Carri Bugbee's List: Agile Marketing

• In today’s fast-paced, multichannel world, marketers no longer have the luxury to spend months crafting large projects; they must innovate and produce on the fly and respond immediately to market disruptions. In their new report, the researchers explain, “Agile for Marketing (A4M) drives long-term marketing strategies with short-term, customer-focused iterative projects that improve responsiveness and relevance. It allows for faster creative, more testing, smarter improvements and better results.”
• 63% of marketing leaders indicate agility as a high priority, but only 40% rate themselves as agile.
• The CMOs we spoke with needed a solution that would help them orient marketing activities around the constant change in the marketplace—a solution that allows them to be more dynamic and flexible in their operations, more productive, and more collaborative and integrated in their work product.
• Where confusion or inconsistency sets in is around Agile, the methodology, and the use of it in marketing. Agile helps reinforce a culture of agility by providing structure that drives marketers to be iterative, flexible, customer-centered, and focused on priorities of high-value. Many CMOs are unfamiliar with the Agile Methodology used in software development and its application to marketing. We are seeing adoption grow, but it’s still a new concept in marketing.
• As CMOs become more and more responsible for growth, they have an unprecedented need for speed and flexibility.
• Marketers who wait to deliver a big splash are not taking advantage of real-time ways to infuse market feedback into the development process.

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• “The days of the big bang campaign are gone. We don’t have time to spend months baking ideas and putting a big bang into market.”

   
  Article Highlights:
   
   
  • The way we think about and execute marketing is in flux.
  • Agile for Marketing (A4M) empowers organizations to be more responsive to the market.
  • Now is the time to create a new competitive advantage through innovation and responsiveness.
   
   
    
• CMOs adopting A4M have an unprecedented ability to tackle corporate and market realities with ease, speed, and intelligence. And our research shows that translates into stronger business performance and higher employee satisfaction.
• agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than nonagile organizations.

• To help you get the agile advantage, over the next few weeks we’ll share deeper dives into the seven principles of A4M:

   
   
  1. Flexible and focused
   
  2. Data-driven
   
  3. Iterative and experimental
   
  4. Clear and transparent
   
  5. Collaborative
   
  6. Empowered
   
  7. Customer-centric
      
   
    

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• Marketing was built on Madison Avenue. It was built in a very specific era, marked by very specific limitations.

• But, executing marketing in campaigns is suboptimal for a few reasons:

   
   
  • It’s not focused on building audience/brand/love. It’s focused on “here’s what we’re going to say this month.”
   
  • It implies that marketing has an end. It doesn’t. You never finish marketing, even if your campaign is “done”.
   
  • It perpetuates the fallacy that marketing is the same as advertising. (Keep reading.)
   
  • It creates bigger than necessary batch sizes.

• we created an entire board of the Ultimate Trello Tips and Tricks.

• Scrumban was designed for more mature agile teams, those working in an unpredictable environment where plans and requirements constantly shift, and/or teams who are supporting existing products rather than creating new ones.

   
• In a nutshell, Scrumban is driven by events and demand rather than a pre-established schedule. It focuses on minimal planning, providing just enough of a backlog to give the team enough important work to do next.
• Scrumban also ignores the focus on egalitarian, cross-functional teams that Scrum emphasizes. Instead, it embraces specialized roles within the team (a more realistic way to handle marketing skill sets).
• Individual WIP limits govern the workload for each team member as well as for the team as a whole. This is vitally important, because it protects your team’s sanity as well as the quality of its work:
• you don’t spend hours planning or estimating task size every other week just because it’s time to do that. Instead you only plan projects when your team reaches the pre-determined minimum threshold of new projects on their list.

• In Scrumban you don’t have timeboxed iterations as you do with Scrum, so you need strict limits on how much work can be in each category (planning/doing/testing/promoting/etc.) to keep your teams from becoming overworked or scattered.

   
• Kaizen basically means continuous improvement or change for the better, and on agile teams it should be a major focus.
• Team members should be able to “call a Kaizen” anytime they feel that the process is breaking down, and you can also schedule them to occur when particular conditions are met.
• here’s how Scrum is beginning to break down for our marketing team.

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