dgroup • Agile Marketing — The Right System is the Key to Success

In today’s world uncertainty, rapid change and volatility can lead to customer demands having already changed and the product having become obsolete even before it is released. Agile methods address those problems and challenge the traditional way of developing products — whether it is software or marketing campaigns. Software development engineers already tackled this problem years ago and changed to agile development methods such as DevOps or Scrum. In contrast, agile marketing is still in its infancy.

These days, everything is becoming agile: agile development, agile organization, agile marketing. As discussed in “Building the Marketing Organization 2.0 — The Transformation to an Agile Way of Working”, marketeers can learn from agile software development to adapt to ever-changing customer demands.

Benefits of agile marketing

• Speed to market: Transforming to agile marketing helps companies to significantly improve time to market along the process from generating ideas and developing campaigns or products. Speed increases by continuous iterations and process optimizations based on previous learnings.
• Respond to change: Agile marketing is the best method to keep pace with changing customer demands by saving a certain amount of marketing resources anticipating the unavoidable changes and by the short nature of sprints.
• Productivity: Productivity can be measured in several ways, e.g. in user stories completed, story points or in terms of results like conversion rates or visits on a site. In a survey done by Forbes, 87% of addressed marketing professionals said that adopting agile made their teams more productive.
• Prioritization: An agile approach requires that the stakeholders do continuous prioritizations of their requests, have an overview of all resources available and can discuss how to utilize those best.
• Customer satisfaction: Agile marketing is customer-centric and continuously addressing changes in customer demands, their needs are met quickly and customer satisfaction tends to increase.

Agile in action: Hilton

Hilton is using an agile-based approach to testing designs for the company’s online reservations pages. The team started with a first experiment by focusing only on improving room upgrades. Then the team moved to different rooms with different frontend visualizations at different points in the consumer journey. Doing iterative experiments allowed the team to optimize the experience resulting in immediate uplift in upgrades and sales.

Discovering the agile system that’s right for you

In order to benefit from the major advantages of transforming the traditional marketing department to an agile one, the choice of the best suitable agile system is crucial. The Scrum methodology is one of the most popular ways for new teams to adopt an agile marketing approach, but it’s by no means the only option. Another popular and more pragmatic system is Kanban. A third, called Scrumban, is a hybrid form that aims to combine the benefits of both Scrum and Kanban.

1. Scrum

Scrum is an iterative and prescriptive process using the agile methodology. A team plans and commits to completing a certain amount of work in a certain time period called a sprint. At the end of each sprint, the team reviews the work together with a product owner. Furthermore, a retrospective meeting is hold to analyze the processes during the sprint and identify team improvements for the next sprint.

Each scrum team consists of a scrum master who facilitates the scrum process, a product owner who is responsible for the actual product and the team that develops the work packages collected and prioritized in the product backlog.

One of the primary motivations for moving a team to Scrum is to get loose from the restrictive and inefficient processes of the waterfall model. In this model, too much time is lost with planning and designing before any work starts and teams find themselves unable to respond to change later in the project. In contrast, Scrum builds products in iterative sprints and is opened to react to newly learned insights.

2. Kanban

As with most agile methodologies, Kanban is designed to make teams work better, and anything that isn’t working for your particular group should be up for change. Kanban consists of three core components:

• Product backlog: It contains all work packages, defined as user stories, that are added by business owners, project managers and all other stakeholders that are involved in the decision about what work the team does.
• Columns and lanes through which stories move: This visualization of a story’s progress is a crucial part of the transparency that makes Kanban a suitable agile option. Each column represents a certain process step, e.g. “in development” or “in testing”.
• Work in progress (WIP) limits: Each column/lane has a limit, and once that limit is met no new user stories can be allowed to move into that lane until one is moved out. For example, if you have five stories that are “in testing” by a developer and your WIP limit for that lane is five, you can’t move any more items for testing into that lane until one gets moved out.
• Continuous releases: In contrast to scrum, there are no sprints in pure Kanban that require you to release a new iteration after a set period of time. In lieu thereof, Kanban teams release software or marketing projects as soon as they are completed.

Kanban offers possibilities of prioritizing work, offering a transparent view of what marketing is working on, and maintaining a steady flow of manageable work packages across the marketing team.

3. Scrumban

Scrumban has been designed for more mature agile teams, working in an unpredictable environment where requirements frequently change, and/or teams who are working more on existing products rather than on creating new ones.

It combines some of the structural components of Scrum along with the pull-based nature of Kanban. Scrumban is driven by events and demand and focuses on minimal planning, having just enough user stories defined in the backlog to give the team enough important work to do next. Scrumban focuses on specialized roles within the team (a more realistic way to handle marketing skill sets) instead of cross-functional teams in Scrum.

Agile marketing teams in Scrumban also rely on WIP (Work in Progress) limits to ensure that they are not overcommitting themselves, and that they are focusing on delivering completed work packages of consistently high quality rather than focusing on too many separate tasks.

Pure Scrum provides a rather strict framework that sometimes leads to the feeling of striving more to comply with all Scrum processes than focusing on the actual product. Scrumban therefore can give teams the power to adapt and change to stakeholder and production needs, without feeling overburdened by their project methodology.

Agile in action: ING Bank

ING is a leading bank in the Netherlands offering banking, investments, life insurance and retirement products and services. After strong dissatisfaction with a resource-consuming and unsuccessful project in IT services, ING NL bank decided to adopt the Scrum methodology.

During the initial steps of adopting Scrum, ING was accompanied by an external consultancy who ensured that software delivery was still managed in budget and time but with flexible scope. Accepting that the output of the software delivery processes could no longer be fully predicted upfront was a major shift in the organization and culture. However, the output improved and was available faster. Cycle time for similar projects decreased from the usual 3–6 months to 6–9 weeks. Cost savings in software delivery are in the range of 30–50%. Overall time to market of IT changes improved with 37%. Among the employees, the levels of innovation, energy and job satisfaction drastically increased, as did craftsmanship and collaboration.

The impressive benefits of agile marketing can only be leveraged by choosing and adopting the most suitable agile method that fits into your team’s culture. Experts can assist in finding the right solution and leading through the huge change process.

Sebastian Straube is a consultant for digital transformation realizing online and e-Commerce projects. He is a Certified Scrum Product Owner and an expert in agile product management, especially in building e-Commerce platforms.

Originally published at www.d-group.com.