Agile Marketing Case Study
Agile Marketing Case Study
Table of Contents
Transcript
This case study is about how Agile marketing was implemented in a digital marketing agency. I was part of this project and I’ll be sharing how and what we did to make the project successful. I was hired by the agency as a subcontractor and the agency in this context. I will refer as an agency, and when I say client, I mean the in-house team from the organization. Due to NDA, nondisclosure agreements, I cannot mention or highlight any names, and everything will be kept confidential, but I’ll do my best to share how Scrum with a flavour of Kanban was applied in this digital marketing agency. And at the end, if you have any question that needs clarifying, drop me an email or contact me directly for further clarification.
Agile Marketing Case Study: Implementing Scrum and Kanban
So, on the agency side, we had a Scrum Master. The Scrum Master worked on the team. And then we had a client director. This client director was responsible for managing the in-house team on the client’s perspective, as well as managing the delivery team, the people working in collaboration with the Scrum Master. So, this client director also from the agency perspective, was reporting straight into the CEO of the agency, so he was more like the main person managing dependencies and issues, but wasn’t heavily involved, but had visibility of the project. So, the Scrum Master reported into the client director on the agency perspective.
And above that, we had the marketing director. The marketing director was based in the UK and he reported into the VP marketing based in America. So, this is the client-side of Agile marketing. And then we had external stakeholders as well, which were on the same level of the VP of marketing. This were the sales director and the head of IT. In the beginning, I highlighted that this was about a website redesign project, and we had a specific deliverable. And we created a cross-functional team. This team understood what we wanted to deliver.
So this team comprises of the UX, this UX person was responsible for looking at the existing websites and creating and doing research and doing everything that has to do with usability testing, user research, customer personas, and stuff like that. And the UX person worked closely with the SEO and PPC person who was in charge of reviewing audits on the website to make sure that we didn’t break any rules or create any problems for the redesign project. And also we had the front-end developer, back-end developer, a web analytics person. And then we had a project manager. The project manager was on-site three days a week because all those teams were co-located. And the project manager reported directly into the marketing director and the VP marketing from the client perspective,
from the client’s side, sorry.
We also had the CRO person that was looking at the customer journey, looking at the conversion path and making recommendations and gathering insight as well. We had a graphic designer, and then we had the IT team. The IT team was reachable through the marketing director on the client-side. That was the part where the head of IT came into play because we needed to make sure that the functional requirements for the redesign were accurate and everything on the backend side of things was working.
The IT team worked closely with the backend to make sure that all those functionalities were aligned and accurate. And then we had legal because this was a regulated, this organization worked in a regulated industry, so there was compliance, and everything that we were doing needed to go through legal for approval, and then we had a tester. So, after everything was created on a stage by stage basis, the landing page, the home page, the tester kind of run tests to make sure that everything was working very very well. So, this is what the structure looks like. What I like to highlight is that, when we worked in an Agile way, we were co-located.
Everyone on the team was in the same office. And we had, the seating arrangement was, the SEO person sat beside the UX, the web analytics, and then the project manager sat on the other side. It was a table that had four on each side, there was no division between both of them, so, it was a truly cross-functional team. So, the graphic designer was also on the table, the content person was there, and then we had another table behind where the other members of staff were. And then close to the table, we had a board, a physical board. So that board, I’ll talk more about the board later on, but that board was what we used as a Kanban board.
And we also had a virtual board as well, because the VP marketing was based in the States, the sales director. So they needed to have visibility. So we replicated the physical Kanban board into a virtual Kanban board to communicate and to give visibility to the people in America. For this project, the North Star was the statement of work. The statement of work was agreed with the agency and was created in a collaborative way. So we had, it was a living document. The deliverables were clear, but the requirements within the documents were continuously updated.
And the VP marketing who was the sponsor on the client-side, owned the statement of work. And the statement of work also contained financials and expenses, everything that was, that needed to be known. So, it wasn’t like there was information that the VP marketing knew, that people on the team didn’t know. So that was one of the good things that I saw in this project. Like everybody had visibility of the final goal. What was the expectation, even the finances. And even the rates that, the payments that were made to the contractors and everything had visibility, nothing was hidden.
The marketing director, who was also the product-owner reported into VP marketing. He kind of ran the execution side of things, he was responsible for making sure that everything was going, there was progress, while the VP marketing kind of took a backseat and just kind of allowed and empowered the marketing director to take reign of the project. The Scrum Master was onsite with a team and all the Scrum, he was responsible for managing the Scrum team, doing all the meetings and everything like that. So, the statement of work was what created the backlog.
So basically, all the items that were relevant to SEO, PPC, social media, content, was now broken down and each person and I like to highlight that each person, each subject matter expert on the team created a backlog. Because we had visibility of the goal, the expectation from the VP marketing. So, because everyone was up to an expert level, so we created and broke down the task into this backlog. And we kind of, although we created everything because it was a long defined four months project, we created each sprint backlog from the product backlog.
So basically, for the UX person, he broke down, he knew clearly what needs to be done for the whole project, so, he broke it down into bits. So we had a total of 16 sprints, if I remember correctly, yeah, about 16 sprints. So it was two-week cycles, and at the start of each iteration, we created a list of items that we needed to get finished at the end of each two weeks and presented to, we had a meeting. So, the meeting was the daily meeting, the planning meeting, and then the show and tell.
The daily meeting involved, was, include the marketing director, the Scrum Master, and the Scrum team. It was onsite, but the marketing director wasn’t always present physically, so, he dialed in through a phone and we just basically went through progress reports and things that were happening towards the end dates, which was 16 weeks. So, there was clear visibility of how the work was progressing because we had a defined end goal. And then the planning meeting was at the beginning of every two weeks, so, at the end of the first sprint, we make sure that we did a show and tell onsite where the people in America dialed in, they were updated on what work was completed for the week, the marketing director, because he was based in the UK, came onsite to the agency and everybody just sat around the table, prepared each person, the SEO, the PPC, each person on the team prepared a very short presentation, not more than 10 minutes at most if you can do it under five minutes, perfect. Two, three slides, top-level, stood in front of the room and just did a show and tell. It wasn’t like to create any anxiety or anything, but just so that the stakeholders were aware of what you did that week and the potential issues that you’re having.
Which we also flag during the daily meeting with the marketing director. So, the show and tell was a way to kind of create documents as well. So, there were deliverables. So, the UX person with creators were doing show and tell, and will present the mockups of the home page and that was the final deliverable that would then be passed on to the marketing director and the VP. So the show and tell wasn’t just about showing things, it was about actually delivering the act, tangible stuff at the end of each iteration, leading up to the final design that we delivered at the end of the 16 weeks.
So, as I said, these meetings were attended by the sales director as well, and the head of IT to make sure that everything was aligned. And one thing I like to highlight about this is, we use a blend of Kanban and Scrum to implement this project. At the beginning of the project, the sales director, the head of IT, VP marketing, and the marketing director had two-day training. This two-day training wasn’t about Scrum or Kanban, it was just about everything, a blend of both of them, for them to understand the process in which the team will work and then to teach them how to manage expectation, to teach them how to delegate, and to help them understand that working in an Agile way meant they had to be very very fast in responding when a request is sent to them.
Because this project was 16 sprints and it had a defined timeline. So, this was just a top-level example of how Agile marketing is applied in the agency, this does not apply to all agencies, because this was a specific project, I will share a different case study about how Agile marketing was implemented across an agency that had close to 40 clients, and I helped them kind of move away from using Scrum because they found out that Scrum was too rigid for them and move them more towards a Kanban-style of Agile marketing. But that’s more advanced.
This is just a top-level overview of how Agile markets was implemented in an agency. And the key points I want you to understand is, the Scrum Master wasn’t fixed, it’s rotated across the team, and the marketing director was the product owner, and that was on the client-side, and in between that, we had a client director that was managing the internal activities and he was responsible for removing blockers. For example, there was a time where we had issues crawling the existing website, and we had to get through to the head of IT. Your normal Scrum would dictate that you should go through the Scrum Master or through the line of authority to get to the sales director.
But we worked in a very different way, the subject matter expert on the team contacted the sales director directly, and got, the line of communication was very very open. And the visibility was just amazing. And the project was a success. So, I’ve seen Agile marketing work in an agency perspective, but one thing that I would like to highlight is, every member of the Scrum team was an expert. So, most of us were contractors. So, if you’re working, if you’re trying to apply this within a team of an existing agency employee, you might want to look at the experience level of those people on the team. If their experience level is not accurate, or it’s not up to scratch, then you might struggle on that part.
And that’s why Agile was very very successful in IT because all the Scrum teams in the context of IT were very skilled people, so, they didn’t really need, from a skills perspective, they didn’t have any dependency on external stakeholders. In the context of marketing, that’s where it becomes tricky. You need to know if you have a resource that is shared across multiple teams, and how would that impact on you deliver at pace? How would that impact on the velocity and the throughput of your task execution. And one thing I also like to highlight is, we didn’t use user stories, we used the word, task, instead.
So, the product backlog had the task, big-level epic tasks, so, tasks that would say, for example, create a mockup of the homepage that will be like a deliverable at the end of the sprint. But leading to that, there’ll be subtasks, smaller tasks that you need to use to create that final goal. So, what we did was we made sure that each task was not more than two days, and you, we kind of didn’t work at 100% capacity, there was flexibility, so the idea was you started on a Monday, but the work doesn’t really gather pace until the Tuesday, and by the end of the two weeks, towards the Friday, you should have at least a day flexibility, so, it’s not like you have to just ramp up all the tasks into the two weeks and you’re not able to finish it.
So, capacity management is also very very important to give way for things that will fly into the team, unexpected tasks coming into the team. So, that’s one thing that we learned as well. We didn’t work at 100% capacity to give room for people to take on important tasks. So, if something comes in from the VP of marketing that was urgent or needed to be added into the backlog or during the sprint, we had the flexibility of taking stuff away from the sprints back into the backlog and then into the sprint. So, we were always reprioritizing and that’s where the daily meeting was very very important. So, things that were top priority, the marketing director with information on the client-side would tell us that, okay, they’ve deprioritized that, this is now the parity.
So, there was that flexibility. We were not very very rigid. Although we worked in sprint, there was no hard and fast rule that if a task didn’t finish in this sprint, you couldn’t move it into the second sprint. So that’s where the difference between Agile in marketing and IT is different. And everyone on the team, as I said, was very very knowledgeable and experienced about Agile marketing. So, that helped. So that’s why we moved the Scrum Master role across the team. One week someone will be the Scrum Master, the other, the other person will be. So, it was basic admin maintenance. And at a time we use a software called Rally, I think it was acquired by LeanKit, and then acquired, I don’t know the story, but we used that Rally software, which is similar to Trello, and we also use JIRA, it’s an Atlassian tool, confluence to manage file sharing and stuff like that.
So, if you’re, we use Slack as well to communicate with the team, everyone can communicate at easily through that. So, that’s another thing that I like to highlight. With you looking to implement Agile marketing, you need a different type of communication method, different from email, that will allow easy access and file sharing and also security as well. Because it wasn’t heavily regulated industry. So we were very very careful with what we shared. So we didn’t really use Google Suite and stuff like that to share documents. This is a top-level overview of a case study of Agile marketing. Have you read my book Lean Agile Marketing?
If you have any questions or need clarification on how to apply Agile marketing in a digital marketing agency, contact me or connect with my via LinkedIn.
Thank you very much and stay agile.
