This theory is fundamentally flawed because agility is a mindset and a new culture with strategies that support how you achieve the new desired state. When agility is expected to happen without any leadership changes to support new ways of working, the benefits are limited. 

Agile means everyone — from the junior copywriter to the CMO — must change the way they work. Some companies may already be very agile in their culture, so not as much transformation is needed. However, most large organizations have worked in a siloed “command and control” structure for decades, meaning they have a bigger mountain to move.

The need for agility to take place at all levels in the company is why we created the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads in the Agile Marketing Navigator framework. This article takes a deeper dive into those roles and how they can help to navigate agile marketing.

Leading a practice vs. managing people

In the traditional marketing organizational structure, managers managed people and assigned work. With agile marketing, we’ve changed this entire paradigm so that work comes in a strategic and prioritized way and the team is empowered to deliver on those priorities.

When set up properly, an agile marketing team is cross-functional, meaning they have people delivering work from many different disciplines. The goal is for them to run like a small startup, even inside a large company.

What’s shocking for many marketers is that setting up a team cross-functionally doesn’t mean that the reporting structure of the players needs to change. I strongly advise against that because you want to create a team that can work more autonomously.

So if you’re a manager with employees on an agile marketing team, how does your role change? This can be a really sensitive question for people because it is a huge shift from the old way. 

Essentially, you no longer assign work or manage the work itself. Your job is now to empower team members to be more independent, ensuring they have the right tools, skills, training and coaching to hone their craft. 

As a manager, you may have people who report to you who are now dispersed across several agile teams. While you may feel like you’ve completely lost control, you haven’t. You need to think about it differently, and that’s where the role of Practice Lead comes into play.

As a Practice Lead, you’ll want to set up a regular cadence with everyone who reports to you, called a Community of Practice. This role is more inspirational than managerial. You bring people together to become a strong, united practice that masters its craft. You’ll look to team members for their ideas and opinions. You’ll facilitate and unite this group, empowering them to be leaders of their craft on each agile team.

Stakeholder as collaborator vs. requester

If you rely on marketers to produce work for you, your role is a Stakeholder. Stakeholders can come from several different places, such as product marketing, sales or a line of business.

In the old way of working, you probably went to a department manager and told them what you needed. Or you submitted a brief, which someone picked up to interpret your request.

We are getting away from the requester/receiver dynamic with agile marketing. This has been the number one reason marketers are burnt out — the workload is endless if anyone can request work. And how do we know we’re working on the right work at the right time?

As a Stakeholder in agile marketing, you have a critical role to play. You need to communicate your needs to the team’s Marketing Owner, who will determine the priority of your request and if it aligns with the team’s business goals and Guidepoint.

Your ideas will be discussed rather than your request submitted, as agile marketing is about collaboration. Also, the team will determine the best way to deliver what you need, so communicating desired outcomes, not desired output, is really important.

Within the Agile Marketing Navigator framework, we always encourage Stakeholders to participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop with the team quarterly. This is a way to work together and gain alignment.

The other place where Stakeholders need to be active is during the Team Showcase. This is a great opportunity to see what the team is working on and how campaigns are performing and offer feedback for upcoming work.

The critical thing to remember with agile marketing is to work with the team, viewing them as your partner in creating the right solution to drive the business outcomes you need.

With the roles of Practice Lead and Stakeholder, you’ll have the right people in place to successfully navigate agile marketing.

The post The importance of Stakeholders and Practice Leads in agile marketing appeared first on MarTech.

The practices we’ve established in the Agile Marketing Navigator help drive culture change and the right behaviors for agility. Today, we’ll focus on Cycle Time, Waste Removal and the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads that can help you to take agile marketing to the next level.

Remove waste by overhauling old ways of working

When it comes to waste removal, a team can make changes if they can work autonomously. But more significant effort is required to make impactful changes in larger organizations where systems and processes reach far beyond the team.

Let’s say that several agile teams have identified that too many sign-offs are required to get work delivered quickly and with agility. Now you know this is a systemic issue across marketing that requires more than a Band-Aid repair.

The first step is measuring the problem’s impact on overall marketing delivery. It’s best to do this collaboratively, getting in put from representatives of several teams and levels in the company. You can break down items by the types that seem most problematic. 

Let’s say everyone says the process for launching a landing page on your website is really slow and has the most sign-offs. Take sticky notes and map out all the steps in the process, focusing on each sign-off. This allows you to quantify a baseline for just how many steps are in your process and how long it’s taking today. 

You’ll then look at the total number of average days it takes to deliver the landing page across the organization. In this example, we’ll say it takes an average of 45 business days to launch a landing page from start to finish.

Everyone should then discuss what seems like a more reasonable timeframe. This group decides to strive for 30 days. Now they need to uncover where they can get back those 15 days, most of which are tied up in approvals and wait time.

Because this issue is constraining all marketers, leaders need to be able to step up and be willing to radically empower the change from old ways of working. They will have to allow this change to happen and empower Lean thinking. This often means giving up a bit of security or safety in exchange for speed. And yes, mistakes may happen. But this is where trusting that people will learn from them and the overall change will outweigh the risk.

It’s this type of culture change that will lead to true agility. Leaders: You can’t just hand off agile marketing to your team and walk away. It’s imperative that you empower the teams to identify the issues while actively paving the way for them to implement new ways of working.

Lead Communities of Practice

As you mature in your agile practice and form teams around business needs, you break away from traditionally built departments around disciplines. However, as you involve more and more teams in agile marketing, it will be really important that those disciplines still have strong leadership and best practices.

A Design Community of Practice is a great example. The Practice Lead needs to work with all the designers across all agile teams to ensure branding quality and growth in the field happen. 

A Practice Lead in our framework is typically a department manager, but their role alters with agile marketing. They are no longer assigning or managing work, but they still need to work to ensure everyone in the field can be successful with skills, tools, knowledge sharing and practice standards.

If you’re working in agile today and have found that the functional roles are being diminished, immediately start operating a Community of Practice, and you’ll find that you can succeed with a delivery team that has multiple skill sets, as well as in a community where shared skills are maximized.

As you grow in agile marketing, remember it’s not just a check-the-box process or framework. Really good agile marketing takes great leaders that are invested in true transformation.

The post Scaling agile with the Agile Marketing Navigator framework appeared first on MarTech.

That may not be surprising, as agile marketing started about 10 years after it did in software development, but why are we still so far behind? What are the barriers that are getting in our way and how can we remove them?

In this article, I’m going to share with you three reasons why I think marketers are behind with agile implementations and what we can do to catch up.

1. Language Barriers

A few years ago I had an amazing opportunity to teach an agile class in Haifa, Israel. While I’d taught the content many times before, what I didn’t take into consideration was the language barrier. I’m sure I made a lot of American references that they didn’t understand, and when they went to do team activities, they all spoke in Hebrew, making it incredibly difficult for me to validate if the learning was registering. So while the learning can and does happen, the time to get there will expand in those kinds of circumstances.

But barriers can also be created by aspects of a common language — for example, acronyms.

When you see the term “PM” what do you think of? Depending on your perspective, this could be a project manager, program manager, product manager or even preventative maintenance — not to mention just “afternoon.” It’s really confusing.

When marketers are forced into translating terms from a language that was written with product and software development in mind, problems can arise because the language doesn’t speak to them.

2. Framework resistance

When I began moving my agile coaching practice into the marketing space, I quickly realized that I was trying to teach Scrum the same way that I did in software development. It wasn’t working. I was met with a ton of resistance.

Here were some common objections I heard:

• “Scrum is a process for IT.”
• “Scrum doesn’t make sense in marketing.”
• “The language in Scrum is for software developers.”
• “We don’t want a rigid process.”

I kept thinking about this resistance. The problem I concluded wasn’t in the framework. The problem was getting acceptance of the framework outside of the software world.

3. Reinventing the wheel

As an industry, more than 60% of agile marketers are implementing a hybrid or scrumban (Scrum/Kanban combination) approach, according to the 2022 State of Agile Marketing survey.

While inventing a hybrid approach seems like a great way to take what’s out there and customize it to marketers’ needs, the biggest challenge was that there was no consistent way that this was happening. Going from company to company, I saw a lot of marketers trying to reinvent the wheel, which meant it took them a lot longer to get off the ground while software teams were already flying.

However, if we look back at our agile history, software development had a similar beginning. There were dozens of methodologies that are no longer talked about today such as the Crystal, XTreme Programming, Adaptive Software Development and many more.

It wasn’t until Scrum became the gold standard in software development that real change began to happen. I believe it’s because, when everyone agrees on a common method and language, we have a mutual starting point. We don’t have to start at square one. We can just learn from there, all agree on the path and work on what’s really important — lasting cultural change.

Getting ahead!

Now that you know my theory on why agile in marketing is 10 years behind, how can we break the cycle and move forward? Here are 5 things to try:

• Avoid technical jargon or terms that people don’t understand.
• Don’t try to sell teams or leaders on a process, but rather what you’re going to do to resolve their business problems.
• Allow flexibility around agile practices and choice. By allowing teams to choose from a few options that meet their needs, they’ll be more accepting.
• Provide a clear roadmap for teams on how they’ll go from point A to point B.
• Clearly outline what success looks like for each team and steps for getting them there. 

For more ways on how we’ve bridged the gap between software teams and marketing teams with agile, read our latest eBook on how to get started with the Agile Marketing Navigator.

Download the free ebook here.

The post 3 reasons marketers are 10 years behind with agile — and how to catch up appeared first on MarTech.

What does this mean for marketers? It’s time to be more strategic.

By knowing where you’re headed, you can use agile marketing to focus on the work that’s going to perform best.

1. Know where you’re headed

So many marketers are working reactively. Until you know where you’re headed, you’ll always be spinning your wheels and throwing darts, hoping one will stick.

As a marketing team, it’s critical, especially in this climate, to understand what business goals you’re driving towards or you’ll be caught in an endless cycle of execution without much impact.

In agile marketing, we align on a Guidepoint that ties directly to our larger organizational business goals. The Guidepoint ensures that everyone understands what success looks like to the team, the business and the customers. It’s a shared understanding that keeps us on the right path forward.

2. Focus only on a few high-return initiatives

The biggest mistake that most companies make is too many projects or campaigns happening at once without evaluating the impact on the business results they are driving toward.

We’ve found that by measuring an idea’s impact, you can be more selective about the work that the team is spending time doing.

Here are a few things you can measure:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as clicks, interaction rates, traffic and page completion rates.
• Baseline metrics that measure your current performance.
• KPI goals for improving current metrics.
• Impact on your business if the KPI goals are met, such as a percentage of sales increase.
• Value in dollars that this brings to your business if the KPI goals are met.

When you take a little extra time upfront to understand the data behind a marketing idea, you get away from simply saying “yes” to everyone’s requests, which will lead to employee overload, especially if you’ve had a reduction in staff.

Dig deeper: The dangers of saying ‘no’ in martech

3. Continuously evaluate metrics

Once you begin launching your marketing, you can’t ignore the data. It’s imperative that you’re always monitoring performance at regular intervals and that you understand when to turn an initiative off.

Too many times as marketers we’re only focused on what we’re going to do, but we forget to ask ourselves what we’re not going to do, or what we’re going to stop doing. 

A few good questions the team should ask themselves are:

• How long will we let something run that’s underperforming from our goal?
• What’s our threshold for stopping work?

4. Quickly ditch low-performing campaigns

Evaluating metrics should be a continuous process that the agile marketing team does daily, or as soon as data is available. 

As part of the team’s Daily Huddle, looking at performance is something they can spend 5 minutes doing, and it will go a long way. 

Why waste time and money on low-performing marketing? Stop and pivot — that’s what agile is all about!

Dig deeper: Why doing less is more in agile marketing

Be quick and nimble in the face of uncertainties

As we head into times of uncertainty, we can no longer afford to work on every marketing tactic that our stakeholders request. 

We must take a consultative and data-driven approach to make marketing less of a cost center and more of a value-added partner.

The post 4 steps to becoming a more strategic marketer in 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

Today we’ll dive into the Stakeholder role. Of course, the role of Stakeholder is not new to agile marketing, however, it’s not explicitly talked about in other agile frameworks. Here’s how we describe this role in the Agile Marketing Navigator:

“Stakeholders have a vested stake in the work that the marketing team produces. This group often comes from Sales, Product Development and Customer Service departments. Stakeholders participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop and offer feedback during the Team Showcase.”

How to identify your team’s stakeholders

There are many stakeholders in an organization, but the ones we’re concerned with in agile marketing are the people that directly care about the outcomes the team is producing. That list of Stakeholders might remain constant, or it could change regularly, depending on the nature of the work. Some teams have a large number of Stakeholders, whereas others have a select few.

To identify whether someone is a Stakeholder to your agile team, ask yourself the following questions:

• Did this person request work from the team?
• Do I regularly update this person on the team’s work?
• Has this person previously asked for a status report?
• Is this person responsible for delivering on business goals that tie directly to the work your team is doing?

How do Stakeholders request work?

While an agile marketing team is self-organizing, it’s important that they keep a clear line of communication open between the team and the Stakeholders. The work the team is doing should be transparent to Stakeholders at all times.

The Marketing Owner on the team is responsible for managing Stakeholder relations. The Marketing Owner ultimately gets to prioritize what work the team will do and in what order, but needs to be having regular conversations with Stakeholders.

As a Stakeholder that requests work, it’s important to share with the Marketing Owner why your work is important and how it fits into the agreed upon Guidepoint that you co-created. You may have to be flexible and understand that some trade-off decisions may need to be made and not all requests may get worked on.

The work requests will go on the team’s Marketing Backlog, as long as the Marketing Owner believes that the work will contribute to the value the team is trying to achieve. Some teams allow anyone to contribute ideas to the backlog, others set it up as a conversation with the Marketing Owner. Your organization can determine this process for what works best with your current culture.

Communicating with Stakeholders

The team needs to be transparent about when the work might get done and keep you informed in a timely manner if priorities change. The Blueprint document that gets created at the beginning of the project or quarter is meant to be a conversation starter between the Marketing Owner and the Stakeholders.

The Blueprint should be discussed during each Team Showcase (and more often on a 1:1 basis if needed). This way everyone knows what buckets of work are coming up next, if they’re still the highest priority, and if not, what priority may replace it (note: we aren’t adding more work, but switching out priorities).

Stakeholders’ role at the Team Showcase

During the Team Showcase that happens at the end of each Cycle, Stakeholders with a vested interest in the work should attend and be ready to ask the team questions and offer suggestions for future work. Keep in mind that this isn’t an approval meeting. At this point the team has delivered work, but it’s to see what they’ve done, hear how various tactics are performing in the market, and have a collaborative conversation around what work should follow, or how work that was done may need to be altered or improved upon for upcoming Cycles.

As a Stakeholder, try to leave your personal opinions out. Instead of saying, “I wish that button was red,” you may want to ask the team, “How have customers responded to the blue button? Have you tried testing it in another color to see if people submit more requests?” This empowers the team to take your suggestions in a data-driven manner versus merely an opinion.

Stakeholders’ role at the Collaborative Planning Workshop

Stakeholders should also participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop at the beginning of the quarter or project. As a Stakeholder, you are an active participant in this collaboration. We ask that you raise any objections to the Guidepoint if it doesn’t align with where you were hoping it would go. It’s important to have these transparent conversations early and get on the same page with the team.

From there, the Brainstorm happens and even if you aren’t a marketer, contributing ideas from a customer perspective adds value. After this session, the Blueprint gets put together by the Marketing Owner, but you should make sure that you are in agreement with the priorities shown. If not, it’s your responsibility to bring it up early and have a conversation with the Marketing Owner. However, at the end of the day, it is the Marketing Owner’s decision as this role has to balance all Stakeholders’ needs.

Note: This is the last article in the Agile Marketing Navigator series. A full list of articles appears below.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Stakeholders: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator  appeared first on MarTech.

Today we’ll dive into the Practice Lead role. This is one that’s unique to marketing and you won’t hear this term in other agile frameworks. Here’s how we describe this role in the Agile Marketing Navigator:

“This role consists of leaders of functional departments. In agile marketing, their role changes significantly. They no longer manage their employees’ day-to-day work, but instead lead the functional area to achieve optimal quality and best practices through a Center of Excellence that services all of the agile marketing teams.”

Why did we add a new role?

We’ve added the role of Practice Lead to this framework because so often in Scrum or other agile ways of working, everyone assumes that agile is only for the team that’s delivering Marketing work. If we look at agile from a wider lens, it’s about culture change and mindset shifts. In order to be successful at those, everyone in the organization needs to understand that they are part of the change.

How is a Practice Lead different from a manager?

Since the agile role of Practice Lead is someone who is likely a manager, how are these roles different? The role doesn’t change whatever corporate job responsibilities or titles that this role has — but how they interact with their direct reports that are working on an agile team does change.

The most significant change is that agile teams don’t get work direction from their manager, which is often a key responsibility. Instead of assigning work, a Practice Lead should focus on enabling their team members to do their job effectively.

The concept is a lot like the difference between a manager and a leader. A manager gets into how the sausage is made, whereas a leader helps provide skills and mentorship so that others can make the sausage more effectively.

Key responsibilities of a Practice Lead

While the key responsibilities could vary quite a bit from company to company, some things to be thinking about as a Practice Lead who has direct reports on an agile team are:

• Do team members have access to the latest tools and technology to perform their job?
• Is there a repository of assets that can be used across teams (design assets, content, etc)?
• Are my employees working across teams and able to share best practices and learnings with each other?
• Are quality standards understood and followed across all teams?
• Do team members have a way to grow their skills or expand their knowledge?

Letting go of control

One of the hardest things about being a Practice Lead is letting go of command and control ways of working. A Practice Lead should get comfortable with failure and encourage their employees to work out-of-the-box with courage. 

The biggest thing you can do to be successful in this role is to trust your people. They need to be trusted to do the right thing, and if they don’t, to learn from their mistakes. 

It’s your responsibility to set guidelines of what success looks like and provide encouragement. If the people you employ continually fail to meet your expectations, they may not be a good fit for an agile team or you may not be setting them up for success. In either case, trust is a must to succeed with agile marketing.

Establishing a Community of Practice

A Community of Practice is a great way to gain alignment for employees that work across teams. As a Practice Lead, a key role would be to start and maintain a Community of Practice. This is a group of everyone within a common discipline, such as graphic design, that work together and collaborate around the best tools, skills, assets and more.

A Community of Practice is often run like an agile marketing team, prioritizing needs into a backlog and working together to accomplish common goals. As a Practice Lead, you would be responsible for prioritizing the needs of the practice and keeping it going. However, you become more of a facilitator than a boss in this way of working, soliciting input and partnership from everyone in the practice.

We hope that you find the role of Practice Lead helpful as you navigate your agile marketing journey.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Practice Lead: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator  appeared first on MarTech.

Today we’ll dive into the Supporting Cast role. This is one that’s unique to marketing and you won’t hear this term in other agile frameworks. Here’s how we describe this role in the Agile Marketing Navigator:

“The Supporting Cast are important contributors who do occasional work for the team. They serve as consultants to the team, joining them when they are actively involved with work in the Launch Cycle. This cast is often comprised of agency partners or very specialized skill sets that service all of marketing.

Why did we add a new role?

You may be wondering why we’re adding a new role. It was created primarily to identify the nature of interaction with agency partners, many of which are critical players in marketing departments. Since this has never been talked about before, we’re covering new ground with this role, and it will probably be refined over time. 

As we’ve worked with teams, we often coach and train the team — and the agency partners are left out. When the team comes back to them with a completely new way of working, there’s a culture clash.

So, let’s just knock this one out from the get-go and help to define how these relationships should work in an agile marketing environment.

Where do agency partners fit into agile marketing?

The teams that I’ve seen embrace this the most effectively bring agency partners close to the team. While they may not be the core group that does day-to-day work, it’s critical that they understand their client’s agile approach and how they fit into it.

First of all, if your budget allows for it, agency partners should attend any agile marketing training with the team to gain shared understanding. This will get everyone on the same page right away.

In a typical client/agency relationship, the agency does a lot of the strategy work and presents it to the client. In agile marketing, this shifts a bit and the agency and Marketing Owner partner on this together, constantly communicating on business goals and what makes sense.

In agile marketing we don’t remove strategizing, but it’s not as heavy upfront. A high-level strategy should be agreed upon by the Marketing Owner and Supporting Cast members, but they will also iterate throughout execution, as delivering quick experiments and their results is really what we’re after.

The Supporting Cast members may be heavily embedded with the team during certain projects where they’re delivering work. However, there may be times when they’re more removed because they don’t have active work happening. 

When the Supporting Cast members have work in the cycle, they should attend team meetings daily so that everyone is working in real time.

Building a partnership

The Supporting Cast members become true partners with the agile marketing team. One of the toughest things here is for the agencies to show vulnerability. It’s no longer about being pixel-perfect or having all of the “right” answers before coming to a meeting. The relationship becomes more of a peer-to-peer one where agencies and the team ideate and collaborate together.

When agencies are the “team”

In some cases, work is outsourced to agencies and they actually are the team, not necessarily the Supporting Cast. This is true if the majority of work being delivered is being done by an agency. In those cases, treat them like any other team member and have them actively involved with the day-to-day collaboration happening.

Whether people are Supporting Cast members or part of the agile marketing team, it’s important to carve out roles and expectations early on and adjust them if needed.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Supporting Cast: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator  appeared first on MarTech.

Today we’ll dive into the role of Agile Champion. This role is similar to a Scrum Master in Scrum, but with a greater emphasis on the part about “championing agile.”

In the early days of my agile career (and even once recently) I worked as a Scrum Master, so I can speak from a lot of personal experience about this role. This is the most confusing role for hiring managers because it’s so unlike any other typical job description at a company. Because of the lack of understanding of this role, we’ve seen a lot of bad Scrum Mastering. This has led to some misunderstandings around the value of this role, and in marketing it’s a tough sell.

What is a Scrum Master?

Before we dive into the Agile Champion role, I want to ground you in what a Scrum Master role is (and was meant to be).

A Scrum Master owns the agile process on a team. According to Scrum, this is a fully dedicated role that doesn’t perform any work on the team, but helps to unblock the team, teach Scrum to the team and the organization, facilitate meetings and help to make organizational change happen.

Why is the Scrum Master role a tough sell?

I think the meaning of Scrum Master was well intended, but over the years companies have watered down this role. In many large companies, project managers aren’t needed as much, so they get converted to the role of Scrum Master. While this works for some people, many people are great project managers, but terrible Scrum Masters.

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of problems with the execution of this role including:

• Leading the team by command and control methods.
• Becoming the team’s admin, facilitating meetings and taking notes, but otherwise adding little value.
• Being too much of a doer, and trying to do the team’s work instead of being neutral.

From those three anti-patterns alone, you can see why this role is a tough sell. However, in software development, it’s so common that hiring for this role is pretty standard. Meanwhile, marketing runs like a lean machine, and asking for a full time dedicated role that doesn’t deliver — well, you can see where that’s going.

How is the Agile Champion different from a Scrum Master?

Because of all the baggage around the role of Scrum Master, even though I think it’s a valuable role if done well, it’s not one that marketers are buying into very often. So, how do we deliver the good parts of that role and get rid of the baggage? That’s where the Agile Champion comes in.

First of all, we chose the name carefully. When working with clients, we heard a lot of push back about being called a Scrum Master. We also wanted to really emphasize that this role is about championing agile ways of working, and not about project management.

In the Agile Marketing Navigator framework, the Agile Champion doesn’t have to be a full time dedicated role. It can be, but it’s not a requirement. Why? Because we’d rather see someone who’s excited about agile marketing lead this, even if they have another role on the team, than to try and force a full time position for someone who doesn’t fit the bill.

The Agile Champion helps the agile marketing team:

• Break through legacy ways of working.
• Get excited about agile marketing.
• Coach and mentor others about agile marketing.
• Helps the team become more accountable and self-organizing.
• Listens to the team’s concerns and help solve their problems.

I’ve seen a lot of success in this role with people that you wouldn’t expect to take it on. I had a team graphic designer that volunteered for this position and loved it so much that her company did make it a full time role.

A great Agile Champion is someone who wants to learn about agile marketing and can build excitement around it for the organization.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Agile Champion: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator  appeared first on MarTech.

Today we continue our deep dive into Roles by looking at the role of the Marketing Owner. This role is key to ensuring that business goals and priorities are clearly understood, and is the connective tissue between stakeholders that request work and the team that gets the work done.

If you’re familiar with Scrum, you may have heard of a Product Owner. The Marketing Owner role is essentially the same, but the nuances of working in marketing versus managing a product may alter the role slightly.

Don’t miss Stacey Ackerman and Michael Seaton discussing agile marketing at MarTech.

Who fits into this role?

A common question I often get asked is who at a company is best suited to be the Marketing Owner? A common answer is a strategist because there may be a lot of similarities between the job they’re already doing and the role on an agile marketing team. However, this can vary so much from company to company, so here are some good qualities to look for in filling this role:

• Has authority to make decisions for the team regarding priorities of work.
• Knowledgeable about the company and the market it serves.
• Works well both in the day-to-day tactical world as well as with a larger strategic vision.
• Is available to the team to answer questions about the work, but doesn’t tell the team how to get their work done.

Why the Marketing Owner role is the backbone to success of the team

While this role is considered an equal team member, and there isn’t hierarchy on an agile team, the role can make or break a team because the Marketing Owner is guiding the team directionally. Without that single person communicating the vision and priorities, the team is often pulled in a million different directions.

I once trained a large retailer that had been working in agile marketing for a while, but had never set up a Marketing Owner role. After listening to me talk about it in class, they realized that this was the reason that their team was overloaded. Instead of a single person to filter all of the stakeholder requests through, every team member was exposed to them — so they were often working on conflicting priorities.

Prioritizing work is essential

The Marketing Owner’s ability to prioritize work effectively is really important. Within the Navigator, we set out a pretty easy system for doing that. The Marketing Owner is responsible for writing the Guidepoint, which helps directionally navigate the team at a high level. The Blueprint is the tool the Marketing Owner creates to share quarterly work that the team is planning to deliver, but this is meant to be flexible and initiate conversations. From there a single-ordered backlog is owned by the Marketing Owner and it’s this person’s job to continually shuffle this as new priorities surface.

While we’ve given the Marketing Owner a lot of tools to make this job easier, this role really needs to be several steps ahead of the team and have a great working relationship with all of the team’s key stakeholders.

Effective leadership

It’s important for the Marketing Owner to be an effective leader. This means that the team should always be able to ask why work was chosen and what outcome is desired, but the Marketing Owner needs to stay out of the team’s way when it comes to how the work will get done. I make the clear distinction between the Marketing Owner’s role and the rest of the team by saying, the Marketing Owner owns the “what” and the team owns the “how”. If the Marketing Owner is overly prescriptive, they aren’t likely to get most creative and innovative ideas from the team.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Marketing Owner: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator appeared first on MarTech.

In recent articles we covered the first three components. Now we’re going to dive into our final stop on your agile marketing journey—Roles. 

Six agile marketing roles

The navigator identifies six agile marketing roles, whereas Scrum has only three named roles. We’re not trying to overcomplicate roles, but we’ve expanded our definition of agile roles to go beyond just the team. The roles that support the team must also be versed in agile marketing and know their responsibilities. In my experience with Scrum, we often forget about everyone outside the team — and those people think that agile is only for the team. 

Over the next several weeks, we’ll deep dive into each of these roles and why they are significant. Of course a framework only scrapes the surface of these roles and isn’t intended to be a comprehensive job description. That’s where your organization and its uniqueness fit into the mix; but what our framework does provide is a baseline of what’s expected from these roles in agile marketing.

Role #1: The Team

Today we’re going to dive into our first role, the team itself. If you’ve worked on an agile team in the past, the role of a team member doesn’t change much despite the framework used. However, we’ll refresh you on what makes up a good agile team versus one that may not be set up for success.

Who should (and shouldn’t) be on an agile marketing team?

When getting started with agile marketing, a good team formation is going to be key to your success. I’ve seen a lot of variations of what people call an agile “team” so let’s begin with who should and shouldn’t be on your team.

Should:

• People who are getting their hands dirty and are “doers” of the work — such as content writers, SEO specialists, graphic designers, software developers, analytics, etc.

Shouldn’t:

• People who are managing the work of others, but not actually doing it themselves. We have another role for them called “Practice Leads” which will get into in the coming weeks.

It’s really common for everyone to want to be on the agile team, however, in order to gain the autonomy and ownership that are core tenets of agile marketing, the team needs to be made up of people who are actually getting the work done and who can collaborate with each other without someone telling them how to do it.

Cross-functional teams vs. functional teams

In agile marketing, a cross-functional team is the ideal setup. This means that you have a mix of roles that can get a piece of work delivered from end-to-end without having to go to another team. 

If you’re building web landing pages, you’ll probably need a designer, a writer and a developer to complete the work. The magic lies in having those roles working together, day-in and day-out, and understanding the entire piece of work from start to finish. That means being able to quickly deliver customer value.

A functional team, such as a team of designers, may gain some benefits from agility, but there are limitations. While some companies don’t have full buy-in and need to start this way, they will find themselves unable to deliver value independently. A graphic design team may become really efficient and collaborative, but without the other roles, their work sits like inventory on a shelf.

Self-organizing marketers

Becoming self-organizing marketers is the goal with agile marketing. This means that the team serves more as consultants to stakeholders, having an active say in ideation about the marketing that needs to happen.

To become self-organizing, leaders must trust the team and allow them to fail. This can be really difficult in a traditionally-run culture, but once the team is freed and feels psychologically safe to give their opinions, more creative marketing happens.

T-shaped marketers

On an agile team, we look to create T-shaped marketers, meaning you have your core specialty but can help in a few other areas. While your job may be a graphic designer, if you can edit copy to move the work along, then you’re helping the team, not just staying in your lane. An agile marketer knows and understands everything that has to happen to get work done, not just a single piece of the puzzle.

Working on an agile team is rewarding and empowering. You get to have a much larger part in the overall customer experience. Next week we’ll dig into the role of Marketing Owner (which is actually a part of the team).

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholders

The post Teams: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator appeared first on MarTech.