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Agile Marketing

Defining Agile Marketing

In this article we will try to define the approach known as “Agile Marketing” – The application of ideas from the world of “Lean/Agile Software Development” to the world of marketing with the aim of achieving marketing agility.

What ISN’T Agile Marketing

First, a couple of clarifications and myth-busting. Agile Marketing isn’t reactive marketing. Agile Marketing isn’t about how you react in a Marketing/PR crisis (ask United about those) or real-time opportunity (you can ask Oreo about those). I don’t mean that you can not/shouldn’t deal with those when you’re doing Agile Marketing, but it isn’t what Agile Marketing is about.

Agile Marketing

Better late than never

It took us some time, but the slides from our (Steve Wolfe from CA and myself) December talk in the Boston Agile Marketing meetup are finally publicly available.

Agile Marketing

What Is Agile Marketing

This ISN’T Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing also isn’t “We just get things done without any real process.” Being super-responsive and saying “yes we can” all the time isn’t Agile Marketing. (Especially if it means unsustainable pace).

Finally, Agile Marketing also isn’t Scrum, Daily Scrums/Standups, Sprints, Scrum Masters, Kanban Boards. It

Agile Marketing

Do you NEED to Scale Agile Marketing? (Scaled Agile Marketing Series – Part 3)

In earlier posts in our Scaled Agile Marketing, we looked at whether you even need Agile Marketing and then what typically triggers a serious discussion about Agile Marketing. In this post, we move to the next step – figuring out if you need Scaled Agile Marketing.

So – Do you need Scaled Agile Marketing?

Scaling isn’t just a function of the number of people in the marketing organization. It’s more a function of how many marketers need to work together as part of one customer journey/experience.

Let’s look at an example. In the diagram below you can see a typical marketing organization that would possibly have a need for some scaling approach. They have agile teams that cross-cut the different marketing functions – focusing on delivering marketing value/impact for a specific product/customer journey rather than focusing on a specific marketing function/task.

Agile Marketing

Reaching The Tipping Point For Agile Marketing

The Need For An Agile Marketing Transformation

Marketers or junior marketing leaders can implement Agile Marketing at the team level bottom up or in islands in the organization. This approach can achieve some improvement but typically stalls at some point.

Real marketing agility requires a transformative change in processes, policies, mindset, and maybe even the type of leaders. This is a bigger lift obviously.

While most of the marketing organizations we see score pretty high on the “do they need Agile Marketing?” scale, Only some of them would agree that that’s indeed what they need, and even a smaller set goes and does something about it.

While many marketing leaders agree with Agile Marketing at the concept level, They need a strong trigger before they take action on it. (To use “customer journey” language – most marketing leaders aren’t even in the awareness stage, but even those that are, need a trigger to move towards acquisition and activation…)

Agile Marketing

Why Agile Marketing?

Why Agile Marketing

Making any sort of change is non-trivial. Implementing Agile Marketing, especially at scale, is hard. There should be a real need for it. These are some common change drivers we hear from Marketing leaders (more at “State of Agile Marketing” by Andrea Fryrear):

Agile Marketing

To Infinity and Beyond – Achieving Organizational Agility

Agile Development – Just A Starting Point Towards Organizational Agility

For many people Agile is “Agile Development”. They use agile to improve the effectiveness and agility of software organizations. For these people scaling agile typically means developing even larger programs/products with an agile development approach.

Scaling Sideways Towards Business Agility

Agile Marketing

Choosing your Agile Marketing Tool

Tools for Agile Marketing seem to be a hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well.

For co-located marketing teams the best approach would probably be to start without an electronic tool and just use a physical board/wall with sticky notes at least until they get the hang of it and learn what they really need. Many marketing teams are distributed and therefore don’t have this luxury. While moving to a co-located setup is definitely a recommended option it isn’t always realistic… So those teams do need to have some electronic tool to support their move to agile marketing.

Agile Marketing

Kanban for Marketing Kick-start Example

It is a slightly modified version of Henrik Kniberg’s Kanban Kick-Start Example that he graciously shared using a creative commons license. Why do we need a marketing version you ask? Because we find that people connect better to examples in their own domain so talking about code and development doesn’t really work well with marketers… Feel free to take this one and adapt it for your use and share alike! (Here’s a PowerPoint version you can edit)

Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing Validation Board

“Validated Learning Over Opinions and Conventions” is the first value in the Agile Marketing Manifesto. A couple of weeks ago I was helping form what we call a “Marketing Agile Release Train” – a group of Agile Marketing teams each focused on supporting the business activities of a key product/solution in a large portfolio. The way we do this is typically a combination of some Agile Marketing training followed up by actual high-level planning of their first quarter followed by a deep dive into their first iterations/sprints.

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