more experience executing, their large sizes and hierarchies can make it difficult to have an efficient and effective process.

There’s a reason that startups refer to their enterprise competition as “bulky and slow.”

But if you’re an enterprise marketing leader, how do you change years (or maybe even decades) of established process patterns?

Adopting Agile principles, in marketing departments as well as across the wider organization, can help enterprises get a leg up on their competition, big or small.

During Agile trainings, we often discuss the difference between agile – meaning fast and nimble and Agile – a process methodology requiring a mindset shift.

Even though the two should not be used interchangeably, being Agile can often lead to faster delivery time and the ability to make more flexible, tactical pivots.

For example, even just adhering to the Agile principles of prioritizing the value of work completed, listening to your customers, and breaking down your work into more actionable tasks will already have many organizations on the fast track to further growth.

For large enterprises, being first and being fast is crucial…and unexpected.

Combining an enterprise’s abundant resources with a daily work process that is as agile as it is Agile can help large organizations compete on many fronts.

Bonus: Great PR

If what you’ve read so far has convinced you that Agile marketing makes total sense for an enterprise, you’ll also be glad to hear that if you choose to go the Agile route, you’ll be in good company.

In 2019, 31% of the marketers queried for the State of Agile Marketing Report stated that they come from companies of 1,000+ employees. 18% came from companies of 5,000+ employees.

The majority of these marketers are already practicing Agile marketing within their companies.

Smaller businesses and startups rarely have the resources (or the time) to chronicle their Agile marketing journeys. Luckily, a number of enterprises in a variety of sectors have published helpful case studies about theirs. As a result, these companies have been getting serious news coverage.

For example, the team at US software company CA Technologies has been particularly vocal about the wins and challenges during their organization-wide adoption of Agile using their company blog and Medium account.

Other technology giants, such as Mozilla, IBM and Dell, have also pursued implementations of Agile in their marketing departments.

Michelle Peluso, CMO of IBM, believes that “with the right budget and level of executive buy-in, you can turn a ship of any size towards great organizational agility.”

Even banks with an international presence, such as Santander, have begun to implement Agile marketing practices for their key campaigns. Running their promotional campaigns in an Agile way resulted in a 12% increase in their NPS (Net Promoter Score) – the highest in 17 years. Santander’s CMO, Keith Moor, goes into the tactical details of the marketing department’s transformation and their pilot approach in an article in MarketingWeek from 2017.

Check out some more examples of enterprises expanding the general knowledge base on Agile Marketing. These resources make it easier for companies of similar size, and new to Agile, to make use of existing know-how.

Size Doesn’t Matter, Agility Does

Thinking of becoming the Agile champion in your enterprise’s marketing team? Sometimes, taking the first step is all it takes to get your team rolling towards agility.

Let us know in the comments below if you’re on an Agile marketing journey within your enterprise team or if you’d like to be!

The post 5 Reasons Your Enterprise Needs Agile Marketing appeared first on AgileSherpas.com.

Few things are more important to an effective Agile marketing team than a functioning marketing backlog, yet this particular practice is hard to get right.

Many teams struggle with prioritization, scope, and sizing the work in backlog.

These difficulties often lead to frustration and considerable lag time in updating the team’s to-do list.

The marketing backlog is the engine of a high-performing Agile marketing team, so it’s crucial to avoid these common pitfalls. We’re going to level set on backlog best practices and provide some guidance on making it into a well-oiled machine.

Quick Takeaways:

• A marketing backlog is the prioritized list of upcoming tasks.
• No two items on the list have the same priority.
• The Marketing Owner has ultimate responsibility for clearing the backlog.
• Many times, you need to right-size your tasks. Make sure the smallest unit can be completed by two people in two days.

What is the Backlog?

First we need to get clarity on definition, because the word “backlog” sometimes carries baggage.

The marketing backlog is simply the team’s prioritized list of upcoming work. It’s NOT where extra work gets parked.

That modifier “prioritized” is crucial, because that’s what helps differentiate the backlog from any other non-Agile to-do list. Important, time-sensitive, valuable work lives at the top; work gets less important and less valuable as you move toward the bottom.

Whenever the team is ready to start on some new work, they turn to the backlog and select the top priority item that they’re qualified to complete.

That’s it. That’s all a backlog really is.

It’s the engine of a great Agile team, but it’s not rocket science. It can, however, be complicated, so let’s proceed to some other crucial components.

What Goes Into a Marketing Backlog?

The short answer to the question, “What should I include in my marketing backlog” is “Everything.”

Whenever we train marketers on using this Agile practice, most of them nod along when we say that everything needs to be prioritized and visualized in their backlog.

Then we add that we don’t just mean all your projects or campaigns or initiatives, we mean literally ALL YOUR TEAM’S WORK.

Strategic stuff plus the business as usual (BAU) bits that you have to do just to keep marketing going — all of that lives in the backlog together.

That may sound complicated, and oftentimes it is, but it’s the only way for a content marketer like myself to effectively decide whether it’s more important to finish your weekly blog post today or to tackle the copy for the new sales enablement piece.

Both those things have to be prioritized against one another to make that decision.

If you keep everyone’s “day jobs” out of the backlog and just expect them to get it done, several unfortunate things can happen:

1. Because their BAU work isn’t visualized, marketers will overestimate the work they can accomplish, leading either to overtime and burnout or delays in delivery (or both).
2. Strategic work items from the backlog won’t ever get done because BAU work takes up 100% (or more) of everyone’s time.
3. Marketing leadership doesn’t get visibility into the amount of work the team is really doing; all they say are the handful of strategic initiatives from the backlog.

So avoid all those issues and prioritize the team’s projects against its everyday work.

How Big Should Work Items Be?

This, of course, begs the question, “How do I prioritize a major project that will take me months to finish against a blog post that will take a few hours?”

This sizing discrepancy trips up a lot of Agile marketing teams, but it doesn’t have to be a backlog deal breaker.

There are two ways to handle the sizing problem: estimate and split work items, or simply don’t worry about it.

Lots has already been written about how and why to estimate work, so if you’re unfamiliar with this practice jump over and check out these pieces:

• Agile Estimation Explained
• Different Levels of Estimation (Product Backlog vs. Sprint Backlog)
• Estimation Practices vs. the #NoEstimates Movement

Once you’re comfortable estimating, you can begin to split up larger work items into more comparable sized pieces that can be prioritized against one another.

This can, however, be a time-consuming exercise, and it’s one that has long been a source of controversy in the Agile community at large (see the third article linked above for an overview of this ongoing debate).

So your other option when it comes to right-sizing work items in your backlog is simply not worry about it.

Follow the general rule of thumb from the Agile software world and try to keep your work items to a size that allows two people to finish them in two days.

When combined with a commitment to ruthless prioritization (more on that later), this guideline can help alleviate much of the anxiety around right-sizing work items in a backlog.

How Much Work Goes in the Agile Marketing Backlog?

There is, of course, a limit to how much work you can effectively handle in a marketing backlog. So be sure to cut it off at a reasonable point.

You’ll typically want about a quarter’s worth of work in your backlog; six months would be the absolute maximum.

And while you should be visualizing your BAU work alongside strategic priorities, you don’t want to cram your backlog full of tiny tasks.

If you’re sizing work you may want to limit the long-term backlog to just 3’s and above. If you’re using our two people/two days rule, simple to-do’s won’t come into play.

But, of course, seemingly tiny things can end up taking up more than their fair share of time thanks to our friend context switching, so you’ll want to keep an eye on them.

Agile Marketing Backlogs in Kanban and Scrum

The way to ensure visibility into the task level without creating a backlog of thousands of tiny work items differs slightly depending on the framework you’re using.

A Scrum team will look at their marketing backlog during Sprint planning and choose a subset of its work to complete during the upcoming Sprint. This work forms their much smaller Sprint backlog.

Once they select a work item to join the Sprint, they break it down into smaller tasks if needed. Team members then volunteer for the tasks, and everything that’s on deck is out in the open. Any tiny BAU items that are too small to live in the marketing backlog are also incorporated during Sprint planning to ensure a reasonable commitment from the team.

Kanban teams, on the other hand, don’t conduct Sprint planning meetings.

Instead, they can do a couple of things to break down work items.

One is to have a recurring planning meeting where the team does a breakdown of upcoming work. Once tasked-out, that work then moves from the Backlog column to Ready.

It sounds a lot like a Sprint planning meeting, but instead of happening every two weeks, Kanban teams would have it triggered by a visual cue on the board.

For example we might decide that once our Ready column gets down to just five items, it’s time to have a planning meeting. Sometimes this might happen in just a few days, other times it might take a couple of weeks.

This is known as “just in time” (JIT) planning.

Either way, the Agile marketing team has regular, recurring opportunities to take work items from the marketing backlog and break them into tasks so that the full scope of their work is always visible.

Power of Ruthless Prioritization

Of course, all the planning in the world does us no good if every item in the plan carries equal weight.

Ruthless prioritization is crucial for a marketing backlog to do its job.

This means no two items in the backlog can have the same priority; there are no two number one items.

For marketing teams who serve multiple stakeholders, business units, or other teams, this can get tricky. The classic example is the Agile marketing creative team, who needs to produce images, copy, etc. for multiple other teams, each of whom believes their work is the most important thing in the entire world.

It then falls to a team lead, which we refer to as a Marketing Owner, to make the call on behalf of the Agile marketing team.

Who’s Responsible for the Agile Marketing Backlog?

The Marketing Owner (more about them here), is responsible for the team’s output. Whatever the Agile marketing team produces falls on the MO’s head. They do this by prioritizing the backlog.

As you can imagine, this is often a challenging job, particularly in teams who serve multiple groups.

But that’s why this role exists. We need someone who understands both the business needs and the team’s capacity so they can make daily decisions about what work gets done and when.

Note that I said BUSINESS needs, not who’s yelling loudest.

The MO knows what the Agile marketing team as a unit, marketing as a department, and the business as a whole are trying to achieve, and they put work that contributes to those objectives at the top of the backlog.

It’s worth mentioning explicitly that if you have an MO who’s also a project manager and they only prioritize their projects, the team is not responsible for this unfair behavior. They work on what’s prioritized in the backlog and shouldn’t have to worry about whether that’s actually the right work.

Any favoritism displayed by the MO falls on them, not the Agile marketing team.

Again, you don’t have to call them a Marketing Owner, but if you’re going to have a backlog it needs to have an owner. And ideally just one owner.

If you have multiple MOs you lose time in negotiation and it may be impossible to arrive at meaningful consensus. But if you must have more than one MO, make sure you have a tie-breaker (usually the next level up the org chart) ready to settle disagreements about priorities.

How Often to Refine Your Backlog

The final crucial note here is not to let your backlog get stale. It should constantly be evolving based on emerging information, data about past campaigns, reactions from your audience, etc.

The MO should always be refining the backlog, adding detail and specificity to items as they near the top. They go and have fact-finding meetings with stakeholders to flesh out projects the team will soon work on, and they remove items that are no longer strategically relevant.

As we discussed earlier, the team will be pulling work items out regularly, so the MO needs to ensure they always have a steady supply of clearly defined things to work on next. The exact speed at which this needs to happen will depend on the length of a Sprint for Scrum teams, and how quickly Kanban teams process their Ready column.

A Backlog by Any Other Name…

Call it a backlog, call it a queue, call it your magical Agile to-do’s, just don’t let your backlog become stagnant.

Ruthlessly prioritize it and fill it with all the work your team is responsible for, and the backlog will propel you down the path to high performance.

In the startup world of “move fast and break things,” deliberately adopting Agile process practices may rank low on leadership’s list of priorities. Even if Agile practices do make it into the organization at an early stage, it’s usually just in the RnD department, where new generation developers are bred Agile from the get-go.

“We don’t need process, we need results,” is the cry from startup CEOs trying to fill their monthly investor reports with ever more impressive numbers.

For many startup founders, there’s no clear link between Agile marketing and good results for their shareholders’ meeting.

In reality, going Agile at the beginning of a business journey can save a lot of headaches (and losses) in the long run.

Quick Takeaways:

• In startups, Agile marketing improves productivity and innovation.
• Agile helps implement consistent practices and processes in startup marketing.
• Knowledge sharing, and therefore Agile implementation, is easier and faster in startups.
• Agile processes help groom leaders out of early employees.

Why Startups Are Ideal for Agile Marketing

Investing in a lengthy Agile marketing transformation when your company is already set in its ways will take a considerable cut from organizational resources. Doing so as a startup, however, can come cheap and help you move fast (without breaking so many things).

Small businesses and startups are already starting to pay attention to their organic advantage and being successful with Agile practices.

40% of respondents in this year’s annual State of Agile Marketing Report say that they are applying some Agile marketing practices in teams of 10 people or fewer, and within organizations of 100 or less people.

Although Agile Marketing is becoming increasingly popular among enterprises, it is spreading like wildfire among startups. Here’s why.

Generally, using the Agile process in a startup marketing team has the potential to:

• improve productivity
• enhance marketers’ ability to react to changing priorities
• increase innovation
• accelerate delivery times of your campaigns

Not only are startups in serious need of these benefits, but they are in a more advantageous position than large enterprises to receive them.

Startups + Agile Marketing = Early Wins

Startups can capitalize on their small size and fluid structure to create the right environment for Agile to flourish. This is what makes startups such great candidates for adopting Agile, even if they don’t know it yet.

If you’re a startup founder or leader, you can take advantage of your circumstances. Adopting Agile in your marketing team at this stage is one of the wisest investments you could make in your company’s future. Get acquainted with some of the reasons why.

1. Startup Opportunities for Consistent Practices and Processes

When adopting Agile, the most valuable factor among the 400+ marketers, who participated in the 2019 State of Agile Marketing Report from AgileSherpas and CoSchedule, was “having consistent practices and processes across teams.”

In a startup, the inherent fluidity and cross-functionality of team members make it easy for Agile practices to get a foothold in several teams at once.

As more team members have occasion to collaborate in a startup environment, they develop their own rulebook of Agile best practices. Then, they start making them a part of their process. Their constant communication and tight deadlines often result in a communal process structure that the entire team is accountable for.

In other words, they can’t help but have a consistent, agile process.

So, what may seem impossible in a fragmented enterprise with tens or hundreds of siloed teams and departments can be achieved over the course of several weeks within a small, unified startup.

2. Faster Knowledge Sharing Creates Shared Understanding

Smaller team sizes in a startup make it easier to share knowledge among the members of the entire organization.

This comes in handy when a team or the entire staff need to be trained in something new. In a large enterprise, teams will need to be trained in batches over an extended period of time. However, in a startup, the entire organization can be trained at once.

Getting to know Agile marketing concepts together with your peers, instead of learning about Agile without those with whom you need to collaborate, can help the group develop a shared understanding that they build upon together.

3. Agile Project Management Tools from the Start

Thirty-two percent of marketers said that when adopting Agile, it was very valuable to implement an Agile project management tool.

Tools built around the Agile methodology help the team map their workflow, make their tasks visible to each other and promote explicit policies. Traditional tools will often discourage Agile principles, or will require workarounds to accommodate an Agile marketing workflow.

As most new startups are not contractually or mentally bound to an existing project management tool, it’s easier to implement new tools within the team.

On the other hand, larger organizations invest a huge amount of resources in getting all of their teams on one robust system. This makes it very difficult for the entire organization to switch to a lighter Agile project management tool, even if they wanted to.

4. Entrenching Agile Marketing Values in Leadership Early

As your startup grows, your first junior hires will transform into your company’s decision-makers. In time, these people will become integral to the business scale-up.

At this stage, the process values and principles your leaders subscribe to will become a crucial factor in your success.

Executives who have matured within the context of an Agile organization are much more likely to become Agile leaders. They also prove to be much more effective in spreading Agile practices among new hires.

Enterprise organizations that have been around longer usually have leaders who subscribe to more traditional methodologies. Even if an Agile transformation is on the table, it can be a big challenge to convince traditional leaders to undertake it.

Startups can bypass the barrier that a “lack of executive sponsorship” represents. Further, they can capitalize on the fact that their leaders prefer Agile, instead of fearing its disruption.

5. Impact Goes Further, Faster

For small startups, Agile is a natural advantage, mainly due to their size and organic team dynamic. I think we’d all agree that it’s much easier to change the work habits of a group of 10 people, than it is to do so for a group of one hundred people.

In startups, these smaller specialized units also have a faster natural iteration cycle, which they must maintain to find product/market fit and grow at a healthy pace. So, in a way, they’re already one step closer to Agile.

A faster pace, smaller size, and built-in flexibility means that the impact of integrating new practices has the potential to be felt immediately across the entire organization. In a startup, even just applying the three most popular Agile practices can have very palpable effects on organizational visibility, speed and employee morale.

So, What Are You Waiting For?

If you’re a leader or founder in a startup, you’re in a very advantageous position to adopt Agile marketing early. The friction you’ll face during an Agile implementation is next to none when compared to the difficulties older, stagnating enterprises face during theirs.

As you grow, these process values and principles will spread among other teams and help your organization continuously improve.

If you’re already implementing Agile marketing practices in your startup, let us know which ones are having the biggest positive or negative impact in the comments below!

For years our customers have been telling us that using Agile marketing to learn fast, spend wisely, and optimize marketing campaigns has transformed their business. And the benefits don’t just come from our personal experience: a study conducted by MIT suggests that Agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-Agile organizations.

There are three simple metrics you could use today to measure Agile marketing success at the process level, which is a crucial step in optimizing operations. But what about all the time needed to train people and implement technology so operations can actually be optimized?

In other words, how do you prove the ROI of Agile marketing?

In this blog post, we will have some fun with basic math. Don’t worry — there’s no algebra or trig ahead. We’ll simply be using the power of compound interest to prove Agile marketing ROI to your boss.

The Mandate for Agile Marketing

“It’s not one high-level decision each year around marketing mix that makes or breaks us. It is the million little optimizations that we will make all year long that means the difference between success and failure of our marketing” – CMO of a global tech company

Let’s demonstrate the logic behind this CMO quote using something simple from your day to day life. If you do some basic money management for your household, then you’re already familiar with the concept of simple versus compound interest.

Simple interest is based on the principal amount of a deposit, while compound interest is based on the principal amount and the interest that accumulates on it in every period.

When you earn interest on savings, that interest then earns interest on itself and this amount is compounded monthly. The higher the interest, the faster your money grows!

Traditional Marketing Looks a Lot Like Simple Interest

If your team is still doing traditional marketing, where you use annual year-in-review, “hind-sighting” decks or post campaign wrap-up reports from your agency to run annual mix models to help reallocate spend, then your marketing ROI looks a lot like simple interest.

Let’s say you start with a $10 million marketing budget. You spend it, and then the next year you think, “Hey, I think we can get a little bit better” and get a little bit more budget. Then next year you review again, and so forth and so on. In this cycle you’re just getting simple interest.

However, if your marketing team can commit to the continuous course corrections that Agile marketing represents, then the benefits start building on themselves.

Agile Marketing Works Like Compound Interest

This is where you really unlock the power of compound interest. If you’re committed to ongoing agility and ongoing optimization, you can actually get much more out of your marketing dollars.

Let me explain this concept using the formula of compound interest calculation:

P = present value (the amount of money you have available)

i = interest rate (how much improvement you think you can get)

n = length of time

c = compounding interval (are you doing this once a year? multiple times per year?)

FV = future value (your outcome)

The Agile Marketing ROI Formula

Here’s the marketing parallel you should use to demonstrate the ROI on Agile marketing:

P = Present Value of Your Marketing Dollars

How much are you committing to Agile marketing? Is it your whole marketing budget, or are you just devoting a little piece of your marketing spend to the Agile experiment? Whatever the amount of your marketing spend that you’re willing to optimize is your P value.

I = The Improvement  
What improvement you think you can realistically get on reach, engagement, leads conversion etc.?  Here you can use an industry benchmark, or even better your own historic data, if you have it, to hypothesize.

N = Length of Agile Marketing Optimization
How long will you commit to Agile marketing optimization? If you’re just doing a three-month pilot, then you can’t expect to see much change to your budget during that time (even though you’ll likely learn a lot about your Agile process).

On the other hand, if your team is embarking on an Agile marketing transformation for the next few years, you have a much longer time horizon to enjoy the benefits of compounding optimization.

C = Frequency

The C represents the compounding interval, or how frequently you’ll act and optimize your spend each year. If you only optimize annually, then your C=1.

However, let’s say you’re running two-week marketing Sprints, which you’re then using to measure and optimize, your C=26! The higher you can push your optimization frequency, the better your Agile marketing ROI.

FV = Effective Marketing Spend

The results of this formula essentially quantify how much farther your marketing budget will go after your recurring Agile optimizations.

This is the potential value of your usual marketing spend after running Agile marketing for the allotted time period.

A Tale of Two Marketing Teams

Now that you understand how to prove Agile marketing ROI using compound interest calculation, let’s put the formula to work.

In our example below both Team A (Traditional Marketing) and Team B (Agile Marketing) have the same $1 million content marketing budget (p) and expect the same 20% lift (i) via Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

However, Team A is only committed to a 3 month pilot (n) while Team B is embarking on a 2 year commitment to Agile marketing.

Team A gets to optimize its content once a year (c), while Team B is running on two weeks Sprint and optimizes its copy, images, calls-to-action etc. every two weeks using Agile marketing measurement.

As you can see, Team B gets 10x the ROI (FV) on their content marketing budget using Agile marketing compared to Team A still on traditional marketing.

Using Agile marketing allows you to enjoy compound interest on your marketing budget, rather than relegate your optimization efforts to an annual planning event.

If you’d like to play with the numbers yourself, here is a simple Agile Marketing ROI Calculator you can use.

The post How to Prove Agile Marketing ROI Using The Power of Compound Interest appeared first on AgileSherpas.com.

Agile marketing certification: a waste of time and money, or a crucial stepping stone on the path to true agility?

This question is part of a larger, ongoing debate in the larger Agile community. So this Agile Marketing Minute video attempts to tame the certification circus, at least for marketers.

Agile Training Options

Some members of the larger Agile community are very anti-certification. They believe that these courses stagnate the evolution of frameworks and practices by focusing on teaching only existing ways of working. The point of a certification workshop, they argue, is simply to pass on the current set of learning objectives. There’s no room for adaptation.

On the other hand, some folks believe that certifications create shared understanding among a wide group of Agile practitioners. Without a grounding in core practices and principles, how are we to know what works for us? How can we have meaningful conversations if we don’t share a vocabulary?

Of course, there’s no perfect answer to this debate.

It’s up to each individual, team, and organization to decide what training works for them. Check out the video to see some ways to navigate the options available to Agile marketers in particular.

The Power of an Agile Marketing Certification

As I’ve worked to establish and evolve our training practices at AgileSherpas, I’ve come to believe very strongly in the power of Agile marketing certifications. That is, when they’re chosen carefully and applied intelligently.

This video offers some guidelines on choosing the right certification(s) for an Agile marketing effort (hint: you don’t all need to become Certified Scrum Masters).

If you’re looking for opportunities to further your Agile marketing education, check out our list of upcoming workshops that include the Certified Professional in Agile Marketing certification via ICAgile. This group rigorously vets all courses and trainers, so you can be sure you’re getting an awesome educational experience along with a meaningful certification.

Other great options for Agile marketers include:

• Business Agility foundations from ICAgile
• Coaching certifications for those leading multiple Agile teams
• Kanban-specific trainings via Lean Kanban University
• Although not a certification-based course, our online Introduction to Agile Marketing offers a good jumping off point for your Agile education.

Remember, consider your “why” carefully before forking over thousands of dollars for trainings. Many traditional workshops are software specific, and you’ll spend quite a bit of time translating what’s covered into marketing.

If you’re OK with that, great. A few quick Google searches will unearth hundreds of courses.

If not, seek out a marketing-specific course, and/or one geared more broadly towards business agility, like those listed above.

But whatever you do, keep on learning! Remember, marketers cited a lack of Agile education as the primary barrier to agility in our 2018 State of Agile Marketing Report. Get over that hurdle with a well-designed training regimen.

Getting Agile to scale is tricky in any context, and scaled Agile marketing is no different.

Complex models like SAFe feel overwhelming and impossible to marketers who are still struggling to translate the core components of Agile practices to their unique environments. I mean, just look at this diagram:

Recently, however, one of the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, has released a new meta-framework called Scrum@Scale. For my money, this is far and away the most applicable model for marketing organizations.

As with most Agile things, we’re going to need to do some adjusting to language and concepts, but much of Scrum@Scale can be enormously useful for large marketing departments.

(Huge hat tip to Jeff and the team at Scrum Inc. for laying all this out in their Scrum@Scale Guide and in the in-person trainings that are also available.)

4 Steps to Scaled Agile Marketing

Here we’re going to be dealing primarily with the final step, scaling intelligently, but there’s a considerable amount of homework to be done before you can get to this.

There are essentially four steps to building up to scaled Agile marketing:

1. Build an Agile Mindset: You need a firm foundation on which to build your new organization, so this step is crucial. Everyone in marketing needs to understand Agile as a concept so they can support the group’s transition. Ideally this step also includes grounding in other concepts that compliment Agile, such as Design Thinking and Theory of Constraints.
2. Test and Evolve Practices: Only once you understand the mindset can you begin to apply it by establishing actual practices, like backlog refinement and daily standup. Knowing the “why” behind meetings and roles allows you to pick and choose wisely and avoids costly mistakes.
3. Draft a Scaling Plan: Whether you’re working with a group of 20 or 2,000, you need a roadmap to guide your scaling effort. The framework here (based on Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum@Scale) is designed to be modular, so you can drop in new groups steadily over time. This tends to be less risky and more effective than transitioning hundreds of people simultaneously.
4. Scale Intelligently: Begin to implement your plan, following the Agile principles of inspect and adapt. Monitor your agreed-upon metrics to adjust the plan as you learn more about how Agile really works inside your marketing organization.

Designing Agile Marketing Teams

Stable marketing teams will be the building blocks of scaled Agile marketing, so it’s important to set them up properly.

For the love of all that is good and decent, do NOT try to structure them around short-term projects.

And do NOT stick with your existing silos and expect Agile to work.

What you DO need to do is keep them small. Three to nine members is a good range, with 4-5 being the sweet spot. These numbers typically don’t include supporting team members, who we’re calling the Agile Lead (AL) and Marketing Owner (MO).

The MO acts as the go-between for the team and the rest of the organization. (For more on this crucial role, see this article.) They own the team’s backlog, and ensure that its contents align with the business goals of the organization.

(In software-style Scrum@Scale, this role is called the Product Owner. I’ve adapted the naming here to apply more readily to marketing teams.)

The Agile Lead (also known as the Scrum Master) keeps Agile working on the team, removing impediments and supporting team members in using Agile to manage their work. In true Scrum@Scale, this person makes sure everyone is doing “true” Scrum; our concern in marketing is less about getting a methodology right, and more about staying true to the Agile mindset.

As scaling takes hold, this person also escalates problems up the chain, joining larger groups in a Scaled Daily Standup meeting to share impediments and solutions with other teams.

Agile marketing teams don’t have to be 100% persistent (they may spin up and down as initiatives come and go), but they should be:

• Stable
• Aligned around a shared goal
• Self-organizing
• Self-managing
• As cross-functional as possible

Nail it Before You Scale It

Agile marketing is a long-term project, and you probably won’t ever be really “done” evolving it. But before you embark on a serious attempt at scaled Agile marketing, make sure you have fairly high functioning Agile marketing teams in place.

Small problems in teams will be compounded at scale, so make sure you’ve allowed time for these issues to surface and be resolved.

This is why pilots are so crucial; they allow smaller groups within a marketing organization to test the waters and identify the unique roadblocks for using Agile in your company.

The lessons from pilot teams should be used to create a reference model for future teams. Reference models aren’t precise blueprints (each team will have their own special spin on Agile), but rather a set of good practices that new teams can follow to set themselves up for success.

Some Sample Scaled Agile Marketing Models

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore what scaling really looks like for Agile marketers.

The whole process is based off two concurrent and complimentary cycles:

On the left we have the Agile Lead cycle, and on the right the Marketing Owner cycle. The left side governs HOW work actually gets done, while the right establishes WHAT work should be prioritized by the teams.

This is a fairly self-explanatory diagram, but let’s establish what each piece means before we look at organization designs based on it.

Agile Lead Cycle

The Agile Lead Cycle is built on and around the Team-Level Process. (These are the high functioning teams I mentioned before.)

This part works like most Agile groups: teams work in short iterations, pull work from a prioritized backlog, deliver work frequently to customers, collect their feedback, and adapt their output and process accordingly.

The big differences in the scaled model are that we need cross-team communication and the removal of bigger impediments. This requires the Agile Leads from various teams to get together regularly in a Scaled Daily Standup (labeled as SDS in some of these diagrams).

The structure of these meetings mirrors that of the regular Daily Standup, but the topics are slightly different:

1. What impediments does my team have that will prevent them from accomplishing their Sprint Goal?
2. Is my team doing anything that will prevent another team from accomplishing their Sprint Goal?
3. Have we discovered any new dependencies or a way to mitigate them?

Effective coordination among teams also requires the addition of a new group: the Executive Action Team (EAT). In short, this group is responsible for the success of Agile transformation inside the larger marketing function.

They build a transformation backlog and shepherd its contents through to completion.

Any impediments that come up at an SDS that can’t be resolved by the collected Agile Leads will be escalated to the EAT by the Head Agile Lead, and they come up with a way to get it taken care of.

The Marketing Owner Cycle

On the right we see the Marketing Owner Cycle, which governs what all the teams in an Agile marketing department will be working on.

They’re responsible for coming up with a large strategic vision, typically represented as an annual marketing plan, prioritizing the components of that vision, and then breaking it down into large initiatives that can be taken up by the various Agile marketing teams inside the department.

The strategic vision may be analogous to an annual marketing plan, but don’t imagine that this cycle occurs only once a year. Quite the opposite.

Like a regular Agile team, the collections of MOs who are part of this half of the cycle connect frequently. They reexamine the vision, initiatives, and priorities to ensure they’re still the best use of the team’s time, and communicate any changes very clearly.

(That collection of MOs is known as the Executive Meta Scrum (EMS), and they’re lead by a Chief Marketing Owner.)

It’s these frequent meetings that allow teams to respond in nearly real time to audience feedback, competitor movements, or emerging opportunities. Note how work flows from the EMS to individual teams, where their MOs add work into their team’s backlog (the red indicates a buffer that’s left empty to accommodate incoming work). Individual MOs can negotiate with one another to ensure the right team takes on new work.

Note that in this diagram we have two layers of Chief Marketing Owners, with the ultimate authority being labeled Chief Chief Marketing Owner. Each Chief Marketing Owner is a member of that group who is also responsible for the output of a group of Marketing Owners.*

While Meta Scrums and Executive Meta Scrums are made up mostly of MOs and executives, they are open to anyone. What’s more, individual contributors are often valuable attendees who can provide insight into effort levels and other logistics around completing potential initiatives.

Designing Scaled Agile Marketing Organizations

There’s a lot more that could be said about these cycles and their components, but we’ll save that for another time. For now, let’s get down to the really fun part: designing Agile marketing departments based on these ideas.

Let’s start simple. Here’s how we might set up a team of twenty marketers who are responsible for a single product:

Because everyone is working together on a single product line, they all get together in a single Scaled Daily Standup and their backlogs are governed by a single Meta Scrum. Likewise one EAT and one EMS are responsible for removing large impediments and setting marketing strategy, respectively.

For this group, and for most scaled Agile marketing departments, the EAT is made up of Directors, VPs, the CMO, and any other executives whose input could be useful in dealing with bigger impediments.

The EMS has a similar composition, but it also includes MOs from the individual teams if they are senior enough to be involved in strategic discussions. It can also be useful to have representation from sales, finance, and other groups who impact/are impacted by marketing on this team.

If we look at this a little differently, we might have two separate groups who are responsible for marketing different products, or possibly the same product to two different personas:

In this case there are separate Scaled Daily Standups and Meta Scrums for each product/persona. This is because only teams who need to collaborate in order to deliver should be joined through these meta-teams.

Teams working on Product 1 aren’t impacted by the work of teams working on Product 2, so there’s no need to get them communicating daily.

There remains, however, a single EAT and EMS to govern the work of both products. This ensures a consistent experience across products/brands, as well as the distribution of learnings across teams from different products.

Agile Marketing for Very Large Teams

If you’re well outside the twenty-person threshold, never fear. This structure expands out very nicely.

Here’s how we might arrange a 50-person department marketing the same product but for two separate personas:

The first change is that the EAT and EMS are made up of the same people, so we’ve diagrammed these as overlapping groups.

Second, we now have two Creative Services (CS) teams in the mix (shown as white pentagons).

Individuals from these teams actually sit on the Agile marketing teams in gray, but they also have their own MO who helps ensure they’re doing the right work at the right time. Since this MO will be part of the Meta Scrum meetings, they can move CS team members around on a daily basis if needed.

This arrangement helps accommodate highly specialized teams/people who would not be used 100% of the time if they sat on a single Agile marketing team.

If we want to go even more complex, we can add in two agencies and a remote team to this department:

The agencies act as an extension of the teams who are working with them. So the ALs from those teams will share agency input at the Scaled Daily Standup meeting, as well as during the team’s own individual Daily Standup.

The MOs for the teams responsible for agency work likewise act as the liaison between the agency and the strategic perspective provided by the Meta Scrum and EMS.

The remote team works a little differently. If they’re large enough, they may have their own MO who joins in a Meta Scrum to connect the team to the strategic perspective this group provides.

When it comes to process, however, the AL from a non-remote team helps them optimize and acts as their representative during Scaled Daily Standup. They join one of the non-Agile teams for Daily Standup to keep them connected to what’s going on at the office.

Agile Marketing for Enterprise Teams

As the scope of a marketing team expands, so does this meta-framework. Here I’ve diagrammed a team of over 200 marketers working on two separate products and serving five distinct business units:

Once again we have a collection of specialized resources in white pentagons.

These are represented as creatives services teams, but they could really be any group with unique skills that can’t be utilized fully on a single Agile marketing team.

Note that each specialized group has its own MO who’s responsible for ensuring the team members are doing the right work on the right team at the right time. They do not, however, have their own AL; their perspective on process will be incorporated during retrospectives with the teams they’ve recently joined.

The final important thing to note in this diagram is that teams are grouped according to the business unit they serve. Only teams who need to collaborate in order to deliver need to form groups (sometimes known as Tribes).

Breaking Down Agile Marketing Team Structure

Speaking of Tribes, let’s end by taking a closer look at one of this modules from the above diagram.

These four teams have a shared purpose — persona, product, or business unit — and thus need to have a shared vision and backlog.

Their grouping is known as a Tribe in the Spotify model, but the naming doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that the teams are organized in such a way as to be able to deliver value independently and cross functionally.

That typically happens best when teams are organized by stages of the customer journey, but you might be able to arrange them according to channel and still see good value coming from each team.

More holistically, the Chief Marketing Owner who oversees this Tribe ensures that they’re pulling towards the same goal, doing high quality work, and most importantly balancing the needs of the customer with the demands of the business.

Scaling Agile Marketing Intelligently

Despite the common usage of the phrase, “Agile transformation,” there is no magic wand that you can wave and become Agile overnight. Scaling takes time, effort, and above all commitment from all levels of the organization.

You can map out a scaling strategy, but be prepared to evolve it as teams go through the process and learn more about how Agile marketing really works in your unique situation.

If you’re looking for someone to guide you through some or all of these steps, just give us shout. We live to make change less scary

* (This nomenclature is inherited from Scrum@Scale, and may be a little confusing, particularly the CMO abbreviation for Chief Marketing Owners. It could/should be adapted to suit your own organizational structure as needed.)

There are pretty much an unlimited number of factors that can impact the success or failure of an Agile marketing rollout. Organizational culture, team structure, strategic priorities, and tool selection are all on the short list of things can totally derail a group’s efforts to go Agile.

But if we zoom in a little and talk about the team itself, there’s one role that has an a disproportionate ability to make or break Agile marketing: the Marketing Owner.

Modeled after software’s Product Owner role, this person has a number of crucial jobs:

• Apply their strategic perspective to refine the backlog so the team knows what to work on and when.
• Protect the team from external interruptions, separating legitimate emergencies and opportunities from pointless derailments.
• Interface with other teams, both inside and outside of marketing, to help the team effectively collaborate with others.
• Remove large scale impediments that are preventing the team from delivering value.
• Help ensure an ongoing commitment to the customer/audience within the team.

An outstanding Marketing Owner (MO for short) can be like rocket fuel for an Agile marketing team. Having a lackluster person in this role, however, can put an anchor around the team’s neck.

In this article we’re going to examine the characteristics that make an MO effective, some distressingly common problems that emerge around this role, and a few ways you can improve your MO’s impact in the short and long term.

The Effective Marketing Owner

One of my favorite descriptions of the Product Owner role comes from Lyssa Atkins’ book Coaching Agile Teams, and it can be very easily adapted to describe a really good MO as well:

• Business value driver: decisions and trade-offs, including when to stop projects, are made through considering which alternative gives the most business value now.
• Vision keeper: keep marketing’s long term strategic goals in the team’s sight, and direct them toward them each sprint.
• Daily decision maker: be fully present with the team to engage in conversation and make decisions as they arise so that the team can move forward unimpeded.
• Heat shield: protect the team from all outside noise and pressure, allowing them to focus on doing the right work at the right time.
• The one ultimately responsible: be completely invested in creating marketing work that serves the audience. The team’s work is not just another job assignment — it matters to the MO’s career — so they graciously accept the burden of being the final personal answerable for the business results of the work.

When it comes to how an MO spends their day, their main focus is steering the team in the right direction. They spend time liaising with external stakeholders, communicating with other team leaders, and running interference to keep their team members from being distracted. And, of course, they communicate continuously with the team itself.

Importantly, they don’t worry about how much stuff the team creates, they focus on how much value it’s delivering.

Some high functioning MOs can do all of this great stuff for multiple teams simultaneously, particularly if all of those teams are working on interrelated things and/or if the teams are on the smaller side (4-5 individual contributors per team). For the most part, however, each MO should be devoted to just one Agile marketing team, and each team should have just one MO.

Common Marketing Owner Fails

There are as many ways for the MO role to fail as there are Agile marketing teams, but these are three of the most common pitfalls that we encounter on the Agile marketing teams we work with.

Too Many Cooks in the Marketing Kitchen

By far the most common (and most devastating) MO fail is to have multiple MOs vying for control of a single backlog. This happens most often when teams/departments are still organizing around projects and project managers (PMs) have partially taken on the MO role.

It’s fine to maintain the PM role inside an Agile marketing department, particularly if projects are complex and flow across multiple teams/departments, but don’t try to shoe horn a typical PM into an MO role while still forcing them to manage projects.

Instead, pull a particularly high performing PM out of that role and transform them into a true MO.

The MO then acts as the one ultimately responsible for the team and its backlog (less kindly referred to as “the last wringable neck”), prioritizing the work of multiple PMs.

All Responsibility, No Authority

If you’re going to hold an MO accountable for the Agile marketing team delivering value, they need the authority to actually decide what that team is doing.

MOs can’t be great if other people (I’m looking at you, executives) continually swoop in and make unilateral demands of the team.

Without the ability to say “No,” even to their immediate bosses, MOs will be reduced to short order cooks taking orders from multiple stakeholders, and their teams will be no better off than they were before Agile came to marketing.

Solve this problem by getting someone fearless as your first MO, and really letting them push back on external demands. They still need to argue their case — they are, after all, responsible for the value coming out of their team — but they shouldn’t feel threatened by doing so.

Valuing Output Over Outcome

If an organization is still valuing customer-centric outcomes over volume-centric outputs, MO behavior will mirror this preference and their effectiveness will diminish.

MOs who are in output mode focus on things like velocity and the results of A/B tests when communicating with their stakeholders, rather than describing the customer benefits their team has been able to provide.

This issue may or may not be traceable back to the MO him/herself; it may be more systemic and rooted in organizational culture. If it is down to the MO, help them understand how to shift their focus from output to outcome, and how to reflect that within the Agile team’s backlog.

If the culture is to blame, the fix is going to be much bigger and longer term. Getting everyone closer to the customer, changing the focus of meetings, projects, and planning to center around customer needs, and even adjusting the language you use to talk about goals, will need to take place before you can expect to see behavior change at the MO level.

Making Your MOs More Awesome

If you’ve already got MOs in place or are considering adding them to your Agile marketing mix, here are a few keys to set them up for success:

• Identify one — and only one — Marketing Owner per team. Communicate their role to any and everyone who might be interfacing with that team, making expectations and responsibilities crystal clear.
• If they don’t have a solid Agile background, consider some basic training for new MOs. Traditional Product Owner training can help, as can AgileSherpas’ one-day class designed specifically for marketers in this role.
• Ensure team members understand the MO role and how they can interact with it most effectively. Make sure they don’t take on work from external requestors without funneling it through their MO.
• Give your MOs insight into strategic objectives so they can direct their teams accordingly.
• Make sure executives understand the MO role and are willing to take “No” for an answer from these people.

Being a Marketing Owner can be one of the most challenging and rewarding roles on an Agile marketing team, and it’s also a lynchpin that can make or break Agile in marketing.

So don’t undermine your MOs. Give them the training and education they need, then step back and watch their teams do amazing things.

The post Meet the Marketing Owner, Agile Marketing’s Make or Break Role appeared first on AgileSherpas.

Like a delicious, nutritious kale smoothie, Agile marketing is packed full of great benefits. And like a top-quality blender, formal Agile marketing training makes it even better.

But again like a top-quality blender, training can be expensive.

Are Agile marketing workshops, coaching, and training really worth the cost?

As a coach myself I’ll admit to being more than a little biased towards a resounding “Yes!” to that question, but I also wanted some solid evidence to back up my gut feeling.

So here you’ll find multiple data sets that make the case for Agile marketing training.

The argument I’ll lay out goes like this:

1. Agile coaches and training help Agile take hold faster, minimize its disruptions, and ensure it sticks around.
2. Agile has many quantifiable benefits for marketing teams (we’ll look at employee retention and the ROI of marketing campaigns here).
3. Because of its ability to deliver the benefits of Agile, Agile marketing training has very high ROI itself.

The short version: Agile marketing training pays for itself many times over.

There’s a lot of data there to unpack, but first let’s establish that Agile marketing training does in fact help teams and organizations succeed.

The Agile Marketing Education Gap

Our recent State of Agile Marketing Report found that 55% of Agile marketing teams enjoy an increased ability to change gears based on incoming feedback.

Another 52% gained better visibility into project status.

And 47% are producing a higher quality of work following their Agile transformation.

But if Agile marketing is so great, why have only 37% of marketing teams made the switch? It turns out that we’re struggling against an education deficit, with 38% of respondents citing a lack of training as the primary barrier to increased agility.

How Training Helps Agile Marketing Teams

According to marketing teams who have already transitioned to Agile, education played a key role in their success.

We asked them to identify the tools that were most valuable during their adoption of Agile, and training was a recurring theme:

• Online training and webinars: 44%
• External classes or workshops: 33%
• External Agile consultants or trainers: 26%
• Company-provided training program: 25%
• Internal Agile coaches: 23%

In addition, the most recent VersionOne State of Agile Report asked thousands of agilists what was helping them scale Agile, and 53% said internal coaches were the most helpful. Of those facing challenges with scaling, 35% pointed to insufficient training and education as the cause.

So it’s clear that Agile coaches and training help Agile work, but is it that a good enough reason to invest your hard-won budget?

Time to move on to part two of our argument, that Agile has real, quantifiable benefits for marketing teams.

The High Cost of Employee Turnover

According to a paper from the Center for American Progress, which compiled data from 11 research papers published over a 15-year period, when a highly skilled employee leaves it costs a company 213% of that person’s yearly salary.

So if we lose a digital marketing associate who makes $50k per year, it costs us $106,500.

The departure of a more senior employee who makes $85k incurs a cost of $181,050.

Those numbers, of course, don’t include everything a long-time employee takes with them inside their head. Institutional knowledge and an understanding of the customer are lost too, though it’s harder to put a firm dollar amount on those.

The bottom line is that losing people is expensive, and it’s beneficial to keep them around.

Agile Marketing and Employee Satisfaction

Agile marketing significantly increases employee satisfaction, according to both our own State of Agile Marketing Report and independent results from Agile marketing teams.

First off, 35% of Agile respondents in our study reported improved team morale as a benefit of going Agile. And when we compare how happy marketers are with work management, Agile teams are far more likely to say their process works well:

Second, marketing teams who regularly measure their employee satisfaction and engagement see major gains in these areas following Agile adoption. CA Technologies, for example, surveyed their marketers before and after Agile took hold and reported the following outstanding results:

• Engagement increased 6 points
• Feeling “Proud to work for CA” increased 11 points
• Marketers were more likely to “Recommend CA as a great place to work” by 31 points
• They felt more “Appropriately involved in decisions affecting their work” by 11 points
• Feeling “Valued as an employee” was up 20 points

Quantifying the Impact of Agile Marketing

Going back to our earlier examples, let’s say a traditional marketing team typically loses two employees per year, and that together their salaries average $70,000. That means the cost of that turnover is 213% of $70,000, or $149,100.

If investing just $10,000 in Agile marketing training could keep one of those employees from leaving, it would reduce that impact by half, netting the department a savings of $64,550 (half of the $149,100 minus the $10,000 investment).

A bigger investment of $50,000 might eliminate turnover altogether, which would end up having a net positive impact of $99,100 even after we take out the cost of the training.

Agile Marketing and ROI

Now that we’ve started talking numbers, let’s investigate the potential impact Agile marketing can have on the measurable ROI of marketing work.

For our purposes here we’re going to use ROI as a pretty generic term. Yours might come in the form of new accounts if you’re marketing a SaaS product, or maybe it’s measured in actual sales if you’re in a B2C environment.

The point is whatever ROI looks like in your marketing department, it’s almost certainly going to go up following an Agile transformation, and here’s why.

How Agile Makes Marketing Worth More

Whether they’re using Scrum, Kanban, or some hybrid of the two, most Agile marketing teams end up being able to release marketing work about every two weeks, so we’re going to use that as our benchmark.

We’ll be generous and assume that pre-Agile a team was releasing a campaign every two months (though some of us are nowhere near that fast).

If we go from releasing every two months to every two weeks, we’re now delivering 26 campaigns each year instead of just six. That’s an increase in frequency of over 400%, which means we should see a corresponding increase in the annual ROI for marketing.*

So if in our pre-Agile days we got 200 MQLs out of each campaign, and we were releasing six campaigns per year, we’d deliver about 1,200 MQLs annually.

Post-Agile the same team is able to release 26 campaigns of comparable size, each of which brings in 200 MQLs. So they’re now getting 5,200 MQLs each year with no increase in budget or headcount.

That’s 4,000 additional MQLs EVERY YEAR, all for the price of some Agile marketing training.

The Value of Agile Iteration

Of course, Agile marketing isn’t just about speed. Remember that 47% of Agile marketing teams tell us that they’re getting higher quality work in their post-Agile reality.

One of the main reasons that happens is through the power of iteration.

Each time an Agile team releases work, they pause to inspect, adapt, and improve both their process and the work it produces. That means each campaign is a little better than the one before it.

Let’s go back to our two-week campaign (the one that took us two months before Agile marketing). Without any iterative improvement each campaign produces 200 MQLs.

Now let’s imagine that our inspect and adapt cycle allows us to gain a very modest 2.5% increase in ROI each time we release. Our MQL count would look something like this:

Agile Campaign 1 = 200 MQLs
Agile Campaign 2 = 205
Agile Campaign 3 = 210
Agile Campaign 4 = 215
Agile Campaign 5 = 220
Agile Campaign 6 = 225
Agile Campaign 7 = 231
Agile Campaign 8 = 237
Agile Campaign 9 = 243
Agile Campaign 10 = 249

You get the idea.

This increase would continue with each Agile campaign, and we’re being pretty conservative with our iterative improvement estimate. It’s likely that our Agile process would uncover opportunities for much larger gains by putting campaigns in front of our audience more frequently.

Agile Value in Real Dollars

For our final step, let’s see if we can get to real dollars.

For those in the B2C world, we could swap out MQLs for actual sales. For the sake of round numbers, let’s imagine our average campaign brings in $10,000 in new sales.

Using the six to 26 campaign increase, that’s 20 additional campaigns that bring in an additional $200,000 in revenue. Um…yes, please.

For our B2B friends, you’d need to know the average dollar value of an MQL for this last bit to work, but let’s assume that we do.

Let’s stay conservative and say our MQL’s average value is $250. Our Agile marketing team is getting 4,000 more MQLs per year thanks to their increase in speed, which delivers $1,000,000 in revenue.

Yup. A million dollars. Makes that training class and coaching seem like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it?

Agile Marketing Training and Reality

I’ve been a digital marketer for fourteen years, so I fully understand that there are a lot of moving parts in a marketing team that can put a dent in some of these raw numbers.

But research from outside the Agile world backs it up. Dr. Laurie Bassi, a human capital analysis specialist, found that companies get a 300% return on their investment into training and development. They saw 218% higher income per employee, as well as a 24% higher profit margin.

So even if your internal complications decrease some of the positive impacts outlined above, there’s no denying that Agile marketing training is worth the time and investment.

If you’re looking for options, we’d love to chat. You can also check out our workshop descriptions.

* There are certainly arguments against releasing more and more campaigns to the same audience, and evidence that there would be some diminishing return on each campaign if you oversaturate a market. But those complexities are beyond our scope for today.

A successful Agile marketing team has two parts: the people on the team, and the formal ways the interact with each other. In other words, Agile marketing roles and ceremonies.

Team structure and meetings are often overlooked during process optimization, but fine-tuning them both (and making sure they work well together) can be the key to creating a high performing team.

There can be no optimization without understanding, so here we’re going to dive into three things:

1. Who is on an Agile marketing team.
2. How they contribute to the team’s success.
3. The various meetings that help them do it.

Agile Marketing Roles

There are three kinds of roles on an Agile marketing team that we need to cover.

First, and most importantly, we need to understand the Agile marketing roles. Who are the actual members of the team, what are their responsibilities, and how do we set both individuals and the team up for success?

The second component of an Agile team is its leadership, which doesn’t work like traditional leadership AT ALL.

Agile leadership emphasizes a servant mindset, guiding rather than commanding, and tapping into the team’s abilities to find solutions.

Finally, we have Agile coaches. These are certainly unique to Agile teams; they’re a little analogous to traditional marketing consultants, but the expectations for their relationship with the team are quite different.

Flat Teams & Cross-Functionality

A commonly held ideal in Agile software development is that teams should be totally flat and completely cross-functional. This means all team members sit at the same place in the org chart and they all have the necessary skills to help with any project the team might be working on.

The former is often feasible, while the latter is pretty close to impossible.

In fact, Agile thought leaders like Mike Cohn have begun to strenuously argue against the idea of pure cross functionality.

He asserts that:

“specialists can exist on high-performing agile teams. But, it is the multi-skilled team members who allow that to be possible…These individuals can smooth out the workload when a team needs to do more or less of a particular type of work in an iteration.”

Agile marketing teams can strive for this kind of diversity on their teams, allowing specialists to shine while relying on multi-skilled team members to keep things flowing. (Learn more about the various stages of cross-functionality here.)

When it comes to creating flat teams, it’s usually a matter of changing titles rather than trying to change skill sets. This may be easier, or it may be exponentially more difficult depending on what your current org chart looks like.

You can see that there’s really only one leader, whose role we’ll go into more in the next section.

This structure can work well in smaller departments, but once you get past 10 or 12 team members you will need some secondary layer of leadership.

Here each Squad has a leader who makes sure they’re doing the right work at the right time, but there are also Chapter leads. Chapters are groups of people doing the same kind of work, e.g. content marketing or demand generation.

A Chapter lead conducts the reviews for all the Chapter members and helps them continue to advance their skills; these leads act much more like a traditional manager, except they don’t tell their reports what to do from day to day.

There’s no single solution that delivers flat cross functionality in every Agile marketing team. Be prepared to iterate and adjust until you find the right configuration for you.

Agile Marketing Leadership

The team, while central to all sorts of agility, isn’t the only success factor.

I’ve coached teams that were swimming against the current of culture on their own, unsupported by leadership. The difference between those teams and the ones who enjoy unwavering commitment from their leaders is staggering.

Leaders can make or break an Agile marketing team.

Like cross functionality, Agile leadership comes in many flavors. Some of the most common are:

• Agile Team Lead (ATL): This term originated with Gil Broza, who gives the role a single purpose: to help the team meet its objectives. This includes helping them get stuff done as well as supporting the squishy, uncertain, human side of Agile.
• Marketing Owner: Analogous to the Product Owner role from Scrum, this type of leader acts as the liaison between the marketing team and stakeholders outside the team. They talk with sales, executives, product development, etc. to make sure marketing is doing the right work at the right time, but they also protect the team from unnecessary interruptions.
• Agile Marketing Director/Manager/VP: In the Agile version of these roles the leaders maintain their traditional strategic position, but they take on more stewardship of the team. They become a facilitator and coach, not a task master. They share responsibility for the team’s success or failure rather than just evaluating the team’s performance.

Any and all of these leadership positions can be difficult for marketers to adopt. Some people will take to them easily, while others will struggle for months.

Explicitly changing titles, such as going from Marketing Director to Agile Marketing Director or Marketing Owner, can help create a clear point of departure from the old ways of leading.

Owning the Agile Marketing Process

There’s one other kind of leadership that’s unique to Agile marketing teams, and that’s the process owner. You’re probably most familiar with the Scrum version, known as the Scrum Master.

Kanban has a similar role sometimes called the Flow Master, and you could even have an Agile Team Leader (ATL) who’s only responsible for the team’s process.

Giving someone a neutral title like ATL can help free them and the team from feeling bound to a particular methodology, so if you don’t have someone shepherding the process now, you might consider going this route.

Do You Need an Agile Coach?

Many marketers are unfamiliar with the Agile coach role, so I wanted to take a quick moment to introduce it.

Coaches can be internal, meaning they’re an employee on the company’s payroll, or external, meaning they come from outside the organization. Both can be immensely helpful to an Agile team, particularly during challenging stages of their evolution.

Agile coaches are trained in facilitation, process optimization, team dynamics, the Agile mindset, and more. They bring an objective perspective to the team and can be integral in unblocking the team and helping them move towards high performance.

Some things an Agile coach can help with:

• Facilitating a retrospective meeting to uncover hidden causes of dysfunction.
• Reviewing workflow visualizations and providing recommendations for improvement.
• Onboarding new team members into the Agile process.
• Negotiating working agreements with non-Agile departments.
• Transitioning leaders from traditional to Agile ways of working.
• Answering questions and supporting the team during its transitions.
• Attending daily standup meetings to ensure they’re meeting the team’s needs.

We offer coaching here at AgileSherpas that’s customized for marketing teams, so feel free to get in touch if you want to learn more about how a coach might be able to help you.

Agile Marketing Meetings

Now that we’ve covered who’s on the Agile marketing team, let’s talk about how those people work together.

Agile meetings, also sometimes referred to as ceremonies, should always keep the team moving forward. If you find yourself leaving meetings feeling confused, undirected, or frustrated, they’re probably not doing their job.

Daily Standup

Daily Standup (also known as Daily Scrum) should happen every day and last only 15 minutes.

The most common misstep here is to decrease its frequency, meaning you meet only a few times per week instead of every day.

This almost inevitably increases the length of the meeting because you have more to talk about, and it can also slow down your process. Instead of a maximum of 24 hours between team communication, you now have 48 or even 72 hours going by.

Opportunities to help blocked teammates are lost, solutions that could help everyone stay hidden, and the team is less connected to one another.

If you’re getting bored with Standup and finding it less than useful, consider changing up the format. We explored a couple different options in this article.

Agile Marketing Planning

Yes, Agile marketing teams plan. We don’t just get up every morning and chase after the latest shiny object that catches our fancy.

In fact, since we release and iterate often, we need to plan more than most teams.

Scrum teams conduct a planning session at the start of every Sprint, and Kanban teams will be planning as needed (usually on a 2-3 week cycle).

The product of any successful planning meeting should be a backlog of sufficient detail for the team to work on it with continuously and with confidence until the next planning meeting takes place.

You’ll be most likely to get that outcome if you have the right decision makers in the room.

Postponing planning until you get sign off from executives or stakeholders is hugely wasteful, and will result in delays and rework that severely limit the team’s agility.

Finally, if you have more than one team inside your Agile marketing department, you’ll need to regularly get everyone (yes, everyone) in a room together to talk about how everyone’s plans intersect.

What are the dependencies between teams? Are there shared resources that need to be allocated? Any big projects coming up that might impact people’s availability? All this and more should come out in these larger planning meetings.

A quarterly schedule for these Agile planning sessions tends to work well, but you could do them monthly if your plans change frequently.

Backlog Refinement

While the final outcome of a good planning session is an appropriately detailed backlog, you may need to have a separate meeting when you review the backlog from a different perspective.

If you find some backlog items hanging out for months without being worked on, or if your backlog just keeps getting bigger, a dedicated backlog refinement meeting is in order.

This ceremony doesn’t involve exploration of projects or prioritization. It’s simply a stay or go vote for each item in the backlog.

Retrospective

Just like every kind of team needs to plan, any and all Agile teams need to regularly inspect and adapt their Agile process. This moment is known as the Retrospective Meeting, and it should never, ever be skipped.

Typical discussion formats include:

• Stop/Start/Continue: What should we as a team stop doing, start doing, and continue doing?
• Liked/Lacked/Learned/Longed For: Four categories for people to sort their feedback on the most recent round of work.

Those are just to get you started though. There are dozens of different ways to structure a Retro, so don’t get stuck in a rut and stop improving your process.

Learn more about this amazing meeting and how to get the most out of it in this article.

Helping Agile Roles and Meetings Work in Harmony

Just like you keep optimizing your board or adjusting your team’s workspace, make the roles and meetings on your Agile marketing team part of its continuous improvement efforts.

Don’t succumb to the status quo in either case; help each role and every meeting matter, and your team will reward you with ever greater performance.

The post Agile Marketing Roles & Meetings appeared first on AgileSherpas.

I often run a bottleneck workshop with Agile marketing teams where each group is given the goal of folding as many origami hats and boats as possible.

At the beginning of the exercise each person has a single set of tasks they can perform. For example, one person does one kind of fold and then passes it off to the next person, who can only do the second fold, and so on.

A single team member can decorate the final products, and only one team member can review the “products” for quality.

When the time comes to select process improvements, nearly everybody wants to know how they can up-skill their team members.

It’s immediately clear that such rigid specialization doesn’t serve the needs of the teams.

This kind of situation, where the flow of work is painfully slow as it passes from one specialist to another, is why cross functionality is a core value of Agile (and is particularly important on Agile marketing teams).

Benefits of Cross Functional Agile Marketing Teams

When team members have the ability to work on different parts of the team’s projects, we gain so much:

• Predictability: Our delivery dates aren’t dependent on when our sole copywriter will have time to write things. Several people can provide copy, so we can more confidently predict workflow.
• Sustainable pace: We don’t have a few people working like crazy to keep up, while others sit around waiting for new work to come in. Work is spread out more equitably, keeping everyone working at a reasonable clip that they can sustain indefinitely.
• Early and continuous delivery of valuable campaigns: When most team members can work on most projects, they’re more likely to release things often.
• Simplicity: One of my favorite agile principles is that it’s essential to maximize the amount of work NOT done. Cross functional teams can communicate about what’s really important, what can be reused, and what just doesn’t work, so they eliminate pointless projects.

So cross functionality is great, but it’s not always the reality for marketing teams, especially early on during an agile adoption.

Let’s take a look at three different phases of cross functionality, how to handle workflow issues during each one, and how to steadily increase this valuable characteristic in your Agile marketing teams.

Level 1: Cross Functional Marketing Department

Having a cross functional department simply means that somewhere in marketing you’ve got people who can do everything that you need to release marketing work. In other words, you don’t rely on agencies, freelancers, or any other resources outside the department.

This early version of cross functionality may already exist in your marketing team or department, or it may require some adjustment as you bring work in house.

(See the Chemmart case study for an example of how Agile helped this company save millions by creating an in-house agency.)

While a cross functional department is good, it usually still includes functional silos, meaning teams within the department are exclusively responsible for specific kinds of work. This means projects or campaigns need to pass from one group to another to another before they can be released.

And these handoffs, in turn, mean that the whole department will be constrained by a single bottleneck.

Level One Bottlenecks

The bottlenecks in a cross functional marketing department tend to be with a group that touches nearly every project or campaign, such as design or copywriting.

To be clear, bottlenecks are not a bad thing.

According to the Theory of Constraints every single system has one.

What Agile marketing teams need to do is figure out where their bottleneck is and then address it carefully.

How to deal with a bottleneck in a cross functional department:

Step 1: Be sure you know where the bottleneck REALLY is.
This is key to any bottleneck-related work, because taking action elsewhere in the system can make things worse for bottleneck resources. Bottlenecks are busy all the time, work piles up in front of them, and people downstream from them (those who receive work from them) are idle some of the time.

Step 2: Choose options that affect only the bottleneck.
These include ensuring they’re always working on the highest value work, limiting their task switching, taking away non-value adding work, and eliminating wasted effort.

Basically, make sure they have everything they need and don’t bother them with extra stuff.

When dealing with a department-wide bottleneck you don’t want to mess with too much of the system, so simple solutions focused only on the bottleneck are your best bet. In the Theory of Constraints this is known as exploiting the bottleneck.

Important note: Making the bottleneck work longer is not the answer. Throwing more people or budget at this part of the process is not the answer either, at least not until you’ve taken other steps to make the bottleneck(s) work better.

Getting to the Next Level

Once your bottlenecks are functioning more efficiently, the department will be able to more accurately predict delivery of work (assuming interruptions can be managed effectively).

You’ll be able to make data-driven assessments about approximate delivery time, instead of crossing your fingers that the bottleneck will get your project done before your deadline.

As you increase in agility and cross functionality, it will become increasingly important for the entire department to understand strategic goals and objectives so groups aren’t working at cross purposes.

Leadership, whether functional Agile team leads or traditional marketing directors, needs to clearly and frequently communicate priorities.

You should also begin experimenting with Agile pilot teams, which are made up of members from multiple silos or groups. During these early days you’re essentially building smaller, cross functional teams one by one.

Ideally they are stable and permanent, because you want to keep incrementally building more of these groups so you can eventually become a department made up entirely of cross functional Agile marketing teams.

Level 2: Cross Functional Agile Marketing Teams

At his level we have multiple teams that can complete projects independently. Each group has the skills needed to get valuable work done, not just the department as a whole.

Team-based cross functionality allows teams to focus on audience segments, phases of customer journey, or internal business units, so they can become true subject matter experts in that area. They deliver targeted, consistent experiences for customers.

Once again, this requires clear and constant communication between teams and strong leadership to ensure teams are pulling in same strategic, long-term direction. A great example of how this works is the Spotify model.

Here you can see there are cross functional squads led by a Product Owner (in Agile marketing we often call these Marketing Owners). Chapters extend across Squads and encompass people with similar responsibilities. So all digital marketing specialists might be in a Chapter, which is led and evaluated by a Chapter Lead.

All those people are part of the same Tribe, which includes multiple Squads who are all working towards similar objectives. Each Tribe has a leader (and sometimes an Agile coach) who ensures its members are in line with organizational objectives and larger marketing strategies.

In this kind of system bottlenecks tend to be with a single individual in a team or Chapter, such as a copywriter, designer, or marketing automation expert.

We also sometimes see people on these kinds of teams become bored or underused if work isn’t well-planned and they run out of things to do.

Some teams try to address this issue by having low-frequency resources sit on several teams, but this may create more problems than it solves if teams don’t coordinate their planning.

If everyone is planning video-heavy projects next month and there’s only one video marketer who sits on three teams, things are going to get messy.

Level Two Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks in these kinds of systems are sometimes easier to tackle because they impact fewer people.

In a cross functional department each and every team might be dependent on one bottleneck, but when we get to cross functional teams or Chapters, each bottleneck probably only impacts a single team.

How to deal with bottlenecks on cross functional teams:

Step 1: Once again, be sure you know where the bottleneck REALLY is. If, for instance, you think it’s copywriting that’s holding you up but it was really legal review slowing them down, your tactics for fixing the copywriting bottleneck might actually bog down the system.

Step 2: Exploit the bottleneck first. Take steps similar to what you’d do with a cross functional department, namely ensuring the bottleneck doesn’t work on low-value tasks and has everything they need to work effectively. Only once you’ve exhausted these kinds of actions should you move to Step 3.

Step 3: Subordinate the team to the bottleneck. In smaller teams it may be more feasible to let another resource take over some of the bottleneck’s work, have the team work at the bottleneck’s pace, and/or have non-bottleneck resources spend downtime supporting the bottleneck. In Theory of Constraints lingo, you’re subordinating everything else to the constraint.

I also recommend using something like the Guild model among cross functional teams to ensure bottlenecks (and all team members, for that matter) are always improving their skills, finding ways to optimize their workflow, etc.

Getting to the Next Level

Once you have cross functional teams, your next move will be to expand the skills of the people on those teams so they can assist in a wider variety of work.

No need to wait for a single editor to review every line of copy before it’s published if three different people are trained in editorial guidelines and review protocols.

The steps to get here sound simple: cross train team members and encourage pairing (having two marketers work on a single task/project together). But finding time and space to make them happen can be challenging, to say the least.

Level 3: Cross Functional Teams Made Up of Cross Skilled Marketers

Agile marketing departments who achieve this level don’t get here by accident. They have a clearly defined roadmap for breaking down silos and up-skilling team members.

They know which people want to learn which skills, and which skills would be useful for them to have. For instance, maybe a PPC specialist would benefit from learning landing page design. They can get better insight to paid campaign performance, take work off the designers, and pitch in with work that requires landing pages but isn’t directly PPC-related.

Training that same specialist in event planning, on the other hand, is less likely to result in such useful collaboration.

Of course, no team will ever be completely and totally cross functional. What we’re after are t-shaped marketers, or generalizing specialists.

I like the way David Green describes generalizing specialists over on DZone:

“with generalizing specialists, you get the best of both worlds: the experience of specialists in their area with the flexibility and breadth of ideas that come from the whole team being able to work on whatever is required. When the entire team can swarm on any area, you have a very flexible team”

Why We Want Cross Functionality

Our ultimate goal is to have a team that’s able to complete a project start to finish, with many people able to jump in and help drive tasks and/or projects towards completion.

You know you’re on the right track when your velocity and/or throughput really starts improving, team members aren’t swinging wildly between busy and bored, and both individual teams and the department as a whole are running at a sustainable pace.

This situation allows Agile marketing teams to get more done, do their best, most creative work, and predictably deliver campaigns.

Cross functionality, whether in a department, team, or individual, may be difficult to achieve, but the results are well worth it.

The theory of Agile marketing sounds great. I mean, of course we all want to be more nimble and responsive; nobody is standing in line to be slower and less adaptive to change.

But the same questions continually come up: if this is so great, where are the Agile marketing examples? Where can I find a good Agile marketing case study?

It turns out they’re scattered all over this thing call “the internet.” Who knew?

For the past several years teams have quietly been accumulating success stories and sharing them in various ways, some more vocally than others.

This page, then, will be our ever-evolving attempt to collect those stories in an easy-to-consume format.

You’ll find case studies from tech and software companies, banks, universities, and more. Hopefully one or more will spark an idea to get you started, or provide the proof you need to convince your boss or team that Agile is right for you.

If you’re on an Agile marketing team that isn’t represented here, please drop our editor an email (andrea AT AgileSherpas DOT com) so we can share your story!

(Or, if you wish you could join these illustrious Agile marketing examples, contact us to set up your own training program.)

Agile Marketing Case Studies by Company Name:

Alberta Motor Association
Aussie bank
CA Technologies
Chemmart
Deakin University
Dell
General Mills
IBM
ING
Mozilla
Northern Arizona University
Santander Bank
SEMRush
SiteStrategics
Sleeknote
Sunlife Financial

Agile Marketing Examples

Company: SEMRush

Category: Technology/Software
Spokesperson: Olga Adrinko, Head of Global Marketing
Case study summary: SEMRush’s marketing department strives to be Agile at all levels. They’ve gotten as close to a purely flat structure as they can, which has allowed them to fully empower their various teams. According to Olga’s presentation, leadership clearly identifies what needs to be done, but the team gets total control over how to do it. To her, she’s like a soccer/football coach who sees the field and understands the opponent, but she’s not the one kicking the ball.

This doesn’t, however, lead to chaos. Their Scrum approach and its daily standup meetings ensure people are staying on track, and the trust placed in the teams make them both highly creative and deeply invested in their work.

Scrum-style sprints also allow the marketing teams to experiment rapidly, testing and learning on an ongoing basis. These small scale tests have paid off in a big way, netting SEMRush 500,000 users in 8 months.

Olga acknowledges that there are challenges too, particularly when it comes to hiring and firing. A mistaken hire, for instance, can take a big toll on the team if they don’t pull their weight. It’s also up to the teams to fire members who aren’t contributing.

Most exciting takeaways: Thanks to Agile marketing, year over year average revenue growth from top 10 new markets was greater than 90%, and SEMRush gained 500,000 users in just 8 months.

Source: Brighton SEO

Company: Northern Arizona University

Category: University
Spokesperson: Ann Marie deWees, Director of Strategic Marketing
Case study summary: This scrappy four-person team once followed traditional marketing practices, creating an annual budget, creating goals, and designing highly specific projects. With the help of freelancers and agencies, they’d produce around 50 pieces of marketing collateral a year. Then, digital happened.

Despite multiple re-orgs, they couldn’t keep up with client needs and expectations. Then deWees discovered Agile marketing. Instead of individuals taking on an entire project themselves, they now structure work in 2-week Sprints.

They joined forces with IT to create a single in-house design group for support, and phased out their reliance on external contractors. Tara Cobourn, marketing manager, says this new approach allows them to break projects down into smaller pieces, which are in turn given to team members based on skills and availability. Now they can get an entire project done in two weeks instead of waiting months for outsourced work to come back, get edited, get revised, and finally get released.

Now that budget isn’t going to contractors, they’ve been able to hire more writers and designers, increasing the team’s agility even further.

Most exciting takeaways:

• In their first year as an Agile team, content production increased 400% (50 pieces to 200 pieces)
• Sprint tasks have nearly 95% completion rate
• 20% cost savings have been realized
• Client satisfaction rating increased by over 30% in six months

Source: UniversityBusiness.com

Company: SiteStrategics – SEO firm in Indianapolis, IN

Category: Agency
Spokesperson: Jason Fletcher
Case study summary: Tired of seeing process get in the way of productivity, this SEO agency has recently adopted Agile to manage their work. They use 2-week sprints to constantly iterate on campaigns and adjust their spend on various channels.

They also use Sprint planning to keep a handle on their employees’ availability, which means they can give clients a much more accurate estimation of when work will be done. And when a Sprint is over, “all we have to do is walk back through the Agile Sprint to show them the completed list of all the items promised and paid for.”

Most exciting takeaway: A balance between keeping employees busy and doing high quality work that keeps both clients and employees happy.

Source: SiteStrategics.com

Company: Mozilla

Category: Software/Technology
Spokesperson: Chad Weiner, Senior Director of Marketing Operations
Case study summary: In the true spirit of Agile, Chad and his 100-person team are in the midst of a long-term experiment to test and validate the application of Agile to their marketing practice. Chad has been documenting the journey via a series of posts on Medium, which I strongly recommend reading if you’re looking at a large, enterprise-level Agile transformation.

Like many enterprise teams, they struggled with silos, a deluge of incoming requests, and no objective means of prioritizing their work. Team members tended to hoard information as a means of amassing power, which often negatively affected quality.

This led to what Chad calls Metaprinciple #1: Design the organization to improve the frequency and quality of communication inside the marketing organization.

They were also struggling with the traditional practice of supporting two huge launches each year. In one post Chad recalls that they were “effectively spending twelve months on two big bets. And the cycles were grueling.”

To counteract this problem, they created durable teams of 5-7 people with as many generalists as possible. This style has worked well, but it wasn’t perfect out of the gate. It helped to organize teams based on core KPIs, i.e. improving Firefox retention rates, or important channels, i.e. email. Hiring or growing t-shaped marketers also helps.

They’ve also been employing user stories, a sometimes controversial but still crucial piece of an effective Agile implementation.

Most exciting takeaway: Executive support, a bought-in team, and an educated leader are all key components of a productive Agile marketing experiment.

Sources: Chad’s series of posts on Medium

Company: Deakin University

Spokesperson: Trisca Scott-Branagan, Executive Director of Marketing for the education institution
Case study summary: It wasn’t the lure of Agile that brought Trisca and Deakin to Agile. Instead it was the perfect storm of deadlines. The team had to deliver four programs within a few days of each other, and their existing processes just couldn’t handle it. They made some initial changes, bringing together project-based teams and “chunking down” activities to hit their deadlines.

Then, it was time to embed the Agile way of working across the whole Deakin marketing division. Now all the staff have been trained, and they’re applying Agile to daily tasks as well as project work.

Most exciting takeaways: Increased productivity through staff empowerment, reduced meetings and email, and greater real-time communication

Source: CMO.co.au

Company: Dell

Spokesperson: Greg Davoll, Senior Director of Marketing and Product GM

Case study summary: With nearly 200 people in Dell Software Marketing worldwide, Greg had a lot of ground to cover: SEO, lead generation, channel, web, field marketing, channel marketing, etc. And everybody was doing things a little differently across product lines and portfolios, leading to “disconnect points and gaps” and processes that weren’t repeatable.

To counteract these issues, they reorganized into an Agile marketing formation and combined it with an inbound marketing approach. Over about 7 months they created a worldwide team across all product lines that’s organized into an Agile formation that operates on one-month Sprints.

Most exciting takeaway: Size and complexity aren’t obstacles if the problem is big enough and leadership is committed.

Source: ClearPivot.com

Company: General Mills

Spokesperson: Chris Campbell, Director of Marketing and Sales Solutions
Case study summary: General Mills has founded their Agility in the right place: with their customer and their needs. They’ve then taken three steps to create Agility:

1. Embrace mobile as the device of choice.
2. Build a standard set of components that can be deployed across any site.
3. Invest in “always on” teams.

These teams include marketing, agency, and tech resources that work as a single unit to ensure the customer gets the best possible experience.

Most importantly, everything is founded on hiring amazing people and removing any barriers preventing them from delivering a world-class customer experience.

Most exciting takeaway: Agile is rooted in a desire to deliver for the customer. This holds true for great marketing as well as great software.

Source: ChiefMarTec.com

Company: Santander

Category: Financial
Spokesperson: Keith Moore, Chief Marketing Officer

Case study summary: The traditional marketing cycle of long booking times and lengthy review cycles with agencies wasn’t working for Santander anymore. In their place they adopted a more Agile approach, releasing small, low-risk campaigns in two-week Sprints. Those that were successful got more budget and more attention. Unsuccessful experiments were abandoned.

Now that it’s comfortable experimenting, Santander has expanded its Agile approach. Recent results of an experiment combining its first party CRM data and Facebook data were “staggering,” and the application of those learnings to search, social, and programmatic activity is already delivering amazing results (see takeaways below).

Most exciting takeaways: Their new approach to iterative experiments is delivering measurable results:

• Loyalty increased 12%
• NPS (Net Promoter Score) at its highest in 17 years
• Account satisfaction increased 10%
• Highest ever positive sentiment at 90%

Sources:
MarketingWeek

Digiday

Company: Sleeknote

Category: Software/Technology
Spokesperson: Sam Thomas Davies, Content Marketing Manager
Case study summary: On the surface, Sam and his team were doing everything right. Shipping content, marketing their product, building links, and generally doing solid marketing. But they knew they weren’t being as efficient as they could be.

So, they turned to Agile marketing and Scrum. They followed four steps:

1. Choose an application
2. Plan your Sprint
3. Add Sprints to your chosen application
4. Decide on meeting frequency

(Truth be told this sounds more like Scrumban to me…but it’s really a to-may-to to-mah-to situation.)

Sam also gives a detailed walkthrough of their tool of choice, Favro, if you’re looking for guidance on tool selection and implementation.

Most exciting takeaway: “It’s not about getting things done; it’s about getting the right things done and feeling productive rather than busy.”

Source: Sleeknote.com

Company: Alberta Motor Association

Category: Insurance
Spokesperson: Carole Stevenson-Roy
Case study summary: The AMA leadership was looking for a way to kickstart innovation and creativity in their marketing, and so they turned to Agile during a 2017 reorg. With about 40 people spread across multiple interdependent teams, they struggled with dependencies, handoffs, and achieving transparency into their process.

AgileSherpas joined them and helped all the teams redesign their kanban boards, resize the cards being used, and improve their communication across teams (among many other things). We also transitioned the creative services team to a more flow-based Agile approach to try and free them from some of the stress being caused by overloaded sprints.

One of my favorite things we tried with the AMA teams was the creation of Pen column on their boards. This is where all work lives that’s currently outside of the team’s control, and it helps them maintain visibility into its status without the need to stop all work while they’re waiting for feedback.

Most exciting takeaway: The Pen can help mitigate a difficult review process.

Source: Client Engagement

Company: Sunlife Financial

Category: Banking/Financial
Spokesperson: Dave Noyle
Case study summary: Dave and the rest of the marketing team at Sunlife saw the value in Agile marketing, but knew they couldn’t put everything on hold to undergo a huge transformation. Instead they implemented one of the smartest pilot programs I’ve seen, creating a single cross-functional team to work on a finite project as a test case for using Agile.

When that project succeeded they added another Agile team, and then another, incrementally expanding their agility further and further into the department. They’re still early in the process, but Dave (who led the original pilot) and his colleagues have gotten rave reviews from their internal partners. Expect to hear great things from these teams in the near future!

Most exciting takeaway: Pilot teams and projects are excellent proving grounds for Agile marketing’s viability.

Source: Client engagement. See more details in these slides.

Company: ING Netherlands

Category: Banking/Financial
Spokesperson: Nick Jue, CEO
Case study summary: Harried by fintech startups, Nick felt that ING was starting to become an elephant trying to race against greyhounds. He believed it was time for a big change, so he visited some of the world’s most innovative brands: Google, Netflix, Zappos, Spotify, etc. He and his executives then launched 5-6 pilot teams to prove the Agile approach while they simultaneously drew up a whole new structure for the 2,500 employees at the Netherlands headquarters. They modeled themselves on Spotify, creating Squads, Tribes, and Chapters (as illustrated in the video below).

Another big company proving that size isn’t an impediment to Agility, ING is seeing quicker time to market, increased employee engagement, reduced impediments and handoffs, and an improved client experience, even though they’re still early in their transformation.

Most exciting takeaway: The Spotify model can be modified to work outside of software development.

Sources:
BCG.com
McKinsey.com
Frismakers.com
YouTube

Company: Aussie

Category: Banking/Financial
Spokesperson: Richard Burns, general manager of customer experience and technology
Case study summary: This mortgage broker went Agile in a big way, using its $25 million brand relaunch in 2016 to test the approach in its marketing organization. A major catalyst for the transformation was the move to new premises, which were designed to facilitate collaboration within and between all departments.

Equally key was the “comprehensive agile training program” taken by both executive team members and the staff. This provided a solid understanding of the “why” behind the switch as well as the information needed to make it successful.

After 18 months of transformative effort, Aussie now uses 2-week Sprints and combines physical boards with digital project management tools. Each team designs their own board and optimizes their process from Sprint to Sprint, helped along by Scrum masters.

Most exciting takeaway: Building a strong team and culture that’s finally focused on the right priorities.

Source: SimpleHQ

Company: Chemmart

Category: Healthcare/pharmacy
Spokesperson: Darren Gunton, national marketing manager
Case study summary: Darren originally met Agile while working at a national gaming company. So when he joined Chemmart he decided to roll out this alternative process there. His first objective was to tear down silos and reduce hierarchy while also increasing customer focus.

Their marketing activity centers around themed monthly loyalty campaigns designed to drive sales in franchisee-operated pharmacies, as well as loyalty marketing programs that refresh every two weeks. This set up made them an excellent candidate for Scrumban, where they combined two-week sprints with the use of a Kanban board and pull-based work.

Testing and experimentation have become part of the team’s DNA, with A/B tests running constantly and online feedback from customers driving decision making. Chemmart has not, however, sacrificed quality for speed. Their catalogues continue to win awards, and they give each little campaign as much love as they once devoted to their annual big bang campaigns.

Most exciting takeaway: Turnaround times reduced from 2 months to 2 hours, customer satisfaction is up by 50%, and they’ve saved millions by creating an in-house agency.

Source: SimpleHQ

Company: IBM

Category: Technology/Software
Spokesperson: Michelle Peluso, Chief Marketing Officer
Case study summary: In 2016 IBM’s new CMO called the company’s 2600 marketers back into the office only a few years after they’d all been asked to work from home. It was time to trade productivity for innovation, and for Peluso that also meant a focus on Agility. She stated that the newly co-located teams would be going Agile by “creating small empowered teams with the right skills, clear accountability, sprints, and a constant focus on prioritization.” These teams would be cross-functional as well, boasting “a strong mix of creative, process, digital, and data science skills.”

This transition is part of a larger business transformation that has seen IBM spend $380 million on “agile hubs” in Austin, San Francisco, New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Raleigh, North Carolina. They’re also investing $1 billion in training and development programs for the US workforce over the next four years.

I heard Michele Peluso speak at DMA’s &Then in 2017, and she was overwhelmingly positive about the success that Agile marketing was having with her team. Hard data on IBM’s transformation remains scarce, but if it surfaces we’ll share it here.

(Incidentally, agility in marketing isn’t new at IBM, as you can see in this 2014 interview with Ben Edwards, then VP of Global Communications and Digital Marketing.)

Most exciting takeaway: With the right budget and level of executive buy-in, you can turn a ship of any size towards great organizational agility.

Sources:
TCV via Medium
Diginomica

Company: CA Technologies

Category: Software/Tech
Spokesperson: Cameron van Orman, Senior VP of Product and Solutions Marketing
Case study summary: The reasons behind CA’s Agile journey were familiar: be faster to market, iterate rapidly, prove their impact on the business, and improve team morale. It’s taken two years and a lot of learning, but CA is now using Agile marketing with over 100 team members across six Delivery Groups, each of which is aligned with a particular Business Unit. Sixty of those team members are full-time and part of the core Agile teams. The rest are leaders, specialists, data scientists, and regional marketers who offer support as needed.

Like many success stories, CA started with a small pilot team. Most members were co-located and worked on a single product: CA Agile Central. They also drew inspiration from the Rally Software marketing team, which they acquired in 2015. Once their pilot proved successful, they expanded steadily over the next 18 months or so.

While pipeline improved, delivery times shrunk, and win-rate tripled, the journey wasn’t without its obstacles. A lack of co-location and marketing work that didn’t lend itself to traditional two-week sprints kept them on their toes, but it was management that had the hardest time. The need to relinquish control and start coaching rather than directing was a tough hurdle in the early days.

Most exciting takeaways:

• Pipeline improved 20% with a flat budget
• Campaigns can now be delivered in two weeks rather than 1-2 months
• Win rate of marketing-sourced opportunities has tripled

Sources:
Cameron’s posts on the CA Blog

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