7 STEPS TO DEVELOPING AN AGILE MARKETING TEAM

A starter guide for marketers who want to increase their team’s productivity, responsiveness, and speed

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We live in a digital age where communication is fast, and innovation even faster. Companies operate with no preconceptions or rigidity about how they're going to operate. They're able to adapt to market trends because they maintain a steady focus on customer engagement and feedback. Their responsiveness lets them ensure satisfaction and deliver value at a time when customers have more options than ever before.

This high-velocity process is the essence of Agile. It has the power to transform your marketing team into the ultimate customer-centric organization, able to pivot quickly to capitalize on customer needs and market trends.

This ebook is a guide to transforming your marketing team into an Agile machine.

Intro

Table of Contents

I. Adapt or Die: The Constantly Changing Landscape

II. Why Marketers Should Care About Agile

III. Key Agile Principles

IV. Manage Change, Avoid Culture Shock

V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

VI. Conclusion: Embracing Agile For Ultimate Customer Centricity

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I. Adapt or Die: The Constantly Changing LandscapeCompanies that can’t adapt to the breakneck pace of modern business will be quickly left behind, choking on the gritty dust of their competitors.

Think about the recent shift in the digital media space: with the explosion of streaming media, companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and Spotify have transformed the way we consume media, while companies like Blockbuster, HMV, and Tower Records weren’t able to pivot quickly enough, leading to their demise.

I. Adapt or Die: The Constantly Changing Landscape

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Next Generation Marketing

Just like the digital media industry, the marketing discipline is operating in a similar state of flux. Gone are the days of playbooks, requirements documents, and annual marketing plans you could stick to. Instead, the rules change every day as marketers deal with ever-shifting market trends and fickle customer tastes. They are forced to navigate niche channels, differentiate between signal and noise, and choose efficient tools from a growing array of choices.

As a result, marketing organizations struggle to move fast enough to respond to customer feedback and their changing needs. And if a marketing group isn’t equipped to handle this load? It dies (and is replaced).

Which is how we come to Agile.

I. Adapt or Die: The Constantly Changing Landscape

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II. Why Marketers Should Care About AgileAgile is a tried-and-true method for creating a truly collaborative environment, enabling teams to perform efficiently, manage heavy workloads, and instantly respond to changing customer needs.

The Agile method for project management was birthed by software development teams that needed to streamline processes and deliver products more efficiently — and ensure what they delivered was what the customer really wanted.

II. Why Marketers Should Care About Agile

And although it started with software developers, Agile has grown into an approach that cuts across industry boundaries. Are you ready to join the Agile marketing revolution?

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II. Why Marketers Should Care About Agile

How Agile Can Take Marketing to The Next Level

What Agile offers marketing organizations is fourfold — all leading to projects with better business value and faster time to market:

1. Agile promotes adaptive planning, because it understandsthat projects are never set in stone. Parameters change. Customer needs shift. Project plans need a way to take this into consideration without dissolving into chaos.

2. Agile takes an iterative approach to work, improving theproduct incrementally in short, successive work cycles. This means that every few weeks, a new deliverable, or portion of a deliverable, is produced. The improvement process is ongoing.

3. Agile emphasizes transparency and communication.Open, consistent communication between project teams and customers means you know exactly what your customers

want from you. There’s no risk of accidentally spending time, effort, and resources creating something that misses the mark, or having a client review the finished product only to ask for major changes. And transparency within the team means no accidental duplicate work and greater collaboration.

4. Agile allows for rapid and flexible response to change.Because you’re always in touch with your customers, you know when their needs change. And because you’re in constant communication with your team, you know what everyone is working on and can immediately adjust everyone’s efforts to meet those changing needs.

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III. Key Agile Principles

Reflect. After a project ends, reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and apply lessons learned to your next project. Not only will the quality of your work increase, you’ll reap greater rewards for your efforts and the way your team works as a unit will improve. Soon, you’ll have a high-performing marketing team.

Focus. Break work into smaller tasks, and focus on one task at a time. Stop being overwhelmed by the big picture. Small tasks also make it easier to be flexible, in case you need to shift gears.

Test. Test constantly. Trust the data you generate over unsubstantiated opinions. This is where customer feedback is so critical. If you’re not listening to your customer, how do you know if you’re creating something of value?

Adapt. Respond to change instead of rigidly sticking to the plan. When data leads you in a new direction, don’t resist. By staying agile and keeping communications open, you can pivot on a dime.

There are several key principles that give Agile its unique flavor. When done correctly, these principles lead to successful Agile projects:

Interact. Schedule frequent — but brief — team updates so the whole group knows what’s happening. These updates could be daily standup meetings where each member shares what they’re working on and where they need help. Added bonus: doing standups can eliminate the need for long, drawn-out status meetings.

III. Key Agile Principles

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IV. Manage Change,Avoid Culture ShockWith all the benefits that Agile brings to marketing teams, how does one actually go about implementing an Agile marketing process?

Making the transition is not easy. You’re not only changing the culture of your marketing team, but also the cross-functional teams that you work with. It will take time and you will encounter resistance — but you can overcome it.

IV. Manage Change, Avoid Culture Shock

Give it Time

According to researchers, getting a new habit to stick requires an average of 66 days, or roughly 2 months. And if the new behavior is particularly complex, it may take up to 8 months.

So if you’re implementing Agile and don’t see immediate results, resist the urge to give up after 30 days. Stick with it for at least two months.

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Combat Resistance

People will resist Agile for many reasons. Often from fear of the unknown – why change when the old way has worked for years? Or perhaps, a fear of incompetency – will this new process require new skills that I don’t have? There may simply be doubts that the end results will be worth the effort.

Another source of resistance may come from a lack of communication. If you, as the advocate, don’t explain why Agile needs to be introduced at all, and if your team members aren’t consulted for their opinions, brick walls will go up and the new process will be brought to a standstill.

To counter this, you must communicate your reasons for implementing Agile and include your marketing team in the discussion before switching over. Be patient, and encourage your team along the way by celebrating small wins – like sharing positive customer feedback. It takes some time, but it’ll be worth it.

IV. Manage Change, Avoid Culture Shock

Baby Steps

One approach is to introduce Agile in pieces. Incremental changes aren’t as much of a shock to the system, and your team can ease into a new way of working without jumping straight into the deep end, sink or swim.

In the next section, we’ll introduce 7 small steps to help you successfully introduce Agile to your team. As you take these initial steps, document your victories so you have concrete proof that the process delivers results.

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V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started When starting out, focus on the core elements of Agile that can help you experience immediate results. Here are a few simple tips you can use right away without much of a learning curve:

Tip #1: Implement Daily Standups

One way Agile teams communicate is through daily standup meetings, where team members take a minute or two to share what they’re working on and any roadblocks they’re

V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

experiencing. If the same roadblocks keep popping up, take it upon yourself as a manager to help remove those roadblocks.

If you have a distributed team where you can’t have physical standups, try a quick video chat using Google Hangouts or Skype.

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V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

Tip #2: Start Using a Task Board

One of the biggest challenges to running multiple projects is tracking all the moving parts and priorities, and keeping everyone on the same page. An easy way to manage all of the team’s work is with a task board (also called a Scrum board).

All you need are some sticky notes and a white board. Draw a few lines, or use masking tape to break your board into sections, with four columns next to each team member’s name:

• Backlog: tasks that you have on your plate but haven’t gotten around to starting yet.

• In Progress: tasks that you’re working on right now.

• With Someone Else: tasks that you’re waiting for someone else to take action on, whether you’re waiting for approval or a team member needs to contribute some work before passing it back to you.

• Done: your completed tasks.

Assign different colored sticky notes to each team member and start posting the notes on your board, ordering them based on priority. Each sticky note represents a task, so it’s easy to see at a glance who’s working on what and which team members are in danger of being overloaded.

A good rule of thumb: don’t juggle too many tasks at once in the “In Progress” section. Each person should pick 3-5 tasks for the week and focus on those. Once tasks are completed and moved into the “Done” column, you can always move a task from your Backlog into the “In Progress” section and get a head start.

Tip: If there are any important details, questions or issues for a particular task, you can simply write it on the sticky note as a reminder to discuss them with your team during your next standup. It’s a great way to encourage transparency across the team.

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V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

Tip #3: Use Stories To Prioritize Tasks

One of the core components of Agile is the user story. User stories are short, simple descriptions of a task or project told from the perspective of the end user. They typically follow this simple template:

As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.

User stories provide a larger context to help teams determine what approach or solution will deliver the most value to the customer. From a marketing perspective, it’s a great exercise to gain a better understanding of your target personas and how your work can benefit them. User stories are also helpful in prioritizing projects in terms of business value.

Here’s an example of a marketing user story:

“As a content marketing executive, I want an engaging blog design that promotes our trial software so we can meet our trial and revenue goals for this quarter.”

Developing user stories for each of your key personas helps you be highly targeted in your messaging and campaigns. And by focusing on your target persona’s end goal, you’re better able to provide valuable content and solutions that draw customers to you.

A good practice is to create a new user story for each major project. Have everyone on the team contribute to answer these questions: Who are you targeting with this campaign, and what do they want? What’s the larger problem they want to solve? Having your team work together to create user stories is a great way to foster collaboration. Plus, the process will help make sure you’re getting the maximum business value out of your team’s efforts.

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V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

Tip #5: Don’t Forget the Human Element

Many marketers who try to implement Agile focus on the mechanics. While certain elements of the Agile process may be set, like the structure and purpose of standups, there is an art to effectively managing an Agile marketing team. The importance of human interaction should never be overlooked, ranging from how you engage with customers and solicit feedback to how you communicate with team members. It’s imperative to building a high performing Agile team.

When managing an Agile marketing team, you’re going to have to pay attention to both the structure of your processes as well as how your team members work and communicate with each other. Mastering both is the key to repeatable success.

Tip #4: Embrace Simplicity

It’s easy to let an exciting new idea grow into a monster campaign when you start considering all the potential audiences and approaches, especially if your team’s in the middle of a killer brainstorming session. But don’t get carried away.

Agile is about creating the simplest possible solution that will yield the results your customers care about. Resist the temptation to throw in extra bells and whistles or launch a worldwide media blitz because you think it will attract more attention. Ask your customers (internal or external) what they want. Although the idea behind your campaign may be complex, the solution you present should appear simple to the end users.

Image credits: Original photo by Martin Pettitt (left) and Darryl Moran (right). Some rights reserved.

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Tip #6: Hold Retrospectives

After you complete a task or project, take some time to reflect and discuss what worked and what didn’t. Ask questions to try and understand why some things were successful and others weren’t. In this way, you’re continually learning and adjusting to make the next project run smoother and yield better results.

Here’s a simple blueprint you can use during your next retrospective:

• What did we do well?

• What could we have done better?

• How can we improve the process for next time?

Because retrospectives are democratic, they’re very empowering for your team. They identify the problems, work together to find the solutions, and then go out and take ownership over the process.

V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started Image credits: Original photo by Rob Harris. Some rights reserved.

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Tip #7: Develop an Agile Mindset

Agile isn’t a process, it’s a mindset. Following the Agile process is not the same as being agile, and the distinction is often the difference between success and project failure. There are a few common tendencies you’ll need to watch out for, but the #1 perspective you need to change is how you react to setbacks.

On an individual level, you need to encourage your team-mates to share any problems or issues holding them back. People are naturally reluctant to admit they’re having trouble, so show them they won’t be penalized for asking for help or not knowing the best course of action. If the team doesn’t know what members are struggling with, problems escalate until it’s too late to fix them.

On a higher level, you need to rethink your perception of failure. Agile recognizes failure as an opportunity to strengthen your team and your end product. It’s not something that should be dreaded or swept under the rug. If your team is truly pushing itself to perform at the next level, failure is simply part of the process — and can be an incredibly valuable learning opportunity.

V. 7 Simple Tips to Get Started

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Agile is still new to many marketers, but if you can embrace the Agile approach and use the steps we’ve detailed here, your team will be well on its way to becoming a customer-centric organization — able to quickly deliver campaigns that customers want and adapt to constantly-changing requirements.

VI. Conclusion: Embracing Agile For Ultimate Customer Centricity

The bonus is that the process will result in enhanced team collaboration, improved personal and group productivity, and business objectives that center around what really matters: the customer.Good luck and stay Agile!

VI. Conclusion: Embracing Agile For Ultimate Customer Centricity

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