Get More Done. Adapt to Change. See Measurable Results.
Diagram courtesy of Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com
Last night, at the Seattle Agile Marketing Meetup, Scott Brinker of Chief Marketing Technologist joined us. Scott walked us through his diagram of Agile Marketing (shown at left and described in his blog) – in particular, his explanation of the centrality of creating great customer experiences resonated with me and deepened my understanding of our tasks as Agile Marketers.
As best I can remember, Scott said something like the following:
Agile Marketing takes its inspiration from Agile Development. But why would a set of values, principles and processes developed by software developers for faster, more predictable delivery of computer code help marketers? Aren’t developers and marketers as different as oil and water? Don’t they approach problems with a different mentality, respond to different incentives and perform very different jobs?
Image courtesy of Ernest Viernest
When I speak to audiences about Agile Marketing, it resonates. There is a hunger for a solution to what Rohn Jay Miller calls “the dysfunctional room that marketing lives in”.
I think there is no question that marketing has gone through more change in the last 3-5 years than at any time in the last 50 years. And many marketers are looking for something to help them cope with these changes.
I recently sat down with Scott Brinker, one of the founders and CTO of Ion Interactive and the author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, which was recently chosen as the “Best Marketing Operations Blog” by the readers of Marketing Sherpa. Scott is one of my blogging heroes, and someone who was instrumental in making me aware of the possibilities of Agile Marketing.
His post, Ideas for an Agile Marketing Manifesto, was one of the first resources I came across when I began researching Agile Marketing, and it is still one of the best blog posts out there on the subject.
Based on a diagram created by Mountain Goat Software
Agile Marketing teams that are using Scrum begin the Sprint process with an Agile Marketing Sprint Planning session. Sprint Planning, one of the four key “ceremonies” of Scrum (the others are the Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and the daily Scrum), establishes the baseline assumptions of the company’s approach to the market, the goals of the Sprint, and the list of activities which the marketing team will do to reach those goals. To say that it is important to the success of the Sprint, and to the success of the marketing team, would be an understatement.
So how does one run a successful Agile Marketing Sprint Planning session? What are the key agenda items? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? I’ll try to answer these questions and more in this post. [Read more...]
Photo courtesy of Vagawi
Sometimes it seems like Agile is all about the process: Scrum or Kanban or some ad hoc mixture of both. Particularly when you’re first learning about Agile, you can be intrigued or overwhelmed by the vocabulary related to process: sprints, ceremonies, sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retrospective, daily scrum, burndown charts, user stories, points.
But at SprintZero on Monday, I was struck by both the discussions and by the people involved, of the importance of attitudes, skill sets and trust. Agile isn’t all about the process; People Trump Process.
On Monday, we held the first ever gathering of Agile Marketers at an event called SprintZero. There have been a number of wonderful summaries and recaps of the event (here, here and here). For whatever reason, I needed a couple of days to allow my own thoughts to crystalize.
Nearly all the marketers in the room felt that marketing is at a crossroads – we could continue down the well-marked road of big campaigns, clamoring for attention, shouting at our buyer’s like carnival barkers, or we could turn off on to the less-traveled path pointed to by scarecrows on a post like Seth Godin (Permission Marketing) and David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing and PR).
Old marketing is dead, but it simply won’t die. As Marty Smith said, when shouting doesn’t work, some just turn up the volume. We, Agile Marketers, will add our voice to the growing call for marketing to change – to become more attuned to customers, to become more permission-based, to become more transparent, and yes, to become more agile. [Read more...]
On June 11th in San Francisco, at the offices of MindJet, we’re going to hold the first ever gathering of Agile Marketing practitioners, which we’re calling SprintZero. I’m super excited. One of our goals will be to put together an Agile Marketing Manifesto. In preparation for this, Travis Arnold posted a roundup of Agile Marketing Manifestos. Reading over Travis’s roundup, I’m struck by the role of the manifesto compared to the other elements that have made Agile Development such a success: the manifesto is the visible tip of the iceberg, but without the remainder of the iceberg, the principles and the methodologies of Agile Development, it would never have had such a big impact. [Read more...]
