#CMO2020 “Growing Up Fast: How New Agile Practices Can Move Marketing and Innovation Past the Old Business Stalemates”

By: Kelley Plasterer

Published in

Digital Marketing

4 min readMay 12, 2015

As part of our CMO 2020 program, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO of Bit Torrent and author of Growing Up Fast: How New Agile Practices Can Move Marketing and Innovation Past the Old Business Stalemates, stopped by Eastwick to talk about what matters most to him as a CMO and to discuss his vision for managing a new era of marketing.

He contributed valuable information about the differences between “peace time” and “war time” companies, and how agile marketing worked in different settings. Here are a few key essentials we learned on how to adopt a more agile marketing strategy.

How do you define agile marketing?

In the 1950s, software design adopted the Waterfall Model, a technique used for building and construction. However, this system did not account for customer feedback. There was a strong false feedback loop as customer feedback was not involved in the process, and the only thing marketing had available was half-assed focus groups.

Agile is a systematic way to meet the day-to-day needs of a business, while still preserving some time to experiment and adapt throughout the process. You must constantly be moving between innovation and customer needs. There is an art to prioritizing both and it depends on if you company is in peace time or war time.

How do you define peace time and war time?

Peace time is about trying to invent a new way to work. You have the time to sequentially line up all the right resources. In peace time you can describe, analyze, and evaluate your customers. The backlog is organized by durable teams and prioritized by product owners. Data is your influence tool.

In war time prioritization shifts to the business owner’s responsibility and the process becomes to evaluate and prescribe. The data sets your priority. It is crucial to push decision-making out, and make sure the day-to-day needs are met. The backlog becomes the only priority.

Where is the line for war time? How do you know?

You are in war time when, if you don’t hit the objective, the company will be done. This is often the case with seed stage companies as they have to validate themselves to get the next round of funding.

CEO top priorities have shifted to innovation being their key objective. Why has that changed so drastically?

My rough estimate is that the key tech changed. Solving for problems is happening in different ways. Commerce has been around forever, but Amazon found a way to reinvent it, using the technology available. Technology and the Internet have provided a completely different playing field. CEOs used to worry about enterprise solving business, but now it is the agility of bringing a product to market that can solve for issues customers are facing.

Why is marketing struggling with agile practices?

Marketing still consistently operates in peace time. We use a process very similar to the Waterfall Method where we think customer equals the same as channel. We presuppose that we know the answer, but now that software can deliver directly to customer, we can receive direct data, and need to be better about analyzing and acting upon it.

Communication and time management are trained into engineers’ workflow, but not marketers. Saying you will have the report “next Wednesday” is not sustainable. Those who are incentivized deal with the chaos, and marketing has to adopt a faster method of adapting.

How can marketing adopt more engineering practices?

Marketing needs to use more of the scrum method — in this process everyone stands up in a room to try and solve problems together, and deliver over the shoulder advice. The group meets together for 15 minutes to explain what they did yesterday, and what they are going to work on today. It offers real-time feedback within a team.

How do you conduct this with remote employees?

You first and foremost must have video conference. It is essential to demonstrate the feeling “I am here because of you. I am sharing with you what is going on, and I need your feedback.” You end up working with product and people you would not have expected, and it is a helpful system for both introverts and extroverts.