Having explored, experimented and applied agile practices within the marketing function for the past few years, I feel like I have as many questions today as when we first started. We have learned a lot. But I think there is a bigger dance afoot and that is the complete rethinking and restructuring of marketing such that we are able to live the dream of agile – creating customer value quicker, committing to a data-driven approach more completely and empowering teams to make decisions faster while being happier at their jobs.
So, this post is filled with more questions than answers.
We have been experimenting with agile marketing practices – adopting those that work well and dropping others that seem too much of a forced-fit. Meanwhile, we have built a marketing technology and data strategy which articulates the most important marketing capabilities to grow and establish to support our business. We have teams and specialisms in campaign management (think email plus), social media marketing and communications, and measurement, for example.
Therein lies the conflict: agile marketing teams focused on specific journeys vs. specialty disciplines applied to many, many campaigns and projects.
Here’s how that conflict plays out:
Team: Do You Have Enough People
You know that being great at ever-more-sophisticated campaign management or relationship management is key to your business. So, you assemble the best capability – people, process, technology and data – to design and execute. To get the most out of that capability, you apply it to as many parts of your business and their customers as you can. If your business is already organized around “journeys’ then you are challenged with deploying these marketing specialists into multiple journey teams. Staffing becomes a real challenge. How do you have enough marketing experts to assign to all the right journeys? Most journey-based models call for dedicated teams working in some sort of sprint cycle. With dozens of active journey teams, that calls for a lot of marketing expertise.
McKinsey’s guide to Agile Marketing highlights the core issue implicit in the agile model,
“While these elements are crucial for success, the most important item is the people—bringing together a small team of talented people who can work together at speed. They should possess skills across multiple functions (both internal and external), be released from their “BAU” (business as usual) day jobs to work together full time, and be collocated in a “war room”. The mission of the war-room team, as these groups are sometimes called (though companies also refer to them by other names, such as “pod” or “tribe”) is to execute a series of quick-turnaround experiments designed to create real bottom-line impact.”
How do you staff enough marketing specialists against many pods or tribes while still maintaining some “center of expertise?”
Team: Do You Have Enough “Specialist-Generalists”
A new tension arises: specialists vs. generalists. Is there a difference between what an 8-year email marketing director can do vs. a 2-year email specialist can do? Yup. So, we tend to adopt the agency or consulting paradigm of having senior folks supervise the work of many juniors. “Pyramids” spring up all over the place where the senior leader at the pinnacle quickly becomes a choke point or barrier to scale.
If your marketing organization serves multiple business units (each, theoretically, with multiple journeys on their “must-do” list) then the model of senior and more junior marketing experts where the seniors supervise the work of the juniors quickly starts to ache at the seams.
David Edelman, Jason Heller, and Steven Spittaels from McKinsey recommends reducing the senior leader bottleneck:
“The marketing organization’s senior leaders will understandably need to oversee the activities of the war-room team. But they ought to interact with the team in a lightweight manner—once every three or four weeks, for example. Automated dashboards with key metrics can help provide leadership with transparency.”
Some organizational experts focus on the “T-shaped” team member. Here’s how Jason Yip puts it:
“As opposed to an expert in one thing (I-shaped) or a “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist, a “t-shaped person” is an expert in at least one thing but also somewhat capable in many other things. An alternate phrase for “t-shaped” is “generalizing specialist”.”
Hiring and training T-shaped team members takes intention, it doesn't just happen. The biggest commitment is training. To make specialists into great generalists, there is more they can learn and get experience with. To deepen their specialism in the fast-paced universe of data and technology-fueled marketing, they also need more learning opportunities.
Are you growing T-shapes vs, bulking up on specialisms? And what is the right balance?
Process: Go Full Agile or Go Home?
We have seen quick benefits to sprints, stand-ups, retrospectives and demos in some of our consistent teams like social media and content. These teams work together all the time. They have extended team members in legal and the business units who can be pulled into these group rituals. Still, it’s not full agile (Think SAFe Agile). We’ve been trained and tried it but struggle to make it all work in marketing.
Agile Sherpas in the 2nd Annual State of Agile Marketing Report put it this way:
“Hybrid frameworks are becoming increasingly common on Agile marketing teams, with 54% of Agile respondents saying this is how they approach their process. This is a big jump from 2018, when only 44% reported the use of hybrid frameworks.”
We are cherry-picking the process that seems to work best in established marketing teams. We tell ourselves that marketing is unlike a software product team or a manufacturing team where more complete agile can work well.
Are we adopting the bits that work best or avoiding the pain of restructuring the complete marketing function to work in the continuous improvement cycle of full agile?
Tools: Are Kanban Boards an Improvement or a Fad?
We have evolved from taped-up Kanban boards on the walls to software like Rally. The Kanban board is one of the most-adopted tools within our team. We will continue to expand its use and look for ways to keep it transparent and available to everyone in the belief that it has really advanced our game.
Remember the days of Basecamp? I mean old Basecamp which was the remedy to Gantt chart project management. Or other tools meant to streamline marketing processes. While Basecamp is still used today, Slack and Microsoft Teams are the rage. What will last?
Here’s why I see Kanban as a lasting improvement:
- The teams doing the work really like it’s transparency and clarity.
- Kanban boards are great for prioritizing work for teams with fixed capacity and, just as importantly, they help make the argument for more resources from business leaders.
- They support a greater level of transparency across the whole team and today’s workforce demands that.
- Kanban boards are simple. They almost defy complexity which makes them east to adopt and easier to manage.
- Because they’re simple, they are cheap to stand up and maintain.
- They provoke discussions when something is being held up by someone or something. There’s that transparency again as it’s harder to hide the bottlenecks.
Will agile tools change how we do things for at least the next 5-10 years or will they flame out quickly?
Agile marketing remains new and emergent. A lot of marketing leaders are trying out various aspects. Fewer are embracing it as a full, revolutionary change to how they staff and apply marketing to their business. I am looking forward to meeting other marketers at the ANA Digital and Social event next week where I will host a round table on agile marketing - mostly so I can ask all of these questions and here how others are experiencing applying agile to marketing.
Related Posts on Agile Marketing: This Blog
Why Agile Marketing is New and Important
Agile Marketing combines lessons from the quick, collaborative approach of agile software development with the reliance on insights from the planners and the use of response data in performance marketing to create a way to plan and execute marketing that is fast, responsive, and measured.
Eight Principles and Voices of Agile Marketing
We are borrowing from the evolution in the production management and software development worlds. The aim is to make marketing more responsive, iterative and more impactful.
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