Tools for Agile Marketing seems to be the hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well.

Here’s my view on what would be a great tool supporting Agile Marketing:

It would talk marketer’s language. Not force marketers to learn the language of development/IT.
It would be flexible. Marketers are not following Scrum to the letter. It should enable marketers to follow lean/agile principles without forcing the wrong practices.
It would be visual and beautiful because marketers appreciate those things. It wouldn’t bog down people with too many grids and lists and instead use more “Boards”.
It would support dynamic teams not just fixed scrum teams. Because that happens in Marketing. (also in Development btw)
It would support a combination of Scrum, Kanban without forcing you to choose one or the other.
It would allow different teams in the organization easily adapt their area in the tool to support their own process.
It would TEACH marketers how to think about lean/agile flow/behavior. As a complement to frontal training, the tool should pro-actively support changing marketing culture to support agility.
Marketers spend even more of their time doing “Keep the lights on” activities such as cleaning up leads, monitoring campaigns, running webinars etc. A great tool would find an effective way not just to take that into account but also to help them manage those activities more effectively. Some of the Personal Kanban body of knowledge can help here.
Marketing Agility starts with individuals and can scale to hundreds of people. Not all tools need to support scale. But if the organizational agile tool can help the individual marketer become more agile it would help with adoption of the tool and agile marketing in general.
Emphasize simplicity, ease of use, streamlined flows. Otherwise it won’t stick. Having a situation where you have special people working the tool because the actual marketers won’t touch it with a stick is unacceptable (true story I heard in a recent meetup). It should take minutes to onboard a new team. It should take seconds for a marketer to add new work or move work along.
Integration into the other main tools of the 21st century marketer. Integration into email is one key thing. SalesForce when we start to talk about Account Based Marketing? Marketo/Hubspot/etc.? Integration into collaboration tools such as Slack/Flowdock?
It should provide some actionable insights: e.g. these items have been in flight for quite a while, worth looking at them in your next daily-stand-up. These items took a long time to cross the finish line: maybe worth discussing them in a retrospective/five-whys session. These items ping ponged a lot between states: worth looking at. There seems to be a lot queueing up for the designer. mmmm. maybe you should look at that (and suggest some tips along the lines of the theory of constraints five focusing steps). Why is it important to marketers? actually the more of those insights agile tools include the better it would be for everybody not just marketers. But since marketers are new to this agile thing, and many marketers aren’t necessarily process-oriented, this can help them along. (If they don’t have a lean/agile coach close by that is ;-)

Consider this take 1. There’s probably more to think about when considering agile marketing tooling. I’ll add more when I think of it or see the need with the teams/organizations I’m working with.

If you want help applying these principles in your marketing organization, see Agile Marketing Workshop.