Podcasts

The Marketing Book Podcast: “The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing” by Jim Ewel

The Martech Show Episode #6: The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

An Interview with Jim Ewel | A Deep Dive into Agile Marketing with John Cass

School for Startups Radio – my section begins at around the 24 minute mark

The Dave Pamah Show: How Marketers Can Win In A Covid-19 World with Jim Ewel

Articles

Why Traditional Marketing is Broken (And 5 Ways to Fix It)

Agile: Can the Wrong Tool Derail Your Transformation?

More Than a Buzzword: Make Agile Marketing Work with These 4 Critical Shifts

How to Overcome Common Agile Marketing Challenges

4 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Improve Their Business with Agile Marketing

Did COVID-19 Destroy Your Marketing Plan? Avoid a Repeat with Agile

The Young Upstarts: Inteview with Jim Ewel, Author of ‘The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing’

The post The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing: Recent Podcasts and Articles appeared first on Agile Marketing.

A few weeks ago I asked my readers what they’d like to make sure that I covered in my new book The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing.  I received lots of great ideas but one in particular from Pete Rakozy cried out for a new post. Pete asked for a step-by-step roll out plan over twelve weeks. At first, I resisted this idea. No one plan would suit every organization. But then I thought that most organizations would appreciate a starting point, even if they modified it heavily.

So here it is. But let me repeat, this plan is meant to be a starting point for a conversation. Every organization is different. It is also a rapid adoption plan. I don’t recommend moving much faster than this plan. Change takes time. If your organization needs more time, take it.

I’ve used terminology from Scrum, specifically describing Sprints. If you practice Kanban, don’t worry about this. Just follow along week by week. I do recommend that even if you practice Kanban, that you hold Reviews and Retrospectives during the first twelve weeks. After that, you can hold them as needed.

I also refer to pages and chapters of my book The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing. While you don’t need the book to implement this plan, it will certainly help.

If you have feedback on the plan, I’d love to hear it. Send me email using the contact link on this blog.

Sprint zero (weeks 1 and 2)

Theme: Getting Aligned, Getting Ready

• Training – get training from an Agile marketing specialist for the entire team. Scrum Master training can help scrum masters but won’t help the team. You also need someone who can translate Agile terms and techniques designed to manage software development into terms and techniques that work for marketing. Consider getting certification training. IC-Agile qualifies both trainers and their courses and delivers a formal certification.
• Get aligned on the big 3 questions (Chapter 5)
  • Why are you adopting Agile marketing?
  • What does success look like?
  • How will you measure whether you are succeeding or not?
• Complete the poster exercise and distribute the poster broadly (Chapter 20, page 200)
• Get aligned with your business teams or your clients if you’re an agency. Explain what you’re doing, but don’t use Agile language. Align on twhat is most important for them and how you’re going to measure it, how much they want to be involved, and schedule Review sessions for the first twelve weeks according to the schedule below (even if you’re practicing Kanban).
• Form 1 or 2 cross-functional teams (Chapter 6). Don’t try to convert the entire organization to cross-functional teams. Start slow and learn what works for you.
• Decide which methodology you’re going to use: Scrum, Kanban or formal Scrumban (Chapters 7-10). If you think you want to combine some of the best practices of Scrum and Kanban into your own version of Scrumban, don’t. You can practice Scrumban, but only the formal version described in Chapter 10. Don’t worry, you can switch methodologies later or combine the best of the three methodologies to fit your organization’s needs. But don’t do this until you deeply understand the formal methodologies with all of their practices intact.
• Select a tracking tool. Choose one that was designed for Agile, not one where Agile was retrofitted on to an older tool.
• Build your initial backlog of deliverables and tasks (Chapter 8). Make sure each deliverable has a user story and that you have more deliverables than tasks.
• Design your Kanban boards (Chapter 9). Make sure you have a small number of process policies, work-in-progress limits (WIP) and queues. Don’t go overboard on process policies or WIP limits. Start small.
• Negotiate Service level agreements (SLAs) where you have any external dependencies on other parts of the organization, contractors, or outside agencies
• Hold your first Sprint planning session or Kanban prioritization session.
• Appoint at least two middle managers and one senior leader to the Agile leadership council.
• Hold your first Agile leadership council meeting, explaining everything you’ve done so far and getting their commitment to help you. Also make sure that they’re committed to de-centralized decision making. Have an honest conversation about where decisions should be made. You’re almost certainly still making too many decisions to high in the organization.
• Optional: Agree as a team on a first draft of a marketing model canvas (pages 40-42).
• Optional: Create personas for your top 2-3 buyers or influencers (Chapter 17).

Sprint One (weeks 3 and 4)

Theme: Achieving some initial successes

• Under commit – my usual recommendation is that you plan your initial Sprint for 70% capacity, saving 20% for overhead (email, Slack, unrelated meetings, etc.) and 10% for interruptions. For Sprint One, I want you to commit to no more than 60% capacity and no interruptions. Make sure that the team can finish everything committed for the Sprint. If you finish early, pull in a few tasks from the backlog. Chapter 8 covers how to calculate initial capacity in terms of story points.
• Practice canonical Scrum or Kanban – you need to experience all of the aspects of these methodologies (daily standups, deferred assignments of tasks/stories, reviews, retrospectives in the case of Scrum, flow, WIP limits, process policies in the case of Kanban). Although reviews and retrospectives are not part of Kanban, do them.
• Measure your velocity (Scrum) or cycle time (Kanban). Also measure any impact to business outcomes.
• Hold your first Review with the business units and Retrospective. Publish a Retrospective report (page 91-92).
• Celebrate the progress you’ve made in a public way
• Hold your second leadership council meeting – Celebrate what went well, talk about what didn’t go well and your plan to adjust, and bring up specific blocking issues and get leadership’s commitment to unblocking these issues.

Sprint Two (weeks 5 and 6)

Theme: Adjusting and iterating based on your retrospective (continuous improvement)

• Commit to 65% capacity, at most 1 interruption per week
• Decide how you’re going to handle interruptions/rush projects
• Continue to practice canonical Scrum/Kanban, but adjust by doing it even more like it’s “supposed” to be done, adding/adjusting Process Policies, discussing SLAs, figuring out where your bottlenecks are in your Kanban board and fixing these bottlenecks. If getting approvals in a timely manner are a bottleneck, work hard to address this problem this week.
• Make sure you hold a Review and a Retrospective. Publish your second retrospective report.
• Hold your third leadership council meeting. Same format as your previous leadership council meeting.

Sprint Three (weeks 7 and 8)

Theme: Executing at full capacity, continuing to adjust and iterate

• Based on the previous two “Sprints”, decide how much capacity you really have and what you can commit to. Put together formal policies for handling interruptions. You can now make minor adjustments to Scrum/Kanban if you feel it necessary
• Focus on outcomes, not outputs. How are you impacting business outcomes?
• Adjust and iterate based on your previous Sprint’s Review and Retrospective
• Hold a Review and Retrospective for this Sprint
• Hold your fourth leadership council meetings

Sprint Four (week 9)

Theme: Increasing your metabolism
You’re moving to one-week Sprints if you practice Scrum. If Kanban, your focus is on improving your cycle times and lead times.

• If you are a team that can practice validated learning (and all cross-functional teams should be), start to figure out how you’re going to run experiments (Chapter 11). Run one or two tests this week.
• If you didn’t build a marketing model canvas in Sprint Zero, build one now. Decide which aspects of your canvas are assumptions that need testing or where change could have the greatest impact.
• You should by now be moving away from a campaign-based approach to one of continuous improvement.
• Hold a Review and Retrospective for this Sprint. No leadership council meeting this week.

Sprint Five (week 10)

Theme: Increasing your metabolism and diving deep on validated learning

• Does moving to one-week Sprints or increasing your cycle time require adjustments to how you practice Scrum or Kanban? From Sprint Four’s Retrospective, make adjustments.
• Increase the number of experiments per week that you’re running. If you ran 1 last week, run 2 this week. If you ran 2, run 4 this week.
• Hold a Review and Retrospective for this Sprint.
• Hold your fifth leadership council meeting.

Sprint Six (week 11)

Theme: Adjusting to change

• How has what you’ve done so far helped you adjust to change? What specific processes do you need to put in place in addition to Scrum/Kanban to help you adjust to change? Check out chapter 12 of my book.
• Continue to increase your metabolism and if you’re ready, increase the number of tests you run this week. If you’re not ready, don’t worry. Set yourself goals for increasing the number of tests in future weeks.
• Hold a Review and Retrospective for this Sprint. No leadership council meeting this week.

Sprint 7 (week 12)

Theme: Customer focus
How has everything that you’ve done in weeks 1 to 11 helped you achieve a better customer focus? What do you still need to change?

• If you didn’t create them in Sprint Zero, create personas for your top 2-3 buyers/influencers (Chapter 17).
• Create a first draft of a customer journey (Chapter 17).
• Do a content audit for each of the personas you’ve created for each stage in their customer journey. Do you have enough content? Do you have the right content? Which content is the most effective?
• Begin to think about how you’re going to make this sustainable. Do you need to move back to two-week Sprints or reduce expectations for cycle time/lead time for Kanban?

QBR (week 13)

Theme: Review of your first twelve weeks and planning for the next twelve weeks

Hold a quarterly business review (QBR) or as it’s sometimes known, a Big Room Planning Session, over two days. Review what went well and what needs work from your first 12 weeks, and plan out the next quarter.

If you’d like a Microsoft Word version of this plan that you can modify, you can download it here.

The post The Twelve-Week Agile Marketing Adoption Plan appeared first on Agile Marketing.

What is Portfolio Kanban?

Portfolio Kanban uses a hierarchy of  Kanban boards to allow individuals and teams to visualize multiple projects and tasks and how those projects and tasks fit into the company’s core strategies and major programs. For executives, it can show at a glance the status of various programs and projects, and where things stand in terms of execution and deliverables. Portfolio Kanban can replace status reports and status meetings, saving the team time and providing management an up-to-date view of critical projects without the delays and overhead associated with other methods of reporting.

Portfolio Kanban also allows management and the team to see project investments as a portfolio – a mix of different kinds of project investments designed to balance risk, balance geographies or balance different kinds of marketing activities. Just as your financial portfolio might have large cap and small cap stocks, bonds, domestic and international investments, real estate and alternative investments in order to reduce your overall risk and to take advantage of hot markets, so to can your portfolio of project investments include low risk and high risk investments, multiple markets and multiple channels, in order to create a balanced approach.

Portfolio Kanban also encourages collaboration, allowing different teams to see how their work fits into the whole, and how delays in one team not only impact the schedule, but also how they impact other teams.

Lastly, if the Kanban principles of visualization, work in progress limits and flow management are used, portfolio Kanban can improve the smooth delivery of work and its predictability of delivery.

How Do Marketing Teams Use Portfolio Kanban?

There are at least 4 different ways that I’ve seen marketing teams use Portfolio Kanban:

• Within the marketing team to manage multiple initiatives
• Within the marketing team to manage their portfolio of work, both in terms of type of work and in terms of near-term vs long-term
• Beyond the marketing team, as a visual status tool for multiple departments and sometimes the company or division as a whole
• As a true Kanban tool, managing the work of multiple teams and applying work in progress limits and flow management

There is a 5th approach that marketers should be aware of, particularly if their company is practicing SAFe. Portfolio Kanban is used in SAFe to manage epics and to apply lean portfolio management techniques, primarily for developers.

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Managing Multiple Initiatives

Let’s say that your marketing team is trying to deliver several initiatives at once: you’re writing a new lead magnet offering for new subscribers, you’re doing a major facelift of the front page of the website, and you’re implementing a new welcome sequence in your marketing automation software. You’d like to track the status of all three of these initiatives and to see at a glance how they’re progressing. You can construct a relatively simple Kanban board with a swimlane on top representing the initiatives and a second swimlane below representing the work breakdown. The various cards representing the work breakdown of each initiative are tied to the initiative in a parent child relationship. For example, if the new lead magnet has 5 chapters, each of these chapters might represent a work item, and be represented in a card. These 5 cards are child cards of the parent initiative card.

As child cards are moved from column to column, the initiative card may either be moved itself, or a percent completion indicator may be updated. For example, in the portfolio kanban board below, if one of the work breakdown cards in the New Lead Magnet initiative is moved into the Doing column, then the Lead Magnet Initiative card is moved into the Doing column. In a similar fashion, if all of the work breakdown cards of the New Front Page initiative are moved in to the Done column, indicating that 100% of the work is done for that initiative, then the New Front Page initiative card is moved into the done column. As work breakdown cards are completed, the percent completed status will also be updated.

Some tools, like Kanbanize and Swift Kanban, perhaps others, can move cards automatically and updated the percent complete. Other tools require modest manual efforts to move cards and to track percent completion.

Managing the Marketing Portfolio

I learned this method of using Portfolio Kanban from Denise Grey when she was at Leankit. This approach allows a marketing team to visualize their portfolio of work at a glance, both in terms of type of work, and also as they track the work that they’re going to do in coming months and quarters.

Denise divided her Kanban board into three major sections: what we’re currently working on, near-term deliverables and further out initiatives. In the what we’re currently working on section, she further divided the work into strategy, awareness, demand generation, product marketing and marketing operations. She then tracked the work in each one of these areas in a simple workflow of planning, doing, reviewing and deploying. In the section on near-term deliverables, she looked at this month, next month and two months out in terms of the same four categories of awareness, demand generation, product marketing and marketing operations, and tied these into major marketing initiatives (i.e., strategy). Finally, in terms of further out initiatives, she listed a backlog of items, some for next quarter, some for two quarters out.

This board allowed Denise and her team to see at a glance the portfolio of work that they were currently working on, as well as to plan future work, and to make sure that they weren’t neglecting any one particular area.

Visual Status Tool

The third approach to Portfolio Kanban, represented by the image at the top of this post, provides a visual representation of work items, projects and programs across multiple departments, and how those projects and programs contribute to key corporate strategies.

To do this successfully requires multiple boards. For example, a team may have their own team kanban board, tracking that teams individual tasks on cards, with that teams flow of work. A higher level board may show how those tasks relate to various projects, with parent-child relationships between the work item cards and the projects. Projects will require work from multiple teams, and the flow of work in a project can be tracked both by stage and by percent completion in each stage.

Project level boards can be owned by project managers. In turn, program managers may have their own board, tracking multiple projects contributing to each program. The highest level board would track the various programs, and how they contribute to the key corporate strategies.

Although in this example, the highest level is at the level of the CEO, it is not necessary to build a Portfolio Kanban at the CEO level. Boards can be built at any level of the organization or of the work to be done.

Using Portfolio Kanban as a visual status tool can be used both by teams that practice Kanban and also by those that practice Scrum. IThe most important contribution of this approach is the visual delivery of status. This reduces the amount of status meetings necessary, and also ensures that status is always up to date.

Portfolio Kanban with Active Management

For teams that practice Kanban, portfolio kanban can be a powerful tool to manage the work of multiple teams and to ensure the consistent flow of work, identifying bottlenecks and eliminating blocking factors before they delay entire projects and programs. With this approach, teams will need to establish work in progress (WIP) limits throughout the hierarchy of boards, measure cycle time and flow and look at certain advanced Kanban metrics such as cumulative flow diagrams and heatmaps. This approach can replace GANNT charts and traditional backward-looking project management approaches, but it requires a high level of Kanban knowledge and team discipline. It also requires coordination across multiple departments and at different levels of the organization. While powerful, it is also quite complex.

If you’re not currently using Portfolio Kanban, I encourage you to take a look at it and see how it can be used in your marketing organization. For additional resources, take a look at this series of articles on Portfolio Kanban from Kanbanize or this video from Swift Kanban.

The post Portfolio Kanban appeared first on Agile Marketing.

Build a Backlog Using Your Current To Do List

Many teams get started with Agile Marketing by building an agile marketing backlog using their current list of marketing to do’s. They convert each one of their to do items (write a blog, build a display ad campaign, etc) into a user story, and this becomes an entry into their agile marketing backlog. For example, let’s say that you need to generate a creative for a display advertising campaign for your theme park. Your To Do item might have been called “Kids fly free promotion”, and here is a sample card that you would create for the marketing backlog. Figure 1 – Sample Marketing Backlog Card

Note that not all of these items will be filled out at the time that you create the card. For example, you might not assign priorities, story points or due dates unitl later and you certainly wouldn’t have the blocked indicator on an item in the marketing backlog. Blocked indicators are only used for items in the active Sprint backlog.

When building an agile marketing backlog from your to do list, leave out housekeeping items like reading email, attending certain meetings, etc. Each entry should either be a deliverable to the customer or a task that is critical to future customer deliverables (customer research, for example).

Teams that create their agile marketing backlog from to do items often organize it around the type of deliverable. For example, blog posts may have different color coding than display advertising campaigns or social media campaigns or videos.

While building your initial marketing backlog from your To Do list is fine, I believe it misses an opportunity to take a more strategic approach to building your marketing backlog. Let’s take a look at two different approaches.

Build a Backlog Using Your Customer Journey

Some teams build their initial agile marketing backlog around either their sales funnel or better yet, their customer journey. Take the example of the customer journey below:

Figure 2 – Sample Customer Journey

The team might add user stories and incremental deliverables around each stage of the customer journey, and in particular around the opportunities identified in a thorough audit of the customer experience with your existing customer journey. For this approach to be successful, you do need deep knowledge of your customer experience. This can’t be based on simply marketing “intuition” or general knowledge; instead, it should be based on careful and recent customer research. When done right, this approach to creating an agile marketing backlog can greatly improve the customer experience over time.

The other advantage of this approach is that it allows you to give themes to your Sprints. For example, the theme of your first Sprint might be to improve website navigation. The theme of a subsequent Sprint might be to improve the customer experience during the “alternatives” stage of the customer journey, and so on. This allows the team to have context for their work, and to see large improvements in a particular area of the customer experience with each Sprint.

Teams that use this approach generally organize the agile marketing backlog around the stages in the customer journey, with each stage assigned a different color-coding.

Build a Portfolio Kanban Agile Marketing Backlog

The third approach that some teams use to creating an agile marketing backlog is to build it around a set of company wide strategic themes, which translate into cross-departmental programs, major projects and individual user stories and deliverables. Portfolio Kanban can be used to track this approach, as it lays out visually the key strategies, and the programs, projects and deliverables that are the tactics that deliver on those strategies.

Figure 3 – Sample Portfolio Kanban Board

Note that this approach requires that your company have well-understood and shared strategies (not as common as you might think) and good cross-departmental cooperation. Typically, the program level items will require multiple departments and multiple projects to execute. The project levels may be strictly marketing projects, usually aligned with projects from other departments as well, or the projects may require some level of inter-departmental cooperation.

This approach ensures alignment of marketing with the key business strategies of the company, and when done right, it can also result in greater inter-departmental cooperation, as each department can see where their contribution fits into the strategic whole.

Teams that use the portfolio kanban approach to creating a marketing backlog generally organize their backlog either around strategic themes or around programs.

What is your approach to generating an agile marketing backlog? If you have a different approach, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The post Creating Your First Agile Marketing Backlog appeared first on Agile Marketing.

Do not try to implement Agile Marketing with a big, six month plan and a complete re-organization.  You don’t know enough at the beginning to do this successfully and the big bang approach is likely to fail.

Pick One or Two Areas to Start

In a small or medium size company (less than 50 marketers) where you are getting started on Agile Marketing, pick one area to start.  In a large company where you are getting started on Agile Marketing, pick two areas.  Note that you are not picking projects, with a beginning and an end.  Instead, you are focused on some area of your business where you can improve customer outcomes over time.  Describe the area in customer language.  You may even write out a user story, although it has to be the kind of user story that would be implemented over many iterations (an Epic, in Scrum language).

Here are some examples:

• Improve the comparison shopping experience (As a “name your biggest competitor” customer, I want to understand how you compare to my current supplier, so that I can save money or get a better product)
• Launch a new product line (“As a shopper for ‘new product line’, I want to . . .)
• Educate me (“As someone new to your product category, I want to be educated on the benefits and the options of choosing a product in your category so that I can feel like I’m making an educated decision”)

Which Areas to Pick?

I generally tell clients that are getting started on Agile Marketing that the right areas to pick generally have three characteristics:

• The right level of risk/reward – pick areas that are neither bet the business areas or so small and trivial that succeeding in them won’t make a difference to the business.  Ideally, pick something that is of medium risk, and where improvements and the impact of better marketing will be clearly realized (medium or high reward).
• New areas or ones that are struggling – A new product or a new business investment can often be a good candidate for Agile Marketing.  By definition, you have a lot of learning to do in this new area, and Agile Marketing’s iterative, adaptive approach fits new product areas very well.  If you can learn rapidly and change your approach based on what’s working and what’s not, you’re more likely to succeed with a new area.
  Similarly, you might choose an area that is struggling.  Again, trying out some new experiments and iterating on what works and what doesn’t is likely to improve a struggling business.  Unless the problems are intractable, Agile Marketing can help you improve a struggling business.
• Areas that can show the value of cross-functional teams – this is particularly relevant for larger companies.  Inevitably, larger companies have marketing processes that are struggling because completing these processes requires multiple skill sets, and prioritization conflicts between the various skill set silos slows down the process.  If you have an area of your marketing that could clearly benefit from the focus of a cross-functional team, it should be a candidate for an early implementation of Agile Marketing.

Kickoff by Describing the Scope and by Defining Success

It sounds obvious, but many get started on Agile Marketing without clear definitions of what success looks like.  We want everything: faster, better, less cost, etc.  Get specific. What improvements are most important? Is it the customer experience? Is it the efficiency of marketing? How will you measure this?

Sometimes you don’t know enough about a new area to write SMART goals.  You remember these, they’re Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results focused and Time bound.  The specific goals may emerge over time.  However, you can decide what is most important to measure and measure the improvement rather than set a specific target.

You should also describe the scope of the area that you are focusing on.  What triggers the customer to enter your customer experience?  What is the first step?  What is the last step?  How much budget does this project have?  Who is on the team?  What’s the time frame for measuring improvement?

I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that you can use as a scope document.  You can download it here: Scope and Charter spreadsheet.

Managing Your Initial Agile Marketing Investments

The most important decision you will make in getting started with Agile Marketing will be to choose the marketing owner(s) for your initial investments.  Who will decide which user stories will be prioritized? Who will work with the scrum master to refine the backlog and refine the individual user stories?  Choosing the right person is critical to the success of these early investments.

I also recommend that you form an executive action team, consisting of the heads of the skill set silos involved in the cross-functional team.  They should have responsibility for the success of these cross-functional Agile Marketing teams.

Let’s face it – the implementation of cross-functional teams can be very threatening to the leaders of the current skill-set silos.  They may feel that this new way of working threatens their jobs and their power.  If you don’t put these middle managers on an executive action team, consciously or unconsciously, they may sabotage the implementation of cross-functional teams.

The responsibilities of this Executive Action Team are the following:

• Create an Agile Marketing Reference Model that will scale within the organization, including cross-group operational rules, procedures, and guidelines
• Measure and improve the quality of Agile Marketing
• Build Agile Marketing capacity within the organization
• Create a center for continuous learning of Agile Marketing
• Support the exploration of new ways of working
• Remove obstacles for the cross-functional teams

They should meet at least weekly, and sometimes as much as three times per week.  They should be very clear that the success of these initial Agile Marketing investments is their responsibility, and that it will be something that will appear on their review.

Implement Scrum or Kanban to the Letter for at Least Six Months

I see many beginning Agile Marketing teams implementing parts of Scrum or Kanban, but not implementing other parts.  That’s fine if you’ve had a chance to practice those parts of Scrum or Kanban for some time and found, empirically, that they don’t work for you.  But often, that’s not the case.

I see teams that don’t practice retrospectives, from the beginning, so they don’t realize the benefits of gathering feedback and iterating on their process.  I see other teams that don’t practice Sprint Reviews, and they don’t get the benefit of feedback from and exposure of the good work that they’re doing to the business teams.

I highly recommend that teams practice Scrum or Kanban to the letter for at least six months before they start dropping some aspects, adding others or combining aspects of each.  This will give the team time to understand the value of each ceremony, each artifact, each principle.

Get Agile Marketing Training

Scrum and Kanban have to be adapted to work for marketing.  There is now a certification for Agile Marketing from IC-Agile.  Classes are available in a number of locations.  Get training and learn now to adapt Scrum and Agile to your marketing practice.

Get a Coach

Yes, I know that this is self-serving, but a coach can save you lots of time and frustration and many times be the difference between success and failure. They’ve seen some or most of the common mistakes before. They have an outsider’s perspective. Even if you hire someone at the beginning and then for once a month check-in’s, I highly recommend a qualified coach.

Getting Started with Agile Marketing: Follow the Agile Principles

I end this blog post where I began: implement Agile Marketing in an Agile fashion. Start small, with a goal of learning, not success or failure.  Follow these principles:

• Make a small plan and then adapt
• Iterate (in time, rapidly)
• Validated learning over opinions and conventions.  Choose what to do in your Agile practice based on measurements of what works, not based on higher up’s opinions
• Many small experiments over a few large bets.  Try some different ways of working.  Make a number of small bets and experiments, rather than trying to adopt Agile Marketing as one big bet.
• Individuals and interactions over one size fits all.  Everyone is different, and your adoption of Agile Marketing will be different than that of others.  You can learn from others, but find something that fits your business uniquely.
• Collaboration over silos and hierarchy.  Collaboration is one of the big benefits of practicing Agile Marketing.  Make sure that it is recognized and rewarded.  Look out for silos and hierarchies that try to sabotage the move to Agile.

Good luck and let me know how I can help.

The post Getting Started with Agile Marketing appeared first on Agile Marketing.

The target audience for Agile Marketing certification is primarily Agile practitioners and first level managers.  This is not training for Chief Marketing Officers (although I’m sure they’d also learn a lot) or executives.  It is also appropriate for Agile coaches or scrum masters who have a marketing background and are looking to extend their practice to the marketing function.

If you want to get a sense of the Agile Marketing certification, the complete learning outcomes are available from IC Agile.  Each provider of training for this certification will create their own materials to address these outcomes, so every course will be different, but all should address these learning outcomes.  IC Agile ensures that each organization and each trainer are held to a high bar, both in terms of the material and in terms of their delivery capabilities.

The Agile Marketing certification classes must be designed to be deeply experiential and interactive.  Instructors must have plenty of exercises, not simply sit up at the front of the room and present slides.  Participants must be able to demonstrate their knowledge of both the why and the what: why agile marketing, what is agile marketing, and what methods and practices (Scrum, Kanban) are used to achieve Agility.

Agile Marketing certification is not a substitute for Certified Scrum Master or any of the other certifications offered by the Scrum Alliance. Some people in a marketing organization, particularly those who serve as scrum masters or coaches, will want to get certified by the Scrum Alliance.  Those courses, however, are not designed for marketers, and they don’t prepare the average marketer to apply Scrum, for example, to the marketing practice.  This certification is designed to provide that translation of the Agile concepts to marketing.

Here is the basic outline of the learning outcomes for Agile Marketing Certification:

1. Why Agile Marketing? What are the critical drivers that necessitate marketers be more agile?
2. What is Agile Marketing? What are the key principles and values of the Agile Marketing Manifesto? How is it different from reactive, real-time marketing?
3. The importance of being customer-centric in Agile Marketing.  Understanding customer needs and delivering value, both for the customer and for the business.
4. Implementing Agile Marketing.  Focusing on outcomes over outputs. Achieving outcomes through backlogs and stories, and through adaptive learning and iteration.
5. Teams and teamwork in Agile Marketing. How to work in cross-functional teams.  How to achieve improved collaboration, both within the team and across teams (and agencies).
6. Iteration-based approaches like Scrum and flow-based approaches like Kanban.  How do they work in the marketing context?  Which is better for certain kinds of work?  Can you combine them?
7. Creating a culture of experimentation and validated learning.  Using data to inform decision making.
8. Agile Marketing in practice, including case studies and a plan to adopt Agile Marketing

I’m really looking forward to getting accredited myself and seeing lots of other people getting accredited.  Agile Marketing certification is an important step forward for the Agile Marketing community.

The post Agile Marketing Certification appeared first on Agile Marketing.

Conditions for Success of Cross-functional teams

There are a number of factors that both the research and my experience suggest can increase the chances of success with cross-functional teams. Some of them are obvious, some less so.

Cross-Functional Governance

Cross-functional teams that succeed need strong governance according to research published in the Harvard Business Review. This is true because silos tend to perpetuate themselves and in many cases, the managers of these silos have a strong vested interest in retaining the status quo. Consciously or unconsciously, they often work to sabotage the cross-functional team.

Governance is not the same as support from upper management. It is not enough for management to cheer on the implementation of cross-functional teams. Managers from different cross-functional areas must themselves learn to work together to make tough decisions on the complex issues that arise in any cross-functional project. These managers need to contribute people to the cross-functional team and they need to have a vested interest in the success of the team. Otherwise, it is likely to fail.

Accountability

In addition to top level, cross-functional governance, the team needs a single, mid-level manager who is the ultimate point of accountability for the project. That person may or may not be part of the team on a day to day basis, but they need to be available to make critical decisions or to escalate issues to the cross-functional governance team as necessary. For small projects, this role may be played by the Product Owner in  Scrum Methodology.

Larger teams typically have multiple product owners and need someone at a higher level to be accountable for the project. In the Spotify model, this role is fulfilled by the tribe leader. In the SAFe model, this role is fulfilled by Epic owners and by program management. I tend to prefer the model (and the representation) provided by the Hoshin Kanri X-Matrix, where a single person is responsible for the successful execution of a top level priority.

Clearly established scope, goals

Leaders who want to have success with cross-functional teams must establish clear scope and goals for each team. The scope and goals should be documented on one or two pages, with clarity around at least the following:

• What problem is the customer trying to solve? How does solving this customer problem solve a problem for the business?
• How frequently does the problem occur?
• What triggers the problem? What is the first step that the customer takes in attempting to solve the problem? What is the final step?
• What does success look like, both for the customer and for the business?
• What is in scope and out of scope?
• What is the budget? What resources are available?
• What is the desired improvement time frame?

I have created a template for documenting the scope and goals for a team. You can download the template Scope and Charter spreadsheet.

Iterative approach with potentially shippable increments of work

This is Agile Marketing, so the team needs to take an iterative approach, producing frequent increments of work that can be shipped or shown to customers. This incremental approach helps the team test their hypotheses and helps them get early feedback on their work. It also helps them work together, discovering early and fixing any issues that must be addressed to ensure the success of the project.

I recommend that teams iterate at least monthly, if not bi-weekly or even weekly.

Members must identify more closely with their team than with their skill-set silos

Who team members identify with may seem like a strange predictor of success for a cross-functional team, but it turns out to be incredibly important. Skill-set silo teams inevitably have their own agendas and priorities, and if a team member continues to adhere to a different agenda and set of priorities, they are unlikely to put the success of the cross-functional team first. They may miss meetings, not complete work items on time (because they continue to work on other things for their skill-set silo team) and they may be reluctant to do work outside their skill-set to help the team.

Special care should be paid to creating a sense of camaraderie and adhesion among the cross-functional team, whether that be through team-building events or work experiences.

Getting Started

You’ll want to start with an important but not “risk the company” project
.  It may be a pure marketing project that requires different marketing disciplines (strategy, creative, personalization and analytics, for example) or it may be a project that requires contributions from disciplines in addition to marketing (product management, web development and finance, for example). The most important thing is that the team needs all of the skill sets necessary to produce a deliverable
.  They cannot have any dependencies that could delay the project.

Make sure that you form a cross-functional governance team of managers that are senior enough that they can resolve any cross-departmental issues.  You want to make sure that the managers of the silo teams have a stake in the success of the project.

Choose team members who work well in a team (think selecting astronauts living in the space station for six months)
.  Locate the team members together.  Do not let them keep their desks within their skill-set silo teams. You may have to give them some initial training on both Agile concepts and tools.  You may also want them to do some cross-training of each other.  In other words, the expert on personalization may want to train everyone else on the team on the basics of personalization such that other members of the team can pitch in and help on personalization tasks.

It also helps to choose for the team T-shaped people, who have both depth of expertise in their own area, but also respect for and preferably some knowledge of other disciplines as well. Or choose pi-shaped people who have both analytic (left-brain) and creative (right-brain) skills.  You may also want to cross-train people so that they can help each other when there is intense demand for a particular skill set.

Lastly, make sure that reviews and rewards are based on team performance, not individual performance, and make this clear up front.

Good luck with implementing cross-functional teams.  When implemented correctly, they can be game changing.

The post Cross-Functional Teams – Part Two appeared first on Agile Marketing.

Could cross-functional teams be a best practice in Agile Marketing?  Most of the marketing organizations that I see today are organized by skill-set silos (marketing strategy, creative, web development, social media, PR, marketing operations). I’ve observed that this skill-set silo approach leads to a number of problems and many marketing organizations would be better served by organizing into cross-functional teams.

The next two blog posts will cover the use of cross-functional teams in marketing. In part one, I’ll discuss the need for cross-functional teams in marketing (the Why) and I’ll define cross-functional teams (the What).  In part two, I’ll discuss some best practices that increase the odds of your success with cross-functional teams and some thoughts on how to transition from your current organizational structure to cross-functional teams (the How).

Why Cross-Functional Teams?

Implementing cross-functional teams requires change and change is hard.  If your organization is going to consider implementing cross-functional teams, you should have some good reasons.  Here are the ones I hear mentioned most often:

Cross-Functional Teams Help Resolve the Conflicting Priorities Issue

In companies organized by skill-set silos, almost any project requires multiple skill sets and thereby work involving multiple departments.  Each department has a different set of priorities and almost inevitably, certain departments become bottle necks.  Perhaps all web development has to go through the IT department and the typical lead time for any development project is months, if not years. Perhaps creative is continually backed-up, and creative is also frustrated by constantly changing priorities and unreasonable deadlines from the strategy team.  Sound familiar?

The conflicting priorities issue arises primarily when individuals work on or get assigned to multiple projects at the same time. The motivation is to keep everyone busy.  When one project requires the skills of a marketing strategist, for example, the creatives or the web designers work on other projects. This leads to a number of potential and real-world issues.

When the marketing strategist is done with their portion of the work, inevitably the person with the next skill set in the chain (say the creative) isn’t available, as they’re working on something else. This adds a delay.  When the creative does come free, the marketing strategist has to switch back to the first project in order to brief the creative. Context switching adds overhead.  This pattern repeats itself when the creative finishes their concepts or first draft. The project waits for a reviewer to free up, then it goes back to the creative, sometimes in an endless round of review and re-work.

Across the organization, many projects are being worked on at the same time, with each of them taking a little step forward, then waiting, then moving forward or backward depending on the review and the amount of re-work, and they inch along to a distant finish.

Cross-functional teams eliminate most, if not all, of the conflicting priorities.  Everyone on the team has the same priority: the success of the project and the completion of the next iteration of work. Their loyalties are to the project, not to their skill set or their functional manager. If constructed correctly, the cross-functional team has all or most of the skill sets necessary to move the project along without delays.

The marketing strategist doesn’t work in isolation, but leads the marketing strategy thinking, with input (and understanding and buy-in) from everyone else on the team.  As the strategy for the first iteration is finished, it goes right to creative, who has more of the context, and who produces rough sketches of ideas quickly, sharing them with the entire team and getting feedback right away, before they invest a lot of time in ideas that don’t work.

In some cases, people on the team whose primary skill-set is in one area contribute in other phases.  For example, the marketing strategist may get cross-trained to use the asset management tool and may gather some of the necessary product images for the creative.  Or the creative may edit and review the copy written by the copywriter for spelling and grammar.  The team pitches in together to get the work done.

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Communication and Quality

Coordinating projects across multiple departments requires meetings. In many cases, lots of meetings. Documents and processes like creative briefs or development specifications introduce the possibility for miscommunication, with the attendant quality and re-work implications.

Cross-functional teams improve communication and quality.  A web developer, for example, develops a deeper understanding of the project if they’re assigned to it from the beginning. It may seem inefficient to have a web developer or a creative sitting in early meetings where scope, target audience and other important considerations for the project are discussed. But these discussions provide important context, and the time “wasted” before the web developer writes code or the creative starts providing concepts is small, particularly if the team is working in an Agile, iterative fashion rather than a waterfall fashion.

Cross-Functional Teams Ensure Consistent Focus on the Customer Experience

Many cross-functional teams are organized around a particular customer intent, customer action or value stream.  This helps the team keep focus on the customer experience.

For example, I heard a story the other day about someone who had purchased an item online with a 30% discount coupon, and when she got home, she realized that she had the wrong size. She attempted to return the item to the local store of this retailer, who refunded the original payment amount through one system, then charged her full price for the replacement item through a different system, designed for point of sale in their physical locations. The customer was understandably upset that she didn’t receive the 30% discount and that the retailer functioned as if their online and their brick and mortar stores were two different businesses.

Although this failure to coordinate online and retail in-store purchases is becoming less common, it still happens, and mostly it happens because organizations build systems for themselves, rather than for customers.

Cross-functional teams can be organized around the customer experience, and can build experiences (like returns) that cross organizational and system boundaries.

Cross-Functional Teams Iterate Quickly

Organizations that seek to achieve agility should improve their ability to iterate quickly.  Rapid iteration leads to esting out assumptions early on, getting direct feedback from customers and delivering value in the marketplace before competitors.

Cross-functional teams can often iterate faster than skill-set silos.  Cross-functional teams have all of the resources and the necessary skill sets available to rapidly prototype and to deliver minimum viable products (MVPs).

Skill-set silos often find themselves delayed, as one or more skill-sets are not available when they are needed. Cross-functional teams also spend less time in meetings and the people producing the work have the context necessary to understand customer needs and the specific problems being solved.  Everyone on the cross-functional team is vested in making the project work and everyone sees the results of tests with each successive version, rather than being rented out to many different projects, none of which provide enough context or history or focus to ensure their best efforts.

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Conflict Resolution

This is one of the biggest and most over-looked benefits of cross-functional teams. Skill-set silo teams often spend many hours in meetings trying to reconcile conflict, each team taking a point of view that often relies heavily on the approach and biases of their formal training. Developers emphasize rigor and specificity and safety, often pushing back on approaches that postpone decisions until more is known and favoring a “right” solution. Creatives often take the opposite approach, delivering a variety of solutions and valuing the new or the different, even as some customers want the familiar. In almost all cases, teams with a full plate of work and tight schedules often have veto power over a project and there is little incentive to work with other teams.

With cross-functional teams, people with valuable skill sets are rewarded not just for exercising their skills, but for the success of the project.  If the schedule seems impossible or they disagree about a particular approach, rather than just throwing up their hands and going on to another project, they must find a way to resolve the conflict so that the project moves forward.

Cross-Functional Teams Can Lead to More Innovation

People with different formal training and different skill sets often look at a problem in different ways.  Having multiple skill sets on the team can often lead to innovation in unexpected ways. For example, a developer working on a product whose audience is other developers may provide insight to creatives that wouldn’t otherwise be available if the creative brief was written by the marketing strategy team. Someone who is experienced at testing code and finding underlying assumptions leading to unanticipated outcomes may contribute to the testing of assumptions in a marketing context.  Multiple points of view may lead to unexpected insights.

There is some scientific research that confirms that cross-functional teams are more innovative.  Rajeth Seshi and Daniel C. Smith studied 141 cross-functional product development teams and found innovativeness was positively related to the strength of team-members identification with the team, encouragement to take risk, customer influence and monitoring of the team by senior management.

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Alignment and Use of Resources

One of the common objections to cross-functional teams is that there aren’t enough people in the organization to form cross-functional teams addressing all of the current problems that people are trying to solve.  Rather than seeing this as a limitation, this should be seen as a strength.  When forming cross-functional teams, management is forced to prioritize the most important problems to be solved and the most important customer processes to be improved. Teams can work rapidly to solve these problems and improve these customer processes, and then the teams can be re-constituted to address other challenges.

Organizing by cross-functional teams sends the message to the teams to spend their time on the big important priorities (for which there are cross-functional teams) rather than on less important projects that clog up the queues. This results in more effective use of resources.

The use of cross-functional teams also eliminates the complacency inherent in skill-silo teams where jobs to be done are somewhere deep down on the priority list of a particular group.  This may give a false sense of assignment: this teams own their portion of a project, when in fact it’s so low down on their priority list that no work is getting done on it or will get done in the foreseeable future.

Cross-Functional Teams Can Improve Employee Engagement

This is somewhat of a chicken or the egg problem.  A Harvard Business Review study which looked at the effectiveness of cross-functional teams found that 75% of them failed, mostly because employees were not engaged in the team, but retained loyalties to their skill-set silos.  The 25% of teams with high levels of engagement to the project, rather than their former skill-set silos, were very successful.  So does establishing cross-functional teams automatically lead to improved employee engagement? Clearly not.  However, cross-functional teams which have strong employee engagement to the project perform very well, better than comparable skill-set silo teams.

What is a Cross-Functional Team?

The idea of cross-functional teams is not new.  Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance company formed several cross-functional teams in 1950 to study the potential future impact of computerization on the life insurance industry.  More recently, Spotify has used cross-functional teams to create their music streaming service.

A cross-functional team is a team that is organized around a project, a defined portion of a product, a service, or a customer value stream. The team members have all of the different areas of functional expertise necessary to complete the project or deliver the product, service or value stream.

Some companies implement what I would call virtual cross-functional teams where team members continue to report in to their skill-set silos and they work on multiple virtual teams.  In my experience, this is rarely successful. Team members get pulled in multiple directions, they don’t attend all meetings of the team, and their loyalty remains with their skill-set silo.

I recommend that at least the core members of the virtual team be assigned full-time to the team.  A few members of the team whose services are only needed occasionally or only at certain defined times in the life of the project, may be assigned to 2-3 cross-functional teams.  For example, if a marketing team occasionally needs the service of an expert in audience management or personalization, those people may be assigned fractionally to the team.  However, best practice is to train one or more members of the team in audience management or personalization so that they can do 80% of the work to be done, with only the most difficult parts needing the assistance of an expert.

Cross-functional teams don’t have to be limited to marketing.  If the project or service is purely marketing, then the members of the team may all be selected from marketing. However, if the project or service requires skills from IT or supply-chain management or retail, then members should include people with those deep skills.

In the next blog post, I’ll cover best practices that increase the odds of your success with cross-functional teams and some thoughts on how to transition from your current organizational structure to cross-functional teams (the How).

The post Cross-Functional Teams – Part One appeared first on Agile Marketing.

Most business interact with customers in both the digital environment (website, social media, digital advertising) and in the physical world (in retail stores, over the telephone, through distribution reps, through outside sales reps).  If you have retail stores, you have to print signage and train retail sales people. If you have a toll free number, whether for service or sales, you have to create scripts and train CSRs and telemarketing staff. If you sell physical products, you need logistics to source and deliver those products in the physical world.

And that’s just looking at the customer interaction challenge from one direction – in addition to delivering customer experiences across both the digital environment and the physical world, you also have to listen and gather feedback and data across both.

This is where Agile gets tough, but it is also reality for many organizations that aspire to Agile.

CMO Council Study

A new study by the CMO Council called “The Responsiveness Requirement: How Agile Marketers Act on Consumer Feedback to Drive Growth” looks at this requirement to implement Agile in the physical world as well as in the digital environment.  Here are some of the key findings:

• • Consumers still want to get physical – although consumers use digital resources like a company’s web site and social media to research products and services, physical world resources like in-store sales representatives, in-store promotions and product packaging are still an important part of the consumer journey.  Here’s the key quote and the supporting data: “physical touchpoints like product packaging and in-store displays are seen as just as important, if not slightly more important, to the success of the overall experience as channels like email, direct mail and mobile apps…three digital channels that actually fail to crack the “Top 10 List” of critical channels”.

• Overemphasis on digital and organizational silos are a problem – Marketers find it easier to create, deploy and measure digital marketing, so in many organizations, digital has received the bulk of the attention and most of the recent growth of the budget. But customers don’t distinguish between digital and physical world channels. Customers want consistent experiences and responsiveness across both digital and the physical world.  53 percent of respondents to the CMO Council study admit that alignment across physical and digital touchpoints is an important focus of the customer experience. Organizations also don’t prioritize creating seamless customer experiences across the digital environment and the physical world: 51 percent of respondents feel they lack the budget to implement the systems and tools needed to manage this complexity.  And lastly, most organizations have separate digital and physical teams, making cross-functional collaboration difficult if not impossible. 46 percent say that functional silos across the marketing landscape have separated teams into physical or digital groups, enabling specialization and functional focus but making alignment and cohesion across these channels even more difficult.
• Customers value responsiveness and marketers aren’t equipped to deliver responsiveness, particularly in the physical world –  52 percent of end consumers in the CMO Council survey said the most important attribute of a brand experience is fast response times to issues, needs, requests and suggestions. Despite the importance that customers place on responsiveness, most marketing organizations admit to being ill-equipped to deliver on that expectation, particularly if responsiveness requires changes in the physical world.

How to Improve Your Ability to Respond in an Omni-Channel World

What can you do to improve your ability to respond in both the digital and physical worlds? The experts at Danaher Corporation, who sponsored this study, have three recommendations:

• Corral all the content makers – The consumer sees your organization as one brand, and receiving different messages from different parts of the organization is confusing at best and a show-stopper for sales at worst. To support consistent messaging across digital and physical channels, some companies are gathering all of the content makers into one central customer experience team, with channel experts responsible for distributing the consistent message across digital and physical channels.
• Connect technologies for real-time transparency – to make responsiveness a reality, you have to be able to gather data from both digital and physical channels and integrate them, present them to decision makers in an integrated and consistent way, and build the capacity to respond across all channels. This is a huge technical and organizational challenge.
• Simplify the entire value chain – the number of steps and the attention to detail required to deliver a new customer experience is mind boggling.  Every step and every tiny detail is an opportunity for something to go wrong.  Simplify and automate where possible. Use checklists to ensure consistency and quality control. If possible, use fewer tools and tools that integrate well together.  Apply Lean and Total Quality Management (TQM) techniques to marketing and the creation of the customer experience.

I’d add two further recommendations:

• Identify your most important customer value streams and build permanent, cross-functional teams to improve these customer value streams – For almost any business, customers realize value through a small set of critical customer experiences. For example, one of my clients provides wireless cellular services. The experience of switching wireless carriers (from Verizon to T-Mobile, for example) can either be a nightmare or easy-peasy or somewhere in between. Getting the switching experience right is incredibly important to the business success of a wireless carrier.  That’s why they have permanent, dedicated, cross-functional teams to improve this critical customer value stream. Identify those value streams within your business and build permanent, cross-functional teams to own these customer experiences and constantly improve them.
• Develop a core competency in real-time responsiveness across digital and physical channels – Last year, Volkswagen struggled to respond across their digital and dealer channels to the revelation that they were cheating on emission tests using a defeat device.  More recently, United showed that they were totally tone deaf in responding to a video showing agents dragging a passenger off of a flight. You don’t have to wait for these kinds of brand damaging events to develop a competency in responding to customer complaints and opportunities across both digital and physical channels.  Make it a priority to develop a core competency in real-time responsiveness.

The CMO Council study can be found here.  I’d recommend reading it and deciding how your organization implements Agile in the physical world.

The post Agile in the Physical World appeared first on Agile Marketing.

There’s no question that Doing Agile by itself leads to certain benefits: improved communication and visibility to what each team member is working on, some increases in productivity and perhaps the ability to set priorities with intent as conditions change.

But the transformative benefits occur from Being Agile, by which I mean consistently, predictably responding quickly in the face of change, delighting customers and achieving excellence through engaged employees all working together towards common goals.

What does it take for marketers to achieve Being Agile? Here are some ways your team can move towards this goal.

Self-Managing Teams

Scrum prescribes that teams be self-managing, but in my experience this prescription is seldom followed. It is critical for managers in an agile environment to get out of the habit of giving orders and of having all the answers, and instead give both authority and accountability to the team. Strangely enough, this can be harder for team members and middle managers than for organizational leaders.

In a top down organization, employees are trained to seek approval for every action.  Managers are the answer men (or women) and the approvers. Some employees and some middle managers will be adrift in an organization where decision making and responsibility are pushed down to the lowest possible level. Employees will feel adrift because they are accustomed to being told what to do. This doesn’t require thinking and responsibility is shrugged off with the phrase “I was just doing what I was told”.

Middle managers will feel adrift because they formerly saw their job as translating orders from above into “managing their team”, which meant telling them what to do and checking back frequently to make sure that they were in fact doing it.  Middle managers also spend a lot of time in meetings approving initiatives or decisions brought to them. If this goes away, what is the role of the middle manager?

The Role of Management in Agile Organizations

To achieve Being Agile, managers must take on a new set of responsibilities.

Providing Clarity of Purpose

I’ve recently been teaching Intent-based leadership as described by David Marquet. David describes the two pillars of intent-based leadership as clarity and competence.  Leaders must clearly communicate purpose and the current major goals of the organization. Their job is to ensure that every member of the organization has clarity on that purpose and those goals.  This is not easy.

In many organizations, I’ll ask them “what is the purpose of this organization and what are the top 3-5 goals at the present time?”.  Sometimes I get confused looks, sometimes I get multiple conflicting answers from different people in the organization, and only once in a while do I get the same clear and consistent answer from everyone in the organization.

Teaching Competence

Giving a team member responsibility for performing a certain function isn’t going to result in success if the team member doesn’t have the skills to perform that function. Another responsibility of the manager in an Agile organization is to teach. Rather than make decisions or approve decisions, managers in an agile organization should teach people how to make great decisions.

David Marquet has a great example in this video. Normally, only the captain of a U.S. Navy submarine can give the order to submerge. The reasoning is that the captain is ultimately responsible if anything goes wrong.  David Marquet wanted to give his officers authority and responsibility for submerging the ship, but of course he also wanted to ensure the safety of the ship. So it wasn’t enough for the officer to state, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship”.  They also had to ensure that it was safe: all the crew members were below decks, all hatches were closed, the ship was rigged for diving, the bottom was deep enough, etc. Eventually, the officers would say, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship, all crew members are below, all hatches are closed” and so on, convincing the Captain that it was safe.  In other words, the Captain passed off his competence to his men, and they in turn to their men.

When every employee makes decisions as if the CEO was looking over their shoulder, consistent with the purpose, goals and values of the organization, you’ve achieved Being Agile.

Rapid Iterations with Learning Intent

One of the core values of Agile Marketing is “Rapid iterations over big bang campaigns”.  When I teach this, heads nod and everyone seems to think this is a good idea. But implementing this in practice seems to evade many teams.

To achieve Being Agile, an organization must build a high tempo testing culture. When people hear this, they often think this only applies to search engine marketing or perhaps testing a few display ads and their click thru rate. You know this is the case when you hear, “Oh yeah, testing, that’s the responsibility of the testing group over there”.

Rapid iterations with learning intent applies much more broadly than simply testing a few ads.  It means that marketing approaches everything with the attitude that we’re going to get something out in front of customers quickly, gather their feedback, and iterate our way to success.

This requires a mindset of learning intent and a relentless focus on delighting the customer through constant improvement. It also requires that teams measure their tempo. How many tests a week are we performing? How long does it take us to build a new campaign? How rigorous are we being in terms of stating our hypothesis up front and making decisions based on customer feedback?

I hope this helps. I’ve found the distinction between Doing Agile vs Being Agile to be very helpful in my coaching, and I’m challenged every day to help organizations achieve Being Agile.

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