Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.

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

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

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.

Map it to your organization. If your teams are truly autonomous and work on separate backlogs and activities with minimal dependency then you might not need a full-fledged scaling approach.

If on the other hand, they ARE working on one bigger customer journey, have some dependencies across teams and some floating specialists that need to be involved in multiple teams or are considering synergies and adjacency campaigns (e.g. If you’re using an agile ALM tool you can probably benefit from our Continuous Integration or Portfolio-level tools), a scaling approach would benefit you.

In this context, SAFe’s Agile Marketing Train (A name coined in the field for the Agile Release Train in the context of Marketing) with its Program Increment Planning, Single Program Backlog, and System Demos provide useful guidance.

Working with Agencies

In many cases, marketing organizations work with external marketing/advertising agencies to deliver some of their campaigns or some of the materials for their campaigns. In most cases, the way these relationships work doesn’t map well to “everybody working on one agile team” and some sort of scaling solution is required.

A rising trend is the “Internal Agency” model (see https://hbr.org/2015/07/6-reasons-marketing-is-moving-in-house) in which an internal agency is created as a shared service that supports the various lines of business in the organization. While getting rid of the dependency on an external vendor, this “shared service” presents its own scaling challenges.

SAFe provides a couple of options for how to deal with internal/external “suppliers” – for example, they can become separate “supplier” Agile Marketing Train on a bigger Solution Train or a “supplier” team that is a “component”/”specialized” team inside an Agile Marketing Train. In any case, SAFe provides guidance for how to involve them in a planning and execution cadence and how to create realistic plans considering their capabilities and availability without forcing them to be members of agile teams (although that is certainly an option and will be recommended in some cases).

Longer-term activities such as events, strategic campaigns

Most agile marketing organizations run a mix of high-tempo testing that is a great fit for agile iterations/flow with frequent planning but also some longer-horizon activities such as conferences, webinars, and big product launches, that require more predictability and visibility beyond the “next 2 weeks” that classic team-level agile provides.

SAFe’s combination of high-tempo team-level agility with the Program level with its Program Increment Planning, Roadmap, and visibility to Features helps deal with this mix of demands from the marketing organization.

There’s a preference for SAFe in the enterprise

In many organizations Marketing is following the product development/management organization into Agile. If a product development/management organization chose SAFe as its agile approach, you will benefit from using it as your approach as well.

The same framework means using the same language. Even after adjusting SAFe to a marketing vernacular, it is still SAFe and marketers will be able to understand developers and vice versa.

The same framework means the ability to share expertise, knowledge, and training. While Agile Marketing isn’t exactly Agile Development a good agile coach or SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) can learn the marketing nuances over time.

Using the same framework means you’re better prepared for the day you will actually bring product development and marketing into the same customer experience value stream. While the typical starting point is for marketing to create “Agile Marketing Trains” focused on the marketing/customer journey value stream, many organizations are executing a “Digital Transformation” which means an emphasis on the digital experience that combines both marketing/sales and usage touchpoints. (See Oracle’s Customer Experience Lifecycle for an example)

With this one bigger customer life-cycle in mind, more and more organizations have a vision of creating “Agile Customer Experience (CX) Trains” combining development, marketing, sales, and others. These trains are needed in order to iterate and learn at the speed needed to compete in the digital age. Starting from the same or similar framework will ease the transition to these sorts of trains – reducing the babel tower effect that might happen otherwise.

If you see a need for agile marketing AND your context fits at least some of these descriptions/environments, you probably need some scaled agile marketing patterns, which will be the topic of our next blog in the series.

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

Artificial Intelligence
Agile Project Management
Amdocs
Operational Value Stream
Kanban 101
Risk Management on Agile Projects
SPC
Continuous Integration
Lean Agile Leadership
Agile Games
Nexus and Kanban
Limiting Work in Progress
Applying Agile Methodology
Hybrid Work
Agile India
Effective Agile Retrospectives
Kanban Basics
Agile Contracts Best Practices
RSA
Scrum and XP
An Appreciative Retrospective
Continuous Deployment
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Games and Exercises
Sprint Planning
Agility
Nexus Integration Team
Agile and DevOps Journey
Program Increment
Agile Marketing
Test Driven Development
Managing Projects
Continuous Delivery
Agile Release Planning
Change Management
Sprint Iteration
Jira Plans
Introduction to ATDD
Agile Testing Practices
Enterprise DevOps
Nexus vs SAFe
Agile Product Development
Agile Basics
Jira admin
SAFe
Slides
Continuous Improvement
Atlassian
LeSS
Business Agility
QA
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Iterative Incremental Development
Development Value Streams
ALM Tools
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Elastic Leadership
WIP
Story Slicing
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Systems Thinking
SAFe DevOps
Self-organization
Agile Development
The Kanban Method
Agile Israel Events
Spotify
Tools
Video
Large Scale Scrum
Presentation
Scrum With Kanban
Nexus and SAFe
Achieve Business Agility
Lean Agile Organization
PI Planning
AI
The Agile Coach
Perfection Game
Agile Outsourcing
Daily Scrum
speed @ scale
Agile Product Ownership
SA
Agile Mindset
Agile Release Management
ART Success
Jira Cloud
ATDD vs. BDD
Reading List
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
AI Artificial Intelligence
Lean-Agile Software Development
Frameworks
Coaching Agile Teams
Atlaassian
GanttBan
Agile for Embedded Systems
Scrum.org
Agile in the Enterprise
Introduction to Test Driven Development
TDD
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Covid19
Releases Using Lean
LAB
Lean Agile
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Agile Techniques
Advanced Roadmaps
Scrum Master Role
lean agile change management
ATDD
agileisrael
RTE Role
Agile
Legacy Code
Agile Exercises
Agile Program
Scrum
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Certification
Agile Community
Agile Delivery
DevOps
BDD
Agile Games and Exercises
Implementing SAFe
Jira
EOS®
Agile Risk Management
Software Development Estimation
Lean Risk Management
IT Operations
predictability
Engineering Practices
Lean Software Development
PI Objectives
Lean and Agile Techniques
Webinar
Legacy Enterprise
ScrumMaster Tales
Scrum Values
Manage Budget Creation
What Is Kanban
Kaizen
Product Ownership
Risk-aware Product Development
Tips
SAFe Release Planning
Rapid RTC
Lean Agile Basics
Scrum Master
Lean Budgeting
Sprint Retrospectives
LPM
Code
AgileSparks
Software Development
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Kaizen Workshop
Continuous Planning
Professional Scrum Product Owner
Agile Assembly Architecture
ROI
Lean Agile Management
Kanban
Lean Startup
Scrum Guide
Professional Scrum with Kanban
RTE
Planning
Kanban Game
ARTs
Professional Scrum Master
Agile Israel
speed at scale
Certified SAFe
Scrum Primer
Product Management
Kanban Kickstart Example
System Archetypes
Portfolio for Jira
Scaled Agile Framework
Release Train Engineer
Risk Management in Kanban
System Team
POPM
Quality Assurance
Built-In Quality
System Integration Environments
Nexus
Value Streams
Process Improvement
Pomodoro Technique
Agile Project
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart