Bringing Agility to Marketing
Ever since the Agile Manifesto was first published in 2001, Agile Practitioners have been applying its concepts to software development. With various frameworks and methodologies that have showed up, the practice has really morphed and matured over time.
However, the notion of Agile Marketing is still a relatively new concept. It’s something that we’re trying for the first time at TradeGecko. We believe that focusing on hypothesis-driven methodologies in rapid iteration will lead us to our conversion and customer-acquisition goals. That applies to every paid ad, blog post, and landing page that we put together.
What does an Agile Marketing team look like?
To come up with what an Agile Marketing team looked like, we took a lot of inspiration from our company values and the agile marketing manifesto. Here were the top things that we cared about:
- Team ownership
We determine the backlog, priorities, process and execution as a team. We succeed and fail together as one.
2. We don’t do anything we can’t measure
Why? Because we can’t improve what we don’t measure. We don’t measure vanity metrics, we measure in cold, hard metrics that matter (qualitative and quantitative).
3. Being the best at getting better by always being curious
The biggest thing we care about is learning. We measure how doing things affects adjacent areas and we’re always curious about how we’re changing the way people engage with us. We focus on consistent learnings that help drive our backlog.
We’re brutal at cutting things that don’t work, and are resourceful at throwing our team’s weight behind things that do.
4. JFDI
We value actions over words. When in doubt, we try, experiment and see if it works. Ship it and let data do the talking.
Opting for SCRUM
Why SCRUM?
While we did have a few traditional Agile methodologies to work with, the one we opted for was SCRUM (with two week sprints). Here are a few reasons why we chose SCRUM as a framework:
- Transparency
SCRUM provides a clear set of team deliverables that we could commit to on a bi-weekly basis. We send out a Sprint Kickoff email at the beginning of every sprint to make our commitments clear to the company.
2. Ceremonies provide structure
While SCRUM has been criticized for being too heavy on the ceremonies, we felt that these ceremonies help keep the team in check and ensure that we don’t skip important activities like retrospectives or prioritizing our backlog when things get too busy.
3. Delivering as a team
SCRUM is big on committing a set of work items and delivering the sprint’s deliverables as a team. Team ownership was one of the core values that we cared about. As such, ensuring that we finish what we had committed to in the beginning of a sprint as a team mattered a lot.
Taking a first stab
Our SCRUM board
The structure of the board is simple — it’s built so that every column was absolutely necessary. The Backlog always ebbs and flows as stories move up and down the list. Anything on and to the right of To-Do is locked to a specific sprint.
We currently use Trello as a backlog management tool. While Trello doesn’t quite support SCRUM out of the box, it seems to be working well for our purposes with minor tweaks (e.g. columns that get archived at the end of a sprint).
Populating our initial backlog
To build up our initial backlog, we got everyone to put down all of their Work in Progress (WIP) and Future work items that they cared about. We further segmented it into small, medium, and large stories. Given these set of stories, we populated the backlog and prioritized it at our first grooming meeting.
Our stories usually contain a few key components:
- A proper story title in the template of: “As a … I want to … So that…”
- A hypothesis in the template of: “We believe that doing … will result in… we know that we’re successful if…”
- Story points (decided on as a team during grooming)
- Acceptance criteria to determine when a story is truly done
Over-communicate
We’ve publicly shared our backlog with the entire company, where they can see what deliverables we’ve committed to, how we’ve prioritized our stories, and what items we have on our backlog. We have also allowed anyone in the company to bring new items to the backlog if they have an idea, suggestion, or need from the marketing team.
Focus on continuous improvement
What’s next? We’ll find out soon enough. In a few days, we’ll be done our first sprint. Our first retrospective will certainly shed light on what went well, what didn’t, and how we can continue to morph this process for our team!
About me
I’m currently the Growth Lead at TradeGecko. Former PM at Microsoft and UX Researcher at IBM.
Hit me up at yiwei.ang@tradegecko.com or http://www.yiweiang.me
