Agile Marketing


#1

Feeling quite ambivalent about this article. I’m not sure what I’m reacting to.

I know marketing can suit a scrum approach OR scrumban OR Kanban depending on the situation. Something in this feels like I want to ask more questions?

The whole article can be captured in this paragraph

Outreach is focused on the company customer, but it’s all in service to the work of product development teams. Making this distinction is key when it comes to agile marketing because it delineates just how critical it is to rethink internal operations to, ultimately, better serve the hallowed company customer. You can run email campaigns and targeted ads across social platforms, but if siloed it runs the risk of failing to serve the greater organisational goal.

I think the issue I face is it feels like “trust me” proposition, not a let me show you WHY this idea works. Am I wrong?


#2

Not wrong!!!


#3

That article felt like an intro/fluff piece…

I’ve been helping a couple parts of our marketing group to agile in my current environment… we use strict Scrum in the areas where strategic work is balanced with tactical (tracking long term backlog/goals) and we use Kanban for the print side of the house where work isn’t known until days in advance and the team is able to never fall too far behind.


#4

There are prob better resources to share with an agile curious marketing team…

Google search, with recent (2017-2018) resources:


#5

Hi, I don’t disagree that the article makes me cringe a little. (more than a little.) The part which got me, specifically, was the notion that Scrum helps them to involve their Product team “at the front end of a project”.

Having said that, however, I re-read the article with this question in mind: If I work in a rather conventional marking department, and the Product teams have told us they’re trying to use Scrum… then what benefits will I experience as a marketing department? Well, a few things:

  • The Product Teams will want our early and regular involvement as they begin building and as they continue building. They’ll not expect us to design and define everything up front anymore. Great!
  • The Product Team, even after they’ve started building, will be reprioritizing their work each Sprint cycle… this would enable us to inject Marketing experiments into their flow – such A/B experiments.

What I mean, I suppose, is that I re-read the article NOT believing for a moment that this particular marketing group is using Scrum. Rather, they are interfacing with Product Teams who are using Scrum. For now, Marketing and Production are still segregated, but perhaps they’ll find ways to become cross-functional. And the article is a early signal of that cross-functional thinking.


#6

I think that may have been what I reacted to. I’m coming to a position, that scrum makes sense for novel work within marketing. By novel, I mean something that has the need to be iteratively explored and developed. The sprint bounds don’t have to be the standard, two weeks, but are still important.

For more regular work, Kanban and flow with swimlanes make sense to me.

If self-organisation is desired, a cross-functional team make complete sense in any environment and provides greater flexibility and resiliency within the team. This though isn’t limited to marketing. Most marketing people I’ve met over the years often have other skills lurking arournd.


#7

Gil Broza has a newish book out - on my night stand, haven’t started yet:

Saw this post recently from Stacey Ackerman:

And yetanother cert:

Good set of learning outcomes from the ICAgile course: