Marketing Backlogs in the TrenchesLast week I facilitated a 2-day Agile Marketing workshop for one of my clients. As usual, the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories was one of the highlights.As usual, I introduce the concept of User Stories which are the most popular way to represent Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in the Agile world and are also very popular in [...]

The Need For An Agile Marketing TransformationMarketers or junior marketing leaders can implement Agile Marketing at the team level bottoms up or in islands in the organization. This approach can achieve some improvement but typically stalls at some point.Real marketing agility requires a transformative change in processes, policies, mindset, and maybe even type of leaders. This is a bigger lift obviously.While most of the marketing organizations we see score pretty high on the “do they need Agile Marketing?” scale, Only some [...]

Why Agile MarketingMaking 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 [...]

This post is a continuation/refresh of an earlier post from Yuval’s personal blogTools 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.For co-located marketing teams the best approach would probably be to start without an electronic tool and just use a physical board/wall with sticky notes at least until they [...]

“Validated Learning Over Opinions and Conventions”A couple of weeks ago I was helping kickoff a team of 8–10 Agile Marketing teams. The kickoff spanning a couple of days includes:Agile Marketing trainingHigh level planning of their first quarterIteration planning for their first agile iterationWhile doing this I saw some gaps between the training and the actual planning around the whole validation/experimentation/learning thing. In other words the difference between increments and iterations.It’s not iterating if you’re not inspecting and possibly adapting along [...]