Agile Marketing

One of the topics I am increasingly being asked about from businesses and potential clients is around agile within a marketing environment. It is a really interesting idea – and it is also exciting. We have seen Agile HR approaches being not only adopted but standards and best practice being shared (see the article on Agile HR at the link – there will be a blog post here on some of my thoughts on this at a point in the not too distant future). So in this blog I am going to revisit a previous project I was involved with and catch up with my former Director of Marketing Guy Herrington thinking of what the work at the time involved, then applying a more “agile” lens based on more recent engagements. 

Royce Gracie knows….

It is no surprise, just like many other business functions, marketers are becoming interested in ways they can reduce time to market and also unlock the creativity of the people who are working for them; to ensure innovative ideas are explored and deployed (or abandoned if proven unsuccessful). The aim – as with any agile team, should be fast moving and continuous delivery of value. 

I think to an extent this is almost a full circle moment. It is easy to forget that one of the first serious explorations of agile techniques in the 1980s – The New, New Product Development game was focussed on… actual physical products such as copiers, cameras, engines and computers – Its really only post the publication of the Agile Manifesto most peoples focus became increasingly on software development techniques (no surprises here, this is what that document was aimed at doing – helping teams doing this type of work to self organise and self manage). That’s certainly not something to ignore either, marketers are just as (if not more) impacted by the impact of digital technologies and the challenges and opportunities they can bring. 

So what would an Agile Marketing team or department look like? I was thinking back to working with Guy Herrington on his Marketing 2.0 (excuse the title, I’m sure people were referring to the internet as the information superhighway then too!) initiative at the Co-operative Bank in the early 2000s – and whereas I wouldn’t claim what we were doing then would be recognised as agile today – there were a number of features that looking back now strike me as worth reinvestigating with hindsight and knowledge gained over the years since. They are as follows:

Daily Stand Up – We certainly didn’t call it a scrum, but the team did talk about the work progress since the day before, what the plans were for the day and raised any potential emerging issues. What made it not so much like a scrum was the sheer amount of people who attended which was a little larger than the best practice for scrum teams.

Cross Functional Team – Remember thinking this was pretty ground-breaking at the time as had up to that point in my career only ever worked in Silo’ed environments. As my memory serves in addition to representatives from Marketing there were also colleagues from Strategy, Finance, relevant product experts from the Bank, General Insurance and Life and Savings businesses and the from the Web team. In addition to this colleagues from Legal, IT, Compliance, Procurement and Press were involved on a needs be basis. I have some further thoughts on ideal composition I will explore later but in general this strikes me as a sensible starting point.

A “Scrum Master” – Again, we didn’t call him a Scrum Master- he was an external consultant who had been brought in to drive the initiative - but a lot of the aspects of servant leadership were there in terms of not only the removal of barriers but including the ability to ask the team some fairly challenging questions and ensure progress was in terms of what had been discussed in the daily stand ups. I would still recommend any team considering an agile transition has someone performing these duties. 

The War Room – There were actually as I remember two of these, co-located but just due to the sheer amount of activity and planning that was occurring. 

Buy in at a senior level – Guy was the Director of Marketing at the time and ensured the C-Suite were well managed from a stakeholder perspective and was able to provide additional resource and sponsorship at the key times of the project it was needed. 

Clear Strategy – there was an opportunity in the market at the time as other banks’ reputations were beginning to decline in the mind of consumers; not least were they safe places to put your money. The Bank’s  ethical positioning made it (and still does) an attractive proposition for more ethically minded potential customers and those in the wider market who may have been considering a change. This was very much a brand led project – but I can see no real reason why some of these techniques couldn’t be applied to either direct marketing or new product development. In fact the fast learning cycles may be a bigger advantage on projects of that type. When discussing this with Guy he made the pertinent point “Agile is a natural bedfellow of marketing given the dynamic, real-time nature of digital marketing however it is more than the execution of PPC, display or social ads. It’s a way of working, a culture and a naturally inclusive style”.

What wasn’t there that I would include today?

Iterations or Sprints – although some of the work did (as it will in many environments) happen in an iterative way almost naturally given the time pressures, I believe a more formalised approach – with defined 2-4 week sprints would have helped with both planning and speed we were able to do the work (or velocity). There were several crunch points – that in honesty may not have been avoided even with this framework but may have been easier to manage. With proper sprint planning work could have been prioritised by the team themselves and reviews and retrospectives would have provided very visible displays of progress and offer the opportunity to pivot if necessary. 

Scale – It is my opinion that scaling the agile approach across the marketing department would have led to even greater value (and the results were not insignificant as they stood, a doubling of potential customers who were aware of and would consider switching to the bank combined with a 150% uplift of new current account sales over a 6 month period). As stated the project I was involved in was brand led, and its is quite an exciting idea to think what else could have been achieved by having other “agile” teams running new product development, direct marketing activities and (if it was today) AI and automation to reduce the costs of delays even further. With more agile teams there is also the opportunity to create communities of practice allowing learnings and experience to be properly shared across the whole department. As ever, I would look to launch one team at a time rather than in parallel. Areas of focus could be around acquisition and retention, specific products and segments or use value streams to better understand firstly how the customer journey is delivering value to both those customers and the business, and also to understand what systems and teams are involved in those processes. A Lean Agile Centre of Excellence would have helped not only to facilitate this, but also ensure resources were properly in sync, best practice was shared and create further links across the organisation to bring in any additional resources as they were needed. 

The point to be aware of at scale was made by Guy when he said, “Agile is failing in some firms within the project management discipline because senior management are over burdening the agile teams with too much upwards reporting. So Directors, Heads Of and the like need to let the agile team ‘do their stuff’ within parameters agreed and to have a degree of autonomy”

Kanban board – even though we had the war rooms, we never really had one place, where all the team members could see where we were up to in terms of delivery. I would say this is a must.

So with all the above in mind – how would I propose structuring an Agile Marketing team? Obviously there is no one size fits all approach, and as ever the composition of the team would be largely dependant on your organisation and / or the focus of what you want to achieve. 

You could then look to supplement if needed with other team members from within the department (or third parties) such as SEO and UX Leads and Leads from outside functions such as Legal, IT, Compliance, Procurement as needed – but be mindful to not allow the core team to grow too large or it could present either issues with co-location or make it more difficult to foster collaboration between team members. 

So in closing, if you were to only take away three things what would be most important? Creating a cross functional self organising, self managing team, a big visual information radiator such as a kanban board to ensure transparency and visibility, and finally working within a defined scrum framework (with associated support). 

What are your thoughts on the above? Do you agree with this as a potential framework? If you have any questions – or would like to know more about agile approaches in general please feel free to get in touch. You can also contact Guy on LinkedIn