Agile in Marketing
Where do I start — show me how?
This is a simple, easy and concise framework with working examples on setting up an Agile approach for marketing and marketing team deliverables. Teams love it (gives them sense of real ownership and makes it easier to manage and multi-task), heads of marketing find it very easy to manage (or rather it requires minimal management) and others in the organization love the results they see from an Agile approach — win win for all. It was crafted with start ups and hyper growth digital/tech companies in mind, but it has been used in larger marketing organizations, and can provide a competitive edge for those who can adapt agile to their teams. We have been using Agile Marketing at multiple companies over the last few years — it’s an evolution, success has been 50%+ hit rate to date. It’s not a fix for all marketing teams or company cultures.
Some key support steps are: Map out your Marketing Funnel, identify key metrics for the team, pick a champion on your team, don’t make every project or task have to fit into an agile process (aim for 75/25 mix), put some automation tools in place, encourage risk taking, test/fail/succeed/iterate and as the CMO get out of your team’s way.
If you are looking for more details on using an approach like Agile for marketing — please contact me — contact info in the slideshare presentation. #marketing #agile #digital #results or at http://about.me/shanelennon
A quick update — on some examples of Agile Marketing from the Econsultancy team — 23 Nimble Examples of Agile Marketing — like GAP, New York Sports Club, Specsavers, Priceline, Adidas, Lego, Virgin, Ben & Jerry’s, Honda vs. Oreo … to name a few
Update to the use of Agile (Jan 29, 2015)— a great story, Lesson Learned from Scaling a Product, from Paul Adams (VP of Product) at Intercom on how they are build product and scaling the team to the demands on customers and the business.
My own experiences on creating Agile for Marketing are based on running product at several companies when CMO/head of marketing and where I have been lucky to work with teams who were able to hit on some of the points Paddy touches on them all in his article:
- Guidelines for making decisions — based on data + good filters & right instincts — some people are just one, data or instinctual, and the team can bring those together to get 1+1=3 like results
- Accountability — when individuals and team take ownership of deliverables that drive outcomes and not just the “doing” or the “motion”
- A lightweight, transparent, comprehensive roadmap — with the ability to twist and turn (not a fan of that word pivot), sometimes go out on a limb ,this depends on are you building product where people may not know they need the feature yet, yet meaning they will buy/use it in near future
- A culture of goal setting — I would expand this to KPIs based on outcomes and results you drive from what you build/deliver, and like #2 not just “motion” e.g. bad KPI = created new product marketing piece, good KPI = new marketing piece helped drive 10% more leads
Finally, it’s all about the mini WOW moments that drive the big wins, so celebrate those WOW moments!
