Achieving marketing agility is a top priority for forward-thinking companies. As organizations grow, continuing the quest for true agility will also require shifting how we consider the distribution of roles and responsibilities in our teams in order to keep them on the track to success. We’ve already covered the fundamental aspects of team structures in an Agile environment, like creating cross-functional teams and mapping their value streams. But, we’ve never discussed hiring the right resources to continue your healthy growth towards high performance. When this moment comes, it is easy to m ..read more

Over several years of working on Agile transformations, I’ve seen the whole spectrum of issues, ideas, and idiosyncrasies. Some organizations want a pixel-perfect plan for their entire transformation before they buy one single sticky note. Others demand agility of their employees practically overnight, providing little to no preparatory training. As you might imagine, neither approach is ideal. What we need is a Goldilocks approach to Agile transformation. Unsurprisingly, that means we need to take a truly agile approach to going Agile. To help show where that middle ground lies, we’re first g ..read more

This article was originally published on CMSWire on June 9th, 2020. As we square our shoulders and prepare to face the second half of this most turbulent of years, it’s no surprise that many marketing leaders are hoping to equip their teams with greater agility. Many decide to experiment with an Agile pilot to see how this approach would go for their teams. Marketers who adapt Agile ways of working report faster campaign delivery, better alignment with organizational priorities, stronger responsiveness to incoming data and even happier teams. In case that wasn’t enough, our recent experience n ..read more

Making a decision to allocate budget for long term improvement can be a tough call. Of course, we know intuitively that investing in the future delivers exponential rewards. Be it buying a physical product that improves efficiency or putting dollars toward intangible line items like employee education such as Agile training. Either way, reinvesting profits back into a business supports the roots of innovation and productivity. So why is this such a hard thing for leaders to prioritize? Business leaders know they need to bring in new technology or train the team on an alternative way of working ..read more

Agile software development teams measure their progress by delivering useful features and functionality. The Agile Manifesto, in fact, explicitly values “working software” as “the primary measure of progress.” But what happens when you don’t create software? How do we accurately measure the progress of other kinds of Agile teams? Each individual team will work out their own precise success metrics, but overall Agile teams need to focus on regular value delivery. In marketing, where we can struggle to show the bottom-line impact of our daily work, this means we need to shift toward measuring ma ..read more

When it comes to what Agile can and cannot do for your team, there are truths and there are myths. Myth: “Agile means we don’t need to plan.” Truth: “The Agile mindset is equally, if not more important, than its practices.” The element of team empowerment, one of the most powerful qualitative benefits of applying the methodology, sits somewhere in the middle. Why? Because most new Agile teams just haven’t cracked it yet.  When an Agile process and mindset is implemented holistically within the organization, empowerment of individual contributors and teams can be a major benefit of the m ..read more

What do Francis Bacon and Japanese manufacturers have in common? They both came to the conclusion that validating your assumptions before acting on them was a good idea. All versions of the cycle of experimentation and improvement are based on a scientific method that was first introduced in the work of Francis Bacon, which he explained as “hypothesis–experiment–evaluation” or, in simpler terms, “plan–do–check.” As marketers are asked to move ever faster, it’s easy to abandon anything that’s not active doing. But this kind of neglect puts our projects, our ROI, and our sanity at risk. Instead ..read more

One of the most central tenets of Agile is to always be focused on delivering value to your end customer (which is one of the reasons it jives so nicely with marketing). In that spirit, our AgileSherpas (myself included) spend a lot of time sharing information on marketing agility with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. As part of that effort, I recently joined the Content Marketing Institute and Workfront on a webinar about Agile marketing, and, as happens so often, there were far more amazing questions than we had time to get to. Many of them are questions I hear quite often, so I’ve colle ..read more

If you’re just starting out on your Agile journey and coming up against terminology that seems unfamiliar – look no further! Our team put together this Agile marketing glossary for Agile newbies that need to learn the language of agility quickly as well as mature Agilists that want a handy reference guide by their side as they explore new facets of the methodology with their teams. Our comprehensive list includes some of the most popular terms grouped into four categories: General Agile Terms Scrum Terms Kanban Terms Measurement Terms General Agile Terms Agile consists of several frameworks ..read more

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