The CMO’s Guide To Agile Marketing
The CMO’s Guide To Agile Marketing
Table of Contents
This guide aims to assist you in your Agile implementation across marketing teams. Its content is not a sales pitch, lead generation magnet or a prescriptive framework. Instead, it will stimulate your thought process on how to apply Agile marketing. This, in turn, will help boost the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, people and processes.
You would be hard pressed today to find an Agile framework that is perfect for marketing teams. Finding trained team coaches with practical experience of marketing is also challenging. This guide aims to educate, inform and encourage senior marketing leaders. To help with the process, we will briefly examine the history of Agile, explore its benefits and ways of applying it in the context of marketing.
What does Agile Marketing Mean for CMOs and Marketing Leaders?
There are many different definitions of Agile Marketing. If you ask 4 marketers to define Agile, you will probably get 7 different definitions. So what is Agile Marketing? We define Agile marketing as an iterative approach to marketing strategy, people and processes. This includes a shift in mindset towards embracing a culture of continuous improvement. Agile marketing should be the default way of working for any and all organisations that want to survive long-term. Of course, not every CMO or marketing leader will necessarily understand how to be Agile. This is why it is important to accept that the current approach to marketing needs to change. This increases the odds of transforming your entire marketing team to ‘being Agile’ as opposed to ‘doing Agile’.
Many so called ‘thought leaders’ place too great an emphasis on frameworks like Scrum, and Kanban when talking about Agile. However, Agile marketing is not defined by these frameworks and focusing on these usually does more harm than good. For Femi Olajiga, the right definition of Agile marketing is framework agnostic. Instead it focuses on the strategic speed, flexibility, and adaptability of the marketing function within an organisation.
History of Agile
The term Agile became popular after the creation of the 2001 Agile Manifesto (click here to read more). As a CMO, it is important to understand that the original Manifesto was not created for Marketing teams, but it aimed to improve the process of software development. Although, these two contexts are very different, some of the key principles apply to marketing teams just as much as IT teams. In my definition of Agile marketing, offered earlier on in this guide, I highlighted Strategy, Processes and People as its key ingredients. Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban are the processes that help with strategy implementation.
Benefits of Agile Marketing
As CMOs, it is important to get the best out of your direct reports and their teams. How you achieve this will depend on the culture, structure and skill distribution within your teams. Agile marketing, when implemented in the right way, provides the following benefits:
- Team Effectiveness: Agile frameworks provide structured rituals that trigger high performance in teams. Lean framework advocates for continuous improvement mindset through PDCA (Plan, DO, Check, Act). Having worked in a number of Agile teams, I realise how its application promotes teamwork. Improved communication through transparency and visibility is a core theme within Agile. Agile encourages prioritising individuals and interactions over process and tools. What this means is that team members are encouraged to be present and more human at work. Agile teams should also have built-in flexibility to respond to change, rather than following rigid plans.
- Subtle Control: The default command and control leadership style is frustrating to employees. People on your team want to feel empowered, whilst leaders don’t wish to relinquish control. So where can we find some middle ground? Processes within Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban enable subtle control. The transparency, visibility and goal clarity afforded by Agile provides a smarter type of control. CMOs and Marketing directors are, therefore, able to control and manage their teams without the usual ‘carrot and stick’ style.
- Focus on Outcome: Marketing teams focus on output by default due to their inherent silos. Agile frameworks like Scrum, if implemented in the right way, invite people to focus on outcomes. It’s a much more fruitful way to help teams improve the value generated from tasks. CMOs are then able to communicate via subtle control their expectations from their team(s). In my experience, individuals and teams that employ Agile have a much clearer focus based on Objectives and Key Results (OKR).
- Stakeholder Engagement: Depending on the blend of Agile frameworks adopted for your marketing, as a CMO you can improve collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders, which can help your organisation improve its customer experience strategy. Forward thinking organisations like ING bank have championed Agile across their IT and HR functions. If you look into your IT function, there is a chance they have implemented Agile. What better way to sync and align marketing with IT and other functions than to adopt an Agile way of working and align it with the rest of your business.
Common mistakes in Agile marketing implementation
Before addressing how to apply Agile in the context of marketing, let’s first examine some of the common mistakes CMOs make. Avoiding these common mistakes will help your chances of successfully implementing Agile marketing.
There is always an ongoing debate about which Agile framework is ideal for marketing teams. Asking this (wrong) question is one of the major mistakes CMOs make when adopting Agile. Instead, what you should be asking is ‘What set of practices across Agile frameworks will improve your teams effectiveness?’.
The first mistake most CMO and marketing leaders make is that they adopt Scrum by the book. What this means is that they fail to understand that Scrum was primarily developed for software and not marketing teams. So why Scum for marketing teams, you might ask. Scrum started outside IT before its reinvention into a framework for software teams. To read more about the true and less well-known creators of Scrum, I recommend reading the original article – ‘The New Product Development Game’ by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in January 1986.
Agile frameworks like Scrum offer a template approach to teamwork in software development. It assumes a team size of 5-9 individuals. You can read more about the Scrum framework by downloading the Scrum Guide online. Having worked as part of Scrum teams in the past and having coached website redesign projects using Scrum, I’ve come to recognise that marketers must learn to avoid following the prescriptive and dogmatic recommendations of Scrum. Instead, you must apply some of the Scrum rituals to the context of your marketing team. How you do that will depend on the leadership style of the CMO, as well as your specific team structure and culture. Agile is not a goal for marketing, but a process that will help with the implementation of your strategy and the achievement of your strategic and tactical goals. More than once I have seen absolute chaos after the application of Agile across multiple marketing teams because:
- The senior leadership team were micro-managers and lacked true leadership skills.
- Senior marketing managers have failed to make the top-level marketing budget flexible. Attempting to adopt Agile marketing without a defined digital strategy is common, but dangerous. If you don’t have a defined strategic plan, how will you know what success looks like? More importantly, how will you know which tactics to employ to achieve your strategic goals? So do yourself a favour and take the time it takes to craft a well-defined Agile marketing strategy to improve your overall customer experience. Then, revisit the strategy at regular intervals to iterate it for your changing environment, increasing the speed and flexibility of implementing tactics as opposed to having a rigid strategic plan. Marketing is far more effective at a strategic level as opposed to the ‘spray and pray’ ineffectiveness of purely tactical focus.
- Culture: Leaders often claim to hire for cultural fit, when in fact they are just hiring people like themselves. Take a good look at your organisation: do you have homogenous teams across your entire marketing function? Research shows that hiring people that think the same way we do reduces innovation and team productivity. Hiring is not a problem unique to Agile marketing, but it is one of the mistakes CMOs make often in their Agile marketing adoption process. Scrum team structure is often sold as a prerequisite for high performance teams. Although there is some element of truth to this assumption in the context of project teams as opposed to stable teams, CMOs must understand that Scrum gained its popularity due to the smart marketing done by the creators of Scrum, whose 2-day certification training has largely become a money spinning scheme. As a certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance), I do not recommend sending your marketing on a pure Scrum Master training.
How to Implement Agile Marketing
Agile is here to stay – even the big consultancy firms are beginning to offer Agile transformation services in large numbers. At what cost and risk to clients, you might ask? CMOs and marketing leaders must understand that one single approach to Agile marketing implementation does not exist. Large-scale Agile frameworks aimed at increasing the adoption of Agile across the IT enterprise are often sold to marketing teams, but can be very ineffective if not appropriately contextualised for marketing.
Imagine a CMO forcing teams to adopt a way of working created by software developers for IT teams. How Agile is that approach? Yet this is happening across large marketing teams because of the lack of qualified Agile Marketing Coaches. I interviewed a number of CMOs that have applied Agile in their marketing teams and this, combined with my experience, highlighted the following points that should be taken into consideration when looking to take the leap into Agile marketing:
- Start with self-study: read Agile marketing books and other available materials. This approach is counterintuitive because it requires your own due diligence, however this can be very beneficial in the long run. Avoid the urge to pay for a 2-day training course even if you can afford to send your entire team on such courses. The rationale behind this recommendation is due to the fact that no individual or team can learn Agile in a 2-day class. Working in an Agile way requires a behavioural change within the team that takes months of work. The need for a specialised Agile marketing trainer is less important than hiring a qualified coach to help you and your team unpick how Agile can work in the specific context of your team. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you approach Agile from a framework agnotic mindset because one size does not fit all when it comes to Agile marketing.
- Is your marketing strategy iterative? With the decline in the ability to differentiate between products and services, customer experience as emerged as the bedrock of any effective marketing strategy. The success of your Agile marketing initiative will depend on how you adapt its rituals as a strategy execution machine. I explained the interpretation of the Agile Manifesto in the context of marketing in my book, Lean Agile Marketing. This applies to the process of executing marketing strategy.
- The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ is not new. I have experienced Agile fail more than once in toxic work environments. Whichever framework or methodology you adopt, it will not reap the expected benefits if the team or company culture is toxic. CMOs must first figure out how to improve the culture within marketing teams in order for Agile to work.
Key Metrics For Success
Time to market: Metrics can be deceiving so it is critical you are confident about what you measure. Having experienced Agile across different teams within a large departments, it’s hard to define success in a generic way. The success criteria for Scrum teams in software development are focused on outputs as opposed to outcomes. As long as the team delivers working software on time and within budget, then it is considered successful. The fact that customers hardly use some of the functionality offered is often ignored. This is not something that would work in marketing.
From the perspective of marketing, success metrics are best measured in the context of waste (otherwise known in marketing as opportunity cost). Increased speed of campaign planning and execution is a good measure of success… but you still need to know its cost. How does speed influence an increase (or decrease) in the cost of executing marketing campaigns? Improved visibility of work and more effective collaboration are some of the key benefits of Agile marketing, but you should always try and calculate the money spent and saved via these initiatives.
Employee Turnover: Employee engagement is an important metric in Agile marketing, which is, unfortunately, also the polar opposite of increased turnover. It is common knowledge that employees tend to leave companies because of bad managers. There is a misguided default assumption that the Agile way of working automatically improves team morale, however this takes concerted and sustained effort on behalf of both the leaders and their teams. One success metric of Agile marketing can be measuring turnover. You can look at team, departmental and company-wide turnover, depending on the level of Agile transformation you are embarking on. The introduction of Agile often results in some turnover, which should be expected. It only becomes an issue if employee attrition rates continues to increase after a reasonable amount of time, so keep a close eye on this.
I have seen instances where a command and control leadership style resulted in huge turnover in Agile marketing teams. Although the team was able to deliver its expected output, this was done at much higher cost and a considerable amount of delays. The HR team chose to ignore ample feedback from team members about the toxic nature of the team lead and this resulted in some team members resigning due to stress-related issues. This negative take on Agile is often not published online, but it exists in reality and few professionals really talk about it.
Decision Making: The main bottleneck to campaign execution is a slow decision making process. Agile makes it easy for CMOs to empower their teams. The key performance indicator to measure your Agility is the speed of your decision making. Delays caused by approval processes trying to overcome the lack of trust from leadership teams is anti-Agile. An environment that empowers people to make decisions without fear or retribution – now that is a metric that shows a successful adoption of Agile in the context of marketing.
Conclusion
Agile implementation is not difficult if applied in the context of marketing. The leadership style and team culture will determine the success of the transition to an Agile way of working. To achieve the desired behavioural change, CMOs must solicit the help of a qualified Agile coach with practical hands on experience of marketing.
You can post your question below if you need further clarification on how to implement Agile across your marketing function.