Catching up on my backlog of data and topics from before #MartechDay earlier this month — which featured the 2022 marketing technology landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my list is the latest State of Agile Marketing report from AgileSherpas.

As always, this is a terrific, comprehensive report on how and why agile methodologies are being used in marketing. You can see from the chart above that agile has found its way into a wide variety of marketing activities: marketing operations, creative services, website operations, social media, advertising, etc.

It’s even being applied (30%) in events marketing, which has long been the go-to example for skeptics: “Oh, agile could never work for events.” (To be fair, in a virtual/hybrid event world, the pacing and adaptability of events marketing has increased significantly.)

But unlike last year, when 51% of participants reported using agile marketing, this time only 43% did. That’s close to the 42% from 2020. Is agile marketing backsliding?

Of course, the most obvious disclaimer is the survey sample. Even with 513 marketers participating in this latest survey, it’s still a very small subset of the diverse marketing universe and no doubt subject to the ebbs and flows of selection bias.

But still. After nearly 15 years of advocacy for agile marketing, the momentum of this movement seems… stalled?

Agile marketing principles, practices & labels

The principles of agile marketing, however, seem to be universally accepted as gospel truth these days. I can’t think of a single marketer I’ve met in the past several years who hasn’t embraced the values of adaptability, learning from experimentation, iterative improvement, cross-team collaboration, greater visibility into work-in-flight, team empowerment, etc.

Marketing has become an agile profession. Full stop.

Classic agile practices — such as sprints, daily standups, kanban boards, etc. — also seem to have proliferated widely. Although in many cases, they’ve morphed from their original form. We’ll come back to that in a minute, as I think it’s the twist of post-agile.

But the labels? Not so much. I very rarely hear the terms sprint, standup, or kanban in marketing discussions. Even “agile marketing” as a term arises less frequently than it seemed a couple of years ago.

Agile marketing vs. agile development trends

A couple of charts from Google Trends help illustrate what’s happening here. First, let’s just look at the growth of the search term “agile marketing”:

The chart shows relative search volume for this term over the past 18 years. You can see that it peaked around 2017. (A year after the release of Hacking Marketing. Coincidence?) Since then, it’s had fluctations up and down. But it largely hit a ceiling.

To get a better sense of how much absolute search volume there is for agile marketing, you need to compare it against another trend. So let’s compare it against its progenitor, “agile development”:

Two things pop right out. First, agile marketing has achieved only a tiny fraction of the mindshare that agile development ever did. Second, interest in agile development has steadily declined since 2010. It’s around 1/4 of the volume it was at its peak.

What happened in 2010? The rise of DevOps.

Indeed, DevOps became the giant that stood on the shoulders of agile development. Its popularity has dwarfed agile development, even from its heyday. And compared to those two, agile marketing would barely even register on the scale.

But it’s important to note that DevOps arose from Agile. To quote its Wikipedia article:

“Agile development teams… couldn’t ‘satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software’ unless they subsumed the operations / infrastructure responsibilities associated with their applications, many of which they automated.”

DevOps “aims to shorten the systems development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.” What is continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) if not the ultimate mechanism for delivering iterative software development?

As Forrest Gump might say, “Agile is as agile does.”

The plummeting costs of “shipping” in the cloud

To be clear, DevOps is not an agile management methodology. It’s not even an “ops” team (in most cases) like other ops functions, such as marketing ops. Rather, it’s a set of practices, processes, and technology that developers use to ship software quickly, iteratively, and safely. It leverages a ton of automation and instrumentation.

DevOps optimizes building and deploying software, but deciding what to build and when still needs to happen at a level above that. In theory, agile development methodologies such as Scrum can provide the framework for those decisions. But most dev teams I know don’t explicitly use those methodologies anymore. Most have invented their own process, pulling concepts from agile methodologies and adapting them and leveraging dev project management tools such as Jira.

My take: DevOps — and more broadly, the cloud — has dramatically reduced the costs of iteratively developing software. Back in the days when agile methodologies such as Scrum were created, the costs and complexities of shipping were much higher. The rigid structure of Scrum was an effective and necessary way to manage that. Today in a good DevOps environment? Not as necessary?

That’s not to say that strategy, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, and all the coordination and collaboration required around them aren’t necessary. They’re as crucial to success as ever. But the rigidity of Scrum in translating that into iterative release cycles? Not as necessary?

(Let the flames from ardent agile advocates commence.)

Is there a DevOps equivalent in marketing?

Marketing ops is a different kind of creature that DevOps. For one, it is a role/team within the marketing org, rather than a practice/process that all marketers use.

Yet there is some shared DNA. In many ways, marketing ops teams function as a DevOps-like enabler for marketers to be able to “ship” marketing quickly, iteratively, and safely. Marketing ops manages the tech stack and processes to enable that — through a ton of automation and instrumentation.

Yet with the rise of more and more no-code capabilities across martech, marketing ops is also empowering marketers with more and more self-service capabilities. Just as software deployment ops got “shifted left” (i.e., moved upstream) into more developers’ hands with DevOps, more capabilities to execute marketing — both internal and external marketing “deployments” — are being shifted into the hands of general marketers.

I don’t know that there’s a name for this phenomenon. It’s a kind of democratization of certain facets of marketing ops. (Ideally under the guidance, governance, and guardrails of the expert marketing ops team.) But it is increasingly analogous to DevOps. More people can ship more marketing, quickly, easily, and safely.

Just as with software, strategy, planning, roadmaps, prioritization, team coordination and collaboration are essential to effectively harness this distributed power of creation. But just as similarly, the costs in deploying most kinds of marketing have dropped dramatically over the past decade. This has created more slack in the marketing production process, which has made rigid agile marketing methodologies… not as necessary?

(Honestly posed as a question, not a declaration.)

New agile practices: Pods, DARCIs, Slack, “Work OS”

Speaking of slack, or, um, Slack, the past 10 years has also brought an explosion of innovation in work communications and collaboration products. For instance, Slack and Microsoft Teams have become ubiquitous — along with a whole ecosystem of apps that extend and integrate with them. A new generation of work management platforms, such as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, and (for marketers) Workfront, provide greater structure and visibility into complex, fast-moving priorities, projects, and workflows.

Indeed, the Management category of the martech landscape had the largest percentage growth from 2020 to 2022.

These tools have had a significant impact on how work gets done. Many of them embed or enable agile (lowercase “a”) practices. Almost none of them use the terminology of agile marketing methodologies. But the essence of agile is there: transparency, prioritization, accountability, work-in-progress management, identification of blockers and bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, I’d say that Slack and Teams — accelerated by the Great Migration to Remote Work — have effectively killed replaced the daily stand-up for most teams.

But it’s not that the underlying principle of stand-ups has gone away. On the contrary, these team communications platforms generally make it easier for teams to stay connected throughout the day in a relatively low-impact manner. Issues that arise can be addressed faster than waiting for the next stand-up in a fixed time window that increasingly fails to align with the schedules of distributed team members.

Hey, I’m still a huge fan of in-person collaboration, and I agree something is lost without it. But other things are gained. And for better and worse, remote and hybrid teams are the new normal. In this brave new world, Slack and Teams are a better fit than daily stand-ups for many.

And it’s not just technology. Management methods that I think of as “point solutions” for specific needs — in contrast to a whole suite of practices, as with formal agile marketing — have been popularized for better cross-functional collaboration (e.g., pods outside the context of formal agile) and multi-party decision-making (e.g., DARCI models).

The net effect? Marketing teams are becoming more and more agile.

They just don’t necessarily think of their practices as formal “agile marketing.”

From agile marketing to… marketing?

Whatever happened to digital marketing? It became marketing.

Not because marketing became less digital. Quite the opposite. Digital became so embedded in everything marketers were doing that the label of the profession reverted to the mean: marketing. I’d call that a victory for the digital marketing movement, not defeat.

Similarly, is agile marketing simply becoming… marketing?

Maybe “agile marketing” will restart its growth as an explicit movement. Or maybe it will be replaced by some newly named methodology that is closer to what DevOps has become in the software development profession. Or maybe is just becomes implicit in how modern marketing teams run.

Agile is as agile does.

Regardless, I still believe there is a huge opportunity for teaching marketing teams how to best harness all these platforms, practices, and processes. There’s never been more demand for helping marketing teams achieve peak performance through good training, enablement, consulting, and advisory services in today’s environment.

Does the name we call it really matter?

The post Have we entered a post-agile marketing age? appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates.

But I am excited to share with you some exciting news about real agile marketing adoption. AgileSherpas and Forrester just released their new State of Agile Marketing 2021 report, and it reveals an important milestone: for the first time, the majority (51%) of marketers surveyed reporting using agile marketing methods in their work.

This is up from 42% in last year’s report and 32% in 2019. That’s a pretty remarkable trendline, given the cultural and operational changes that agile adoption often requires organizations to embrace.

Remarkable, but honestly not surprising.

Pretty much every marketer on the planet has gotten the memo by now about the need to not only engage in digital channels and experiences — but to fully leverage the inherently malleable and adaptive nature of the digital medium when doing so. This is why marketers now have so much in common with software developers. Iteration, experimentation, rapid feedback loops: these are the mechanisms that enable marketing to thrive in a digital world.

76% of agile marketers say their department can handle fast-paced digital marketing work. And in case someone’s going to trot out the old trope that “agile might be fast-paced, but it’s not strategic” — note that agile marketing teams are consistently more strategically aligned (87%) than traditional or ad hoc marketing organizations:

That’s because real agile management isn’t a vague notion of simply being nimble. It’s a set of relatively well-defined practices that were designed to harness the fluidity of operating in a rapidly-evolving digital environment in the service of clear prioritization and performance measurement.

So where does agile get applied in marketing now? Pretty much everywhere:

There are a ton of other great insights in the full report. I highly encourage you to check it out.

No daily plank required.

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Agile management was born 20 years ago, to help teams operate better in a fast-moving, ever-changing, digital world.

Agile originated in software development circles, with a bunch of programmers high in the mountains, and spread to other disciplines, eventually marketing. (“Hey, what are you all doing, standing around, chatting in a circle? With a whiteboard? Looks like fun! Can I join?”) Without even having to know what agile marketing actually meant, marketing teams knew it just sounded good.

In sheer volume of ink spilled on the subject, agile — or, capital-A Agile, if you’re going to be nit-picky about it — was extremely successful. For its time.

But times change.

Indeed, the world has changed. It’s gotten more fast-moving. And more ever-changing. And, with every device, appliance, and surface in our harried lives constantly nagging us, by beeping and buzzing, and buzzing and beeping, and BEEPING and BUZZING, and… um, where was I? Oh, yeah, it’s even more digital too.

We don’t just have automation.

We now have hyperautomation. (I swear, I’m not making that up.) We need a management methodology that can keep pace with this frenzied hell 21st-century Interwebbed nirvana.

And so, as one of the early champions of agile marketing, I’m thrilled to introduce you to the emerging practices of hyperagile marketing.

Agile marketing was based around the rituals and artifacts of Scrum.

Hyperagile marketing is based around Scram. Our rituals and artifacts are different. Better.

Instead of week-long or month-long (!) sprints, we have 24-hour hurtles. Picture that you’re being chased by a ravenous Jabberwock beast. That’s the motivated work environment that hyperagile Scram seeks to instill.

Since timelines are radically compressed in hyperagile marketing, we forgo the daily stand-up. They just take too long. Sure, the original idea of a “stand-up” was the assumption that people would exercise brevity in their updates if they were forced to stand for the whole meeting. But thanks to the evil of standing desks and trade show booths, people can talk while standing for-friggin’-ever.

So in Scram, we have the daily plank.

The whole team has to plank while everyone chimes in with their updates. We’re usually done in less than a minute. That’s hyperagile.

Instead of a product owner, there’s a dungeon master. Let’s face it, they’re good at making up stories and throwing nasty surprises at the poor band of characters who are forced to put up with it all for some meager experience to level up in their careers.

Instead of a Kanban board, we’ve thrown out that archaic artifact. Instead, we keep track of the status of all work-in-progress using a highly sophisticated neural net. When someone asks where things at, we just tap the side of our head and say, “Up here, in our hyperagile neural net.”

If they follow up with the question of, “Um, okay, when will it be done?” We’re able to give an instantaneous response: “Soon.” That’s state-of-the-art fuzzy logic at work for you.

Hey, it’s not our fault that neural nets are kinda black-boxy. Blame AI.

These interactions with other stakeholders are actually where the name “Scram” came from. We were in the middle of our first daily plank when that over-caffeinated fellow from sales ops came over to ask what we were doing. The team replied, “Scram.” History was made.

Backlogs are the bane of Scrum-based agile teams. They keep growing towards infinity, so that you’re constantly reminded of the gargantuan mountain of things that you’re not getting done. (A reporter recently asked the FBI if there were any updates on where Jimmy Hoffa was, and the spokesperson replied, “He’s in the backlog.”)

In theory, agile teams are supposed to prune the backlog. But that’s like pruning the Amazon. With a butter knife.

So with Scram, we’ve invented the brilliant mechanism of an auto-pruning backlog. As soon as someone adds something to the backlog, it’s automatically thrown out. Efficiency-squared.

If someone complains about that practice — “Hey, you just threw away my idea!” — you can reply in condescending tones that, “Hyperagile is a stream, not a pool.”

For the work the hyperagile team does hurtle its way through, there’s no Planning Poker. Instead, we have Planning Roulette. “Joe, you’ve got to get that whole campaign built and launched in — spins wheel — 90 minutes. Go!”

I’m barely scratching the surface of the amazing practices that Scram can bring to the modern, hyperagile marketing organization. So to further study and promote these sick management methods for the new-new-NEW normal, I’m proud to announce that today, April 1, 2021, I’m launching the Institute of Hyperagile Marketing (I-HAM).

We’ve founded I-HAM with a short and sweet Hyperagile Manifesto:

GET IT DONE. NOW, DAMN IT!

To commemorate the founding of the Institute, we’re making this article available for purchase as an NFT. The bidding starts at $4,012,021.

The post Introducing Scram: Hyperagile Marketing Practices for a Hyperautomation, Hypergrowth World appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The following is a guest post curated by Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas, sharing reflections from leading agile marketing practitioners and analysts on the findings from her latest State of Agile Marketing report.

As we learned in the 3rd Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, there are lots of different manifestations of marketing agility. Most marketers use a hybrid framework, and we employ tons of different practices within those frameworks.

To tap into this vast array of experiences with agile in marketing, we reached out to a whole slew of agile thought leaders and practitioners to get their take on the results from this year’s report.

Here’s what they had to say…

Job Satisfaction is a Big Deal

Evan Leybourn, Founder and CEO, Business Agility Institute:

“It is not controversial to say that we spend most of our waking time working (whether in the office, train, or at home). In fact, most of us spend more time working than we do with our family. Whether this is good or not is beside the point. This is a simple fact of the modern economy. Therefore, it follows that work should be one of the most rewarding times in our lives, no matter your role. What excites me about the findings in this report is that 74% of agile marketers declare job satisfaction, compared with just 58% of traditional marketers and 34% of ad hoc marketers.”

74% of agile marketers declare job satisfaction, compared with just 58% of traditional marketers.

Jeff Clark, Principal Analyst, Marketing Operations Strategies, Forrester SiriusDecisions:

“One reason that 74% of agile marketers are satisfied with their work is that they are taking time to review results and quickly course correct to deliver a better product. That discipline leads to both better results and greater on-the-job satisfaction.”

Lucas Kirschman, Senior Manager, Agile Program Office, TD Ameritrade:

“Every team we have stood up has shouted to the rooftops about how great working on an agile team has been. Two such verbatims: ‘I never want to go back to the way I was working before!’ and ‘It’s amazing to be so involved with the strategy and decision-making from the start.'”

Don’t Worry if Progress Seems Slow

Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group:

“Two thirds of agile marketing teams have been practicing for at least 3 years, but most of them say they’re ‘still maturing.'”

“Agile approaches, terminology, processes, and outcomes have become mainstream in marketing. And while many marketers are frustrated with the slow adoption of agile marketing, we have made tremendous progress in just the last 3 years.”

Andrew Burrows, Agile Marketing Lead, IBM:

“There’s a lot to be proud of when analyzing the data in this year’s State of Agile Marketing report, and an intended 46% adoption in the next 6 months indicates that the scale of agile marketing is going to continue to increase. As we continue to scale and mature as an agile industry, I would challenge all of us to truly innovate with how we harness agility.”

Hybrid Agile Marketing Frameworks Just Work

Cameron van Orman, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Planview Inc.:

“In my first agile marketing transformation, I went all in with Scrum. But pure Scrum didn’t click for us. In fact, it was a major barrier to agile adoption. We realized that our wide variety of work types, which included milestone-based, long-duration, and continuous flow-based work, couldn’t be force fit into a traditional Scrum framework.”

Our wide variety of work types, which included milestone-based, long-duration, and continuous flow-based work, couldn’t be force fit into a traditional Scrum framework.

“Ultimately, I’ve found that Scrumban is the right approach for distributed marketing teams. At Planview, we follow many of the Scrum cadences, and we use digital Kanban to visualize and align our work, as well as analyze the flow of our work. As a result, we’ve seen the traction of our agile initiative, morale, and velocity increase.”

Jeff Clark, Principal Analyst, Marketing Operations Strategies, Forrester SiriusDecisions:

“The fact that so many agile marketers are using a hybrid approach is encouraging. It means that they are taking the time and effort to mold agile principles to their needs and culture.”

Andrew Burrows, Agile Marketing Lead, IBM:

“To the 47% of you executing through hybrid approaches — bravo! Marketing is a pure human-centric effort, and with today’s access to data and rapid rate of change, we should be leading our organizations in how quickly we are experimenting, learning, and adapting. So, I still don’t believe that weve discovered the best alignment of patterns, meetings, habits, and tools with which to execute marketing at scale.”

Marketing is a pure human-centric effort… we should be leading our organizations in how quickly we are experimenting, learning, and adapting.

“Having said that, I also don’t think focusing on finding the best approach will lead us to our best approach. Instead, we should focus on scaling behaviors, rooted in our values and principles, from which the best approaches can emerge.”

Benefits of Marketing Agility Take Many Forms

Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Advisor, Content Marketing Institute:

“One of the results that struck me the most was the validation of how a prioritized agile process can help meet business priorities. The three highest priorities for marketing departments right now are ‘producing higher quality work,’ ‘increasing the productivity of our marketing teams,’ and ‘better aligning with organizational goals.'”

“All three of these goals speak to one common challenge, which is how well do marketing departments communicate both inside and outside of their teams. One of the strongest benefits we’ve seen of agile processes for our clients is that it simply removes much of the friction in communication strategies.”

One of the strongest benefits we’ve seen of agile processes for our clients is that it simply removes much of the friction in communication strategies.

Lucas Kirschman, Senior Manager, Agile Program Office, TD Ameritrade:

“Sure, we got into the agile game for the flashy benefits — better, faster, leaner — and we laid out corresponding OKRs by leveraging learnings from other agile adopters outside of marketing. ‘Faster’ being the one that is often the most attractive to those at the top of the food chain.”

“However, it’s about expectation setting up front. While the business impact will come, teams must be given the support to adopt and adapt to this new way of working first. Sometimes that can be a few months — especially as the team encounters roadblocks which impact speed of delivery that were impossible to foresee. It’s a given in the software dev world. The sooner marketers understand this reality, the better, as it will help to reduce stress levels across the board.”

Andrew Burrows, Agile Marketing Lead, IBM:

“Improving productivity (58%) and managing changing priorities (54%) are great reasons to adopt agility, but they are reactive to the situations we find ourselves in. I’d like to see increasing innovation rise from 49%, and include both external innovation for the client, and internal innovation for us as teams and organizations.”

“I’d also like to see team morale (32%) increase as a driving factor in agility. We know that agile teams that have embraced the values and principles of this way of working prove to be more engaged, and a truly self-directed team or organization hinges on the solid morale of the people operating within in.”

Jeff Clark, Principal Analyst, Marketing Operations Strategies, Forrester SiriusDecisions:

“Marketers are putting a greater priority in aligning with organizational goals, and this is where agile can really help. Organization goals provide clear direction on how marketers can drive value and agile provides the discipline to regularly review, ‘How are we doing against our goals?'”

Marketers are putting a greater priority in aligning with organizational goals, and this is where agile can really help.

Training and Tools Are Key

Cameron van Orman, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Planview Inc.:

“When it came to choosing an agile coach, we wanted someone who not only knew agile, but also understood how marketing organizations worked. While the fundamentals of agile may be similar across business functions, the work varies widely. Planning and executing a marketing campaign, for example, is not the same as building and releasing a new feature for a piece of software.”

“Our agile coach has played a cohesive role in helping us quickly understand our types of work, form persistent teams, and choose the right hybrid framework and tools that mapped to our types and ways of working.”

“With the need to collaborate daily across time zones, teams, and departments, it’s essential that we use enterprise Kanban software to stay aligned. Each of our dedicated teams and shared services has its own digital Kanban board that’s highly customized to each team’s own unique process for completing work.”

With the need to collaborate daily across time zones, teams, and departments, it’s essential that we use enterprise Kanban software to stay aligned.

“The team boards roll up to a single program board that gives leadership a clear view of how work is progressing, helping us to better enable initiatives and mitigate risks for all of the teams. The strategic alignment that we get by using enterprise Kanban software has been a key agile enabler for us.”

Jeff Clark, Principal Analyst, Marketing Operations Strategies, Forrester SiriusDecisions:

“There is an obvious need for agile training that is tailored to marketing use cases. It’s reassuring to see organizations like AgileSherpas ramp up their offerings to meet that demand.”

Change Is Hard, But Worth It

Carla Johnson, Speaker, Author, Marketing & Innovation Strategist:

“The growing adoption of agile shows that marketers understand they need a system that helps them respond to dynamic changes that are happening in business. As teams are expected to deliver more with the resources they have in place, it’s natural to look at processes. This is where the agile mindset answers the call, helping marketers produce more work that’s better quality, while still letting people course-correct.”

“This keeps momentum going for teams, shows constant progress to other departments, and reinforces marketing’s ability to contribute to bigger business goals. If marketers want to do a better job of showing how they deliver value, getting more sophisticated with their agile practice is the way to go.”

If marketers want to do a better job of showing how they deliver value, getting more sophisticated with their agile practice is the way to go.

Lucas Kirschman, Senior Manager, Agile Program Office, TD Ameritrade:

“There is an underlying commonality to all the barriers cited in the report: change is hard and it takes courage. With the right focus, commitment and prioritization, you can always: improve the way work is done, upskill your people to learn agile methods, and adopt the right tools — which are probably already available in your organization.”

“What you can’t expect is an adoption of agile to happen without courage from the marketing organization at-large. While that primarily comes from the leaders, middle managers, and those in the trenches have to believe as well.”

“It’s not easy to change the way we have been doing work for years and years. That’s where leadership must acknowledge that while this type of change will not be easy, this is truly the future of marketing. As well as a firm commitment to provide ongoing and unwavering support to remove impediments, provide training and help prioritize/deprioritize whenever needed.”

What you can’t expect is an adoption of agile to happen without courage from the marketing organization at-large.

Andrew Burrows, Agile Marketing Lead, IBM:

“58% of respondents using daily stand-ups but only 43% using retrospectives definitely indicates an opportunity for improvement. Without investing time into uncovering better ways of working, we run the risk of relying on processes instead of people. And, if we’re scaling an approach that isn’t emphasizing the need to put that effort into continually improving, are we really scaling agile? Or just a set of meetings and tools?”

Thanks, Andrea and your team of agile marketing champions!

The post Reflections on agile marketing by leading practitioners and analysts appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

There are a handful of reports I eagerly look forward to every year, and Andrea Fryrear’s State of Agile Marketing is one of my favorite. The third annual edition is available now, and like last year’s, it’s has a number of great insights into the “process” corner of the people-process-technology triangle.

The big trend: agile marketing adoption is up from 32% in 2019 to 42% in 2020. Almost all of the growth in agile comes from a reduction in the percentage of marketers identifying with the “traditional” model of marketing management.

It also turns out that agile marketers are smarter, stronger, and better looking.

Okay, just kidding. But agile marketers can handle fast-paced work better. They are aligned on strategy and vision better. And they can take advantage of emerging opportunities better.

No wonder that 74% of agile marketers report they are satisfied or very satisfied with the way their marketing department manages work.

The number one reason marketers adopted agile, cited by 58%, was because it improves productivity. But the number two reason, cited by 54%, was because it enhances the ability to manage changing priorities.

If you can’t appreciate that under today’s circumstances, when could you?

Critics of agile have often attacked that latter benefit by implying that “changing priorities” was code for not having a solid strategy. That argument is one of the surest ways to bait me, as I’ve repeatedly explained why choosing between being strategic or being agile is a false dichotomy. (Sorry, if you’re trading strategy for agility, you’re doing it wrong.)

Even under normal conditions, pre-pandemic 2020, rapid shifts in markets and the value of accelerated test-and-learn experimentation were more than enough justification for why smart marketers would intentionally adjust their priorities throughout the year. And why they would seek management methods that enable that adaptability.

But having just witnessed the world turn itself upside down in a matter of weeks, we now recognize that the scale of an unexpected disruption can be much, much bigger. Change isn’t just ripples in our pond. It can be a sudden tsunami.

Managing change is at the heart of marketing operations and technology leadership.

Of course, how marketing teams implement agile marketing has high variance. 47% report using a “hyrid” marketing methodology that they tailor to their specific culture and operational needs, drawing upon a variety of agile mechanisms from Scrum, Lean, Kanban, etc.

The most common agile practices are daily standups, user stories, retrospectives and frequent releases.

I am particularly heartened that 43% have embraced retrospectives as part of their agile operating system. Agile shouldn’t be just about iterating and learning around the outputs of marketing — what’s working, what’s not in the market. It should be about iterating and learning how to work more effectively as a team, adapting the process itself.

There are many more illuminating and inspiring findings in this latest State of Agile Marketing report. Pick up a copy.

Sending positive thoughts your way.

The post Latest data on agile marketing, at a time when we can really appreciate it appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

One of our keynote speakers at last week’s MarTech conference in Boston was Matt LeMay, author of the excellent book Agile for Everybody and partner at Sudden Compass.

After my opening keynote (reenacted here), Matt presented a fantastic, 20-minute talk: Agile Is Marketing. And because Matt arranged for a videographer to capture his presentation — far better than my day-after reenactment strategy — it can now be shared widely over the Interwebs.

Matt’s given me permission to share it here, and it’s well worth taking 20 minutes to watch to understand how to put marketing in agile, not just agile in marketing:

The post Agile Is Marketing, Matt LeMay’s excellent MarTech keynote appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas is one of the world’s leading agile marketing experts, author of Death of a Marketer, and instructor for the Agile Marketing Advantage workshop at the upcoming MarTech conference (a few spots for her workshop are still available!). She’s an amazing force for the betterment of marketing management.

So I was excited to read the latest 2nd Annual State of Agile Marketing Report that she just released, produced in conjunction with CoSchedule.

There are a ton of gems in the report, such as:

• 50% of traditional marketers plan to adopt Agile within a year
• 54% of Agile marketers report using a hybrid framework (up 10% since last year)
• 31% of marketers cite a lack of education as their top barrier to adopting Agile

But the single most interesting chart for me was the one at the top of this post, showing data about which techniques and practices marketers use when they do agile marketing:

• 44% — Daily standup
• 42% — User stories
• 32% — Retrospectives
• 31% — Work-in-progress (WIP) limits
• 28% — Short iterations
• 27% — Sprint/iteration planning
• 26% — Frequent releases
• 22% — Sprint/iteration review
• 16% — Planning poker/estimation
• 13% — Kanban board

One of the reasons I love this chart is that it makes the point that agile marketing isn’t some loose, happy-go-lucky, let’s-just-try-a-bunch-of-things-quick-and-dirty-and-see-what-happens free-for-all. It’s a collection of well-defined management practices that are connected by an underlying philosophy of continuous improvement.

I ranted last year that choosing between being strategic or being agile is a false dichotomy, because of the misconception that being “agile” was what they called it if you didn’t have a strategy.

I love Tom Fishburne (Marketoonist) — he’s actually one of our keynote speakers at this next MarTech — but this particular cartoon of his made me grimace, because I’ve heard people abuse “agile” in this exact way many times. (Which is part of what Tom was satirizing.)

Agile is a vessel for informing and executing on strategy. They’re complements.

Anyway, I won’t rehash my agile gives life to strategy arguments here again. But my new tactic when someone tells me that agile marketing doesn’t work will be to pull out Andrea’s chart of those 10 agile practices and ask, “Which ones did you try and why didn’t they work?”

Some might have good answers. But I’d bet most will say, “Oh, well, hmm, we didn’t try that.”

But part of the good news from Andrea’s report is that more marketing organizations are embracing agile. I’m encouraged that an increasing percentage of them have been practicing agile marketing for seveal years.

Because the benefits of agile marketing are pretty compelling:

Want to learn more about agile marketing from Andrea herself? Sign up for her Agile Marketing Advantage workshop at the upcoming MarTech conference, April 3-5 in San Jose. You can also get a free Expo+ pass for 27 other sessions and the opportunity to meet over 100 martech vendors and over 1,000 of your peers. Hope to see you there.

The post If you say agile marketing doesn’t work, which practices are you talking about? appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

“Agile marketing” is a crutch for those who do not have a real strategy.

That was the headline from an article published this week by Samuel Scott on The Drum.

Now, I’m a fan of The Drum. They generally have sharp coverage of marketing and media topics. I’m also a fan of Samuel in particular. His writing is punchy and makes you think.

But painting agile marketing and strategic brand leadership as polar opposites is a terrible mischaracterization of agile marketing.

I give him credit for calling BS on marketers who use abuse the term “agile” as a cover for a lack of strategic direction. If you’re just juggling a bunch of random tactics without any overarching strategy and calling it “agile” — you’re doing it wrong. (And, unfortunately, he’s probably right that too many marketers are.)

But if you think that’s what agile marketing is supposed to be, you’re mistaken.

Agile marketing amplifies strategy in a digital world

Agile management is not a strategy. Agile is an instrument of strategy.

Agile management is a way to execute a strategy when either (a) the environment in which you’re operating is fluid and shifting, and you want to rapidly sense and respond to those changes, or (b) the media in which you’re rendering your strategy is malleable and has fast feedback loops — hello, digital world — giving you the valuable option to iteratively optimize your execution quickly and cheaply.

Marketing today has both of those properties. What marketing executive wouldn’t want to harness those dynamics to outmaneuver and outperform their competition?

Of course, it still requires them to have a vision, a strategy, or — more flexibly — a set of strategic hypotheses. Without that, agile methods are a random walk. But when agile methods are connected to and governed by a clear strategy, agile optimizes the operational reality of that strategy beautifully.

As shown in the illustration at the top of this post, well-structured “sprints” — the short, one-week-to-one-month iterations in Scrum-style agile management — are intentionally designed to be closely tied to strategy:

• The backlog of things to be tackled by the team are continuously prioritized according to strategic goals. It’s a forcing function to make choices and trade-offs, and to paraphrase marketing strategy legend A.G. Lafley, strategy is choice.
• The sprint planning session at the beginning of each sprint frames the work selected to be done that cycle in the context of strategic stories and themes.
• The sprint itself resists interrupt-driven changes to the priorities being addressed in that cycle — if at all possible, postponing “fire drills” until the next sprint planning session, so that the team maintains its focus on the strategic work in progress.
• The sprint review at the end of the cycle evaluates what was accomplished in that sprint through the lens of the organization’s strategic goals — and provides valuable feedback back to the strategic leadership layer of the firm.

It’s important to note that agile marketing also supports strategic leadership bidirectionally. Agile relies on strategic oversight to guide its execution. But it also provides a mechanism to inform strategy of changes “on the ground” — detecting when strategy and reality diverge.

Agile generally doesn’t change strategy on a sprint-by-sprint basis. But it also doesn’t let a bad, outdated, or disrupted strategy go too far off course before providing empirical data necessary to make an informed correction.

Like it or not, modern marketing is entwined with software

Samuel’s frustration with “agile marketing” is expressed in a broader rejection of the idea that marketers should be software developers, which he seems to think was what I was advocating for in my book Hacking Marketing (which is largely about explaining agile marketing).

That wasn’t my argument.

Marketers don’t have to be software developers — a point I explicitly make in the book and have stated many times on this blog and in hundreds of presentations.

However, they are deeply dependent on the digital dynamics of software. So they should strive to understand those dynamics, both to inform their strategy and to create the right kinds of capabilities and organizational capital necessary to realize that strategy in a digital world.

And because software developers have been wrestling with those dynamics for 50 years — I’ve called them “the canaries in the digital coal mine” — it can be a smart idea to borrow proven management concepts from the software profession and adapt them to marketing.

Samuel seems annoyed by this though, writing, “Too many suit-and-tie marketers seem to loathe themselves, hate their jobs, and wish they were hoodie-wearing software developers instead. It is the only reason that I can surmise why the digital marketing world adopts so much of the trendy vocabulary of the high-tech industry without question.”

(As an aside, there’s something funny about that. When I was a kid, marketing — well, mostly advertising — was considered cool. Software development, which was what I was into, was not.)

Incorporating ideas from the software profession into marketing doesn’t inherently displace what marketing is all about or the myriad of strategic and operational approaches it brings to bear on its mission. Thinking it must is a false dichotomy. It simply augments them and updates them to today’s environment.

Marketers shouldn’t borrow ideas from the software world simply because of their software roots. But they shouldn’t reject them simply because of that ancestry either. Assuming that there’s nothing to be learned from an adjacent (and increasingly overlapping) profession is a reckless mindset — especially in an era of great change and upheaval.

Marketers who do that, ironically, are inadvertently borrowing a dangerous anti-pattern from the software profession that has plagued developers for decades: the hubris of “not-invented-here.”

P.S. For further reading on this subject, here are a couple of earlier articles I wrote that are relevant to this conversation: Pragmatic Marketing vs. Hype Cycles and False Dilemmas and 3 Myths of Agile Marketing.

P.P.S. Want to learn how to run agile marketing the right way? Sign up for Andrea Fryrear’s half-day workshop, Agile Marketing Advantage, at the upcoming MarTech conference in Boston, October 1-3. Here’s a peek at more of the agenda of the event, focused on the intersection of marketing, technology, and management.

The post Choosing between being strategic or being agile is a false dichotomy appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

In reflecting on the “greatest hits” of chiefmartec.com over the past decade, it’s been exciting to see how many ideas that were once on the fringe of marketing have shifted into mainstream practice.

For example: agile marketing, the adoption of agile management approaches from the software development profession in modern marketing.

What do marketing and software development have in common? It used to sound like a set up for a bad joke. But in a world of malleable digital canvases and fast feedback loops, the answer is: actually, quite a lot. Both can benefit from shifting to a more iterative and adaptive way of working, empowering teams to harness the infinite flexibility of a digital world to transparently experiment, learn, and drive results.

A new 2018 State of Agile Marketing Report produced by AgileSherpas and Kapost provides an authoritative update on the adoption of agile marketing practices, and it’s impressive to see the momentum of this transformation.

Their big finding: now 36.7% of marketers report that they’ve adopted some flavor of agile marketing. And out of the marketers who haven’t yet adopted agile, around half of them expect to within the next 12 months.

So what does it mean to adopt agile marketing? Scrum? Kanban? Lean? Something else?

The report found that marketers associate agile with all of these methodologies. But the largest percentage of them — 44% — take a hybrid approach, blending techniques from several of these methodologies into their own flavor of agile marketing.

While purists of specific agile methodologies might be horrified by that, I actually think it’s a good thing. The spirit of agile is adaptability. If marketers are being thoughtful about which agile techniques they embrace or jettison — and why — then a continually evolving hybrid approach can be perfectly tailored to the needs and dynamics of their particular organization. (Admittedly, that might be a big if for new practitioners.)

As seen in the chart above (click for a larger image), you can see there’s a wide distribution of which specific agile practices any one particular team adopts.

Out of all of those, I’m surprised that adoption of Kanban boards (34.1%) isn’t higher. They’re such a great way to provide transparency and flexible process control. But maybe there are other variations that are achieving the same net benefit.

In the end, it’s the benefits of adopting agile marketing that matter:

• 54.8% — ability to change gears quickly and effectively
• 51.6% — better visibility into project status
• 46.8% — higher quality of work
• 42.9% — faster time to get things released
• 40.5% — roadblocks and problems are identified sooner
• 38.9% — better alignment on business objectives
• 37.3% — more productive teams
• 34.9% — improved team morale
• 31.7% — more effective prioritization of work

It’s definitely worth picking up a full copy of the 2018 State of Agile Marketing Report.

However, if you’d like to really take a deep dive into agile marketing…

Special 4-Hour Agile Marketing Workshop at MarTech

Andrea Fryrear, the president and lead trainer for AgileSherpas — one of the world’s foremost authorities on agile marketing and the driving force behind the above report — will be teaching a 4-hour workshop on How to Achieve an Agile Marketing Advantage at MarTech in San Jose, April 23-25.

Andrea is a Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) and a Certified Agile Leader (CAL-1), and a trained Scrum Master and Product Owner. She is a renown international speaker on all things agile marketing.

Her most recent book, Death of a Marketer, chronicles marketing’s troubled past and charts a course to a more agile future for the profession.

In this hands-on workshop, she’ll teach you:

• Agile myths and origins. You’ll understand where agile and lean principles came, so you’ll apply them more effectively.
• Agile vs. traditional marketing. You’ll learn how modern marketing demands an agile process from case studies that juxtapose teams that failed using traditional methods with teams that succeeded using an agile approach. This segment also includes hands-on exercises to illustrate how agile differs from typical work management.
• Agile methodologies. There are several ways to put agile into practice, and Andrea will reveal the common ones used by marketers, and let you try them out.
• Roles, leadership, and team structure. Getting the most benefit from agile starts with transforming your org chart. We’ll look at cross-functional teams, silos, and agile leadership and offer some paths forward regardless of where you’re starting from today.
• Piloting agile marketing in your organization. Crawling and walking are prerequisites to running. And you’ll leave with the steps needed to roll out agile methods incrementally. Using this approach, implementing a successful pilot program will get you started in a few hours, not months or weeks.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from Andrea in person, as well as all the other amazing speakers we’ll have at the conference. Rates go up March 17 — reserve your seat today.

The post Agile marketing reaches 37% adoption with a wide variety of techniques appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

The following article is a guest post by Monica Georgieff, marketing manager at Kanbanize, a company that provides Kanban software for lean management, describing her experience adopting this lean management method with her marketing team.

As I discussed in my book, Hacking Marketing, I believe there are tremendous opportunities for marketers to borrow and adapt management ideas like this from the software community to master the digital dynamics of their evolving profession.

You might be asking yourself — what do software development and marketing have in common?

In truth, there is a lot more common ground than you might think between the processes that occur in a software product development team and a marketing team. Consequently, the two can be structured similarly using the Principles of Lean, which have typically proven to lend themselves to the software development cycle.

Applying lean in marketing is an experiment in creating a more streamlined workflow than the creative team might have been used to before.

As the head of a marketing team, supporting the shipping of a SaaS product, I have become accustomed to trying out methods I see our developers use on my own team. Our case is even more unique, as our R&D team actually develops a tool that helps other product development teams apply the lean principles of Kanban to break down their work and track their process efficiency.

Naturally, the sales and marketing teams within our company also use the tool developed in-house, in order to test whether Kanban works not just for development teams, but for other professions as well.

Turns out — it not only works for marketing but it has improved our process threefold!

Our marketing team has been running on the framework used to apply lean principles called Kanban since the induction of its first member (yours truly). Any aspect of our workflow gets tracked on online Kanban boards, like the one presented below ,and work items get visualized as individual Kanban cards that adhere to certain rules endorsed by lean.

When something needs to get done, we make a card for it, assign the card to the relevant person, and add it right to the Kanban board in the Requested column.

As we begin processing a work item, we move its card to In Progress and then, eventually, to the Done column. We collect data from our entire process and visualize the number of cards in each part of our process in a cumulative flow diagram, popular in manufacturing and some facets of product development — instead of the more typical burndown chart used in agile methods like Scrum, which eliminates upcoming tasks instead of accumulating completed ones.

However, I shouldn’t be getting ahead of myself. Let me begin by going into some detail about why Kanban as a method happens to suit the marketing process — at least the marketing process for a SaaS tool like ours — and why it might be able to alleviate some typical problems that plague some marketing teams.

Pursuing a marketing metric for efficiency

Often, marketing places emphasis on metrics, but hardly ever on the metric of one’s own efficiency.

The central goal of the Kanban framework is to remove the waste from various parts of a unified process and make sure it does not get stalled. On a general level, this occurs through a series of experiments, imposed limits in some stages of the work process, and a consistent tracking and analysis of the effects of various actions on the Kanban board — which is a representation of a process map.

Hopefully, the result of the applying these principles is eliminating aspects of the process that make it difficult to achieve the highest quality in the shortest amount of time and improve to optimal efficiency. Lean refers to this as continuous improvement.

Having these principles in the back of our minds, finally made something click for our team — to be the best, we had to make sure we weren’t just productive, but also efficient. In other words, it doesn’t matter if each of us writes seven pieces of content a day, if they turn into pieces of inventory that no one gets to see.

We decided we would not create anything that did not bring value to our customers or clients. That’s when we started to measure the efficiency of our own process and remove unnecessary elements that were taking up time and energy they did not deserve.

Marketing never stops — luckily, Kanban is flow-based

Unlike other software development methods, most prominently Scrum, Kanban happens to be flow-based. This means that the team does not aim to complete work in committed intervals, which runs the risk of either overcommiting and rushing through the work or undercommiting and staying idle when they finish early.

Kanban is conducive to a marketing track because marketing never stops. Of course, one might still deal with some concrete deadlines from external sources, but in both cases, the aim is to create a consistent and predictable workflow of cards.

Our team set a weekly (every Monday) and monthly (first Monday of the next month) “deadline” to measure success and how much value we had put out for the period we had defined for ourselves.

Recently, we have been measuring external followed links to our website. In Kanban flow terms, we track how many links we have made around the web and aim to have more each month. However, we have not officially committed to a certain number of links each month, because we don’t choose to necessarily work in iterations (like Scrum teams would).

Our general team commitment is to maintain a stable environment to run the most efficient version of our particular value creating process.

Marketers are tempted to multitask

In the realm of project management, team leaders often overlook the power of limiting their team’s work in progress.

Kanban respects the benefits of imposing limits on how many work items the team is allowed to work on at the same time and makes it easy to implement them visibly, as WIP (work-in-progress) limits per column on your Kanban board.

At this point, our WIP limit on the In Progress column is as many members of the marketing team there are, which is commonly recommended and has worked well for us. This means that each member of the team cannot start on a second piece of work before finishing the one they have already taken from the queue.

These limits were decided at the beginning of our work together to keep us from getting overburdened and prevent us from the temptation of multitasking. When we add a new member to the team, we raise the WIP limit by 1 to make room for his or her work items. The Requested and Done columns do not require limit as they do not represent work that is In Progress and cannot create bottlenecks by themselves.

Why Kanban stand-ups are an antitode to “marketing meetings”

I have heard it said that marketing meetings in large corporations can go as long as several days until decisions start being made. Following the Kanban method, we host a daily stand-up meeting in the morning at an awkward time (for us it’s 10:08am) so no one forgets and everyone is on time.

It’s a short 15 minute affair, during which everyone is in front of a large plasma screen that we use to project our marketing Kanban board. It’s very important that everyone is standing, not sitting, in order to keep everyone on their toes and quick about it, instead of letting the meeting drag.

Everyone takes a couple of minutes to identify the visualized tasks from yesterday and the cards representing what they would like to accomplish today. It’s a good way to consistently sync about progress and find out whether someone is struggling. This sort of discipline has helped us share, stay on track and deal with issues which could escalate if not addressed promptly.

Kanban pushes marketing to take more initiative

Since its beginnings in the factories of Toyota, the Kanban method has been associated with the pulling of work instead of work getting pushed onto the team from management, HQ, or wherever.

In the context of a Kanban board, it simply means that team members take on cards when they’re ready to start them, instead of getting tasks pushed upon them when they might not have capacity. It’s a great way to self-regulate, self-organize, and show initiative.

Our marketing team underwent a tiny renaissance by incrementally getting used to the pull approach of taking on work — no one was left without something to do, no one felt like they were getting too much thrown on their shoulders, and morale improved because each member was responsible for the tasks they had chosen to undertake at a given moment.

Cumulative Flow Diagrams as a way to measure efficiency

I’m a great believer in physical Kanban boards, pinned right to the wall, color-coded, and right in front of your eyes at all times.

However, there are some things a digital Kanban board can automate, that a physical board can’t help but keep manual. A key example is data collection.

My team works on an online board that gets updated in real time — this is the case with all online tools for Kanban. We keep an eye on the current data by making a manual or digital Cumulative Flow Diagram, a Kanban favorite that shows us how many items are in each stage of the workflow (Requested, In Progress, Done) over time.

Our dedication to efficiency has also led us to focus on measuring the ratio between the actual value-adding time — during which a team member actively works towards completing a task — and the entire lead time required to complete a process.

This helps us generate a percent we call Process Efficiency / 100. We use it to check how efficient the processing of a group of tasks or all the cards on a board has been.

Over the course of our adoption of Kanban, the efficiency of our processing of the cards on our marketing board has been increasing over time. Our aim was to get to 50% efficiency, because we knew we could not eliminate all the wait times inherent in our process entirely — but we’ve actuallymanaged to get from 20% to 60% efficiency, as tracked by our efficiency widget, within the first year.

Will you try Kanban with your marketing team? It’s worth it.

Thank you, Monica!

For more insights into succeeding with agile and lean marketing methods, attend MarTech Europe in London, 1-2 November. Ulrike Eder, the chief commercial officer of drie Secure Systems, will be one of more than 25 expert speakers at the conference, and he’ll be presenting on Agile Practices for Marketing Teams — Putting Theory into Action. “Beta” discount rate expires September 30.

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