Are We There Yet? Agile Marketing Maturity
Agile marketing maturity is not a checkbox. A practical way to read where your marketing team actually sits — and what the next level looks like.
Click image to open full size In a recent Agile Marketing Meetup in Boston we tried to figure out how mature are the Agile Marketing teams/organizations out there. Last week I helped facilitate a third quarterly Agile planning event (also known as SAFe PI Planning or Big Room Planning) for a group of agile marketers I’ve been working with for the past year. This was a good opportunity to ask this question.
Building the Maturity Assessment
To help facilitate th 
e discussion I created a maturity depth assessment. I took our Lean/Agile Depth Assessment and adjusted it to the context of Agile Marketing by looking at the Agile Marketing Manifesto. The result is a set of dimensions aligned with the Agile Marketing Manifesto as well as some deeper Lean Thinking aspects that are missing from the manifesto.
Running the Finger-Vote Exercise
What we then did in the quarterly planning meeting was to quickly introduce this concept and then run a quick finger-vote check for each dimension asking the group where they think they were in the journey between “Not/Barely Started” to “Crushing it consistently” (Scale inspired by Mike Burrows’s AgendaShift).
BTW We initially planned to survey the group about each specific question in the survey but we sensed it was a bit too much for a Friday afternoon. Surveying for the dimensions while giving some color to what they mean by reading some of the specific criteria turned out to be a quick and valuable compromise.
Surfacing the Biggest Gaps
After establishing where we thought we were, we asked ourselves which areas do we feel were the biggest gaps for us. This drove a fascinating discussion about how our planning process should look like, how it should balance the long-lead-time needs of marketing organizations with keeping options open and deferring commitment.
Despite the Friday afternoon “death slot” standing between the marketers and their flight homes (or drive up to the mountain to go skiing…) the discussion was lively and heated. Which was a good sign.
Get the assessment questions here — agile-marketing-depth-assessment1
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- 01 What Is Agile Marketing 10 min
- 02 SAFe for Agile Marketing Guidance Article 32 min
- 03 The Scaled Agile Marketing Series 2 min
