Why Agile Marketing?

Making any sort of change is non-trivial. Implementing Agile Marketing, especially at scale, is hard. There should be a real need for it. These are some common change drivers we hear from Marketing leaders (more at “State of Agile Marketing” by Andrea Fryrear):

• Ensuring that your marketing organization is agile and responsive — the pace of customer needs, partner demands, and requests from other parts of the organization is unrelenting and ever changing. How do you prioritize and execute on the most immediate needs while finding time for longer-term strategic initiatives?
• Creating a culture of data-driven decision making and validated learning — the hunch driven world of Don Draper is dead (if it ever existed). You’re expected to make marketing decisions based on data and validated learning. Easier said than done.
• Delivering customer value when the solution cuts across organizational boundaries — You know what it takes to dominate your market, but creating the solution requires cooperation across marketing, product development, finance, sales, and operations. And not only collaboration with your peers, but all the way down and across the organization. How do you deliver these kinds of cross-functional solutions quickly?
• Understanding, deploying and integrating marketing technology — According to Scott Brinker’s latest Marketing Technology Supergraphic, there are now over 6500 marketing technology solutions. How do you select the right ones, manage the vendors and integrate them?
• Working at the pace of the Technology organization — As their technology/development organizations adopt more and more of the Lean/Agile/DevOps practices, marketers feel overwhelmed by the pace of delivery and change and look for ways to better align to a Lean/Agile technology/product organization.
• Doing all of the above in a predictable and sustainable way — And last, but not least, how do you do all of the above without resorting to “hero mode”? In Hero mode, people work long hours, burn out and delivery is neither predictable nor sustainable.