• Creating an agile center of excellence for change agents, including marketing
• Collaborating with leaders to create success stories during an 18-24 month agility journey.
• Institutionalizing agility across different areas of the bank, including marketing
• Empowering marketing teams to tell their own success stories.

 Episode Summary: 

In this episode, we sit down with Steve Davis, Managing Director and Transformation Lead at Accenture. With a rich history in Agile that spans nearly two decades, Steve offers invaluable insights into the evolution of Agile in marketing, including one of the earliest Agile Marketing transformations we’ve heard of; Ancestry.com in 2005!  This conversation sheds light on the importance of agility in today’s dynamic marketing landscape.

Highlights:

• Steve Davis recounts his journey with Agile, including an early transformation at Ancestry.com in 2005

• Discover how Agile made the leap from technology teams into marketing

• Understand the power of an experience Scrum master in helping marketing teams 

• Hear why Steve thinks Agile marketing hasn’t been adopted by more marketers

Notable Quotes:

Steve Davis:“I got started in Agile in 2001, which was coincidentally the year that the Agile manifesto was introduced. It was a revolutionary shift that changed everything about how we approach marketing.”

“Agile isn’t just a methodology; it’s a mindset. Over the years, it’s been fascinating to see how adopting this mindset has helped companies become frontrunners in their domains.”

Relevant Links:

Agile Marketing Alliance – https://agilemarketingalliance.com/

Steve Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davisbase/

Closing Thoughts: 

Dive deep into the world of Agile with Steve Davis and understand why flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability are key markers of success in contemporary marketing. Whether you’re a novice marketer or a seasoned professional looking to adopt Agile methodologies, this episode is packed with historical context, personal insights, and forward-thinking strategies that promise to inspire and invigorate your marketing approach.

This interview will focuses on scaling Agile, OKRs, working with private equity firms, what most organizations get wrong when adopting Agile marketing, and other topics. Our guest is Yuval Yeret, a SAFe fellow, co-contributor with me to IC-Agile’s Agility in Marketing certification.

[03] – Introduction

Jim Ewel welcomes our guest, Yuval Yuret, a Lean Agility and Flow Coach, Safe Fellow, and Professional Scrum Trainer. The episode will focus on the importance of shared goals like OKRs, the difference between OKRs and KPIs, and how Agile methodologies can help teams adapt to change.

[01:01] – Excitement About OKRs

Jim expresses excitement about the growing popularity of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and mentions how they are now considered a “silver bullet” in various industries, thanks to John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters.”

[01:38] – Challenges with OKRs

Yuval discusses the common challenges organizations face with OKRs. Many companies adopt OKRs without sufficient expertise, leading to issues such as mapping everything to OKRs, lack of filtering, turning KPIs into OKRs, and creating OKRs that are tasks rather than strategic objectives.

[04:08] – Prioritizing OKRs

Jim and Yuval discuss the importance of prioritizing OKRs and ensuring they are specific and realistic. They highlight that OKRs should focus on improving product and organizational capabilities, not managing day-to-day operations.

[07:03] – OKRs vs. KPIs

Yuval explains the difference between OKRs and KPIs, emphasizing that OKRs are for growth, change, and improvement, while KPIs are for ongoing operations. They discuss how OKRs can impact KPIs and drive evidence-based decision-making.

[09:16] – Characteristics of Good OKRs

Yuval outlines the characteristics of effective OKRs, including a focus on outcomes, involvement of relevant teams in setting OKRs, cross-functional alignment, and the importance of making OKRs actionable.

[11:32] – Cascading OKRs

The discussion touches on how OKRs should cascade down from senior leadership to teams, with each level providing context and specific objectives related to the higher-level OKRs.

[15:18] – Example of OKRs

Jim and Yuval provide an example of how OKRs can be used to address issues like customer churn, where teams set OKRs based on the context provided by senior leadership.

[17:47] – Cross-Functional Collaboration

Yuval emphasizes the need for cross-functional collaboration when achieving OKRs. He suggests that organizations should set cross-functional OKRs or OKRs aligned with the desired business impact, leading to discussions about effective ways of working.

[21:31] – Organizational Implications

The conversation touches on how achieving OKRs may require changes in organizational design. While some organizations create separate cross-functional teams, others overlay a network of teams to focus on development work while keeping operational teams intact.

[23:52] – Applying Agile in Marketing

Yuval discusses the importance of applying Agile principles to the right areas of the organization, highlighting that while it may not be suitable for operational work like sales, it is highly relevant for areas like sales enablement and marketing.

23:59 – Cross-Functional Nature and Spare Time

Jim Ewel challenges the idea of expecting employees to handle new initiatives, like sales enablement, on top of their day-to-day responsibilities in their spare time. He highlights that this approach can lead to reduced focus and effectiveness.

24:52 – Focus on New Initiatives

Jim emphasizes the importance of allowing individuals to dedicate focused time to new initiatives instead of multitasking and context switching.

25:07 – Trade-off between Expertise and Focus

Yuval discusses the trade-off between utilizing the expertise of those involved in day-to-day operations and their ability to focus on new initiatives without distractions. He emphasizes the need for balancing both aspects effectively.

27:29 – Transparency in Work Processes

Yuval mentions the importance of making work processes, including improvement, development work, and operational work, transparent to leadership. This transparency helps organizations balance their OKRs with daily operations and drives conversations around feasibility.

27:42 – Agile Practices and Adaptation:

Jim and Yuval discuss the need for adapting agile practices to the unique needs of each organization. They emphasize the importance of a tailored approach and the use of agile practices when implementing agile.

29:19 – Empiricism, Inspection, and Adaptation 

Yuval explains how leaders can leverage empiricism, inspection, and adaptation to achieve business agility. He emphasizes the need for leaders to embrace uncertainty, rely on data, and continuously adapt their strategies.

35:19 – Transition in Leadership

Jim and Yuval discuss the transition in leadership required for embracing agility and making data-driven decisions. They highlight the importance of leaders admitting uncertainty and promoting a culture of learning.

37:39 – Agile Mindset and Culture

Yuval emphasizes the significance of having an agile-friendly mindset at the leadership level for maximizing the benefits of OKRs and agility.

38:13.811 – Virtual Cycle of Improvement

Jim and Yuval discuss how Agile and OKRs create a virtual cycle of improvement, where management openness and agility lead to better OKR execution, which, in turn, fosters a more agile mindset.

40:33 – Agile Marketing

Jim asks Yuval about the challenges marketers face when adopting Agile. Yuval highlights differences between marketing and software development, including a preference for Kanban and less interest in formal processes.

44:40 – Language Barriers in Agile Marketing

Yuval discusses the language barriers between Agile practices and marketing, emphasizing the need to bridge this gap to accelerate Agile marketing adoption.

46:40 – Expertise and Experience

Yuval mentions that the pace of Agile marketing adoption is hindered by a lack of expertise in both Agile and marketing. He stresses the importance of aligning the broader Agile community with marketers.

48:57 – Business Agility and Expertise

Yuval anticipates the challenge of achieving business agility as organizations require expertise in both Agile and the business world. He suggests leveraging OKRs as a common framework to bridge the gap.

Closing Remarks: Jim and Yuval conclude the podcast with thoughts on the growing importance of OKRs in business agility and the need for combining Agile principles with business expertise to drive meaningful change.

We’re speaking with Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva with a deep background in both Agile and marketing. Josh will be sharing his story with us today and talking about managing change in organizations.

Show Notes:

Episode: Managing Change with Agile in Marketing 

Host: Melissa Reeve 

Guest: Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva

Josh was born and raised in Arizona, which is where his wife and 4 kids currently reside. He was introduced to Agile 10 years ago and since then has taken it with him every where he can. He is currently an Agile Marketing Coach at Workiva and loves working with the team to continue to scale and grow as the company does. When he isn’t working or talking about Agile he enjoys playing video games with his boys, mountain biking, spending time with his family, and as you may notice a nice flat brimmed hat!

HIGHLIGHTS: 

Josh Bradshaw’s Background and Introduction to Agile Marketing (00:36 – 03:03)

• Josh introduces himself and his journey into agile marketing.
• Discussion about Josh’s background in project management at a software company.
• Transitioning from traditional project management to agile methodologies.

Implementation of Agile Marketing at Work Kiva (03:03 – 06:56)

• Josh talks about his implementation of agile marketing at Work Kiva.
• Evolution of agile practices within the organization.
• Shifting from campaign-focused teams to customer persona-focused teams.
• Current structure of customer persona “pods” and self-contained teams.
• Continuous improvement and adjusting to achieve more self-organization and autonomy.

Benefits of Agile Marketing and Adapting to Change (06:56 – 15:)

• Discussion on how agile helps manage and embrace change.
• Highlighting the retrospective as a key event for addressing and implementing change.
• Introducing the Agile Marketing Manifesto and its focus on responding to change.
• Importance of data-driven decisions and communicating change effectively.

Addressing Team Members Struggling with Change (15:22 – 20:33)

• Strategies for helping team members who are resistant to change.
• Emphasizing empathy and understanding individual perspectives.
• Importance of addressing behavior alongside process to drive successful change.

Introducing Change at the Right Cadence (20:33 – 27:23)

• Discussion on introducing change at an appropriate cadence.
• Finding the balance between change fatigue and business needs.
• The value of trimester planning as a balanced approach between quarters and halves.

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-up (27:23 – 28:00)

• Recap of key takeaways from the conversation.
• Gratitude for the interview and sharing insights.

Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand, and then moved to the UK, where she joined Colt Technology Services. In her thirteen years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology, and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion & diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. 

Transcript:

Jim Ewel:

We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Branded Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services. Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand and then moved to the UK where she joined Colt technology services. In her 13 years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology. and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process, and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion and diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. Laura, welcome to the podcast.

LAURA:

Thank you, very happy to be here.

Jim Ewel:

Laura, one of the things that interested me about your bio was that you brought growth marketing methodology to your team at Colt. Of course, at the Agile Marketing Alliance, we’re about agile marketing. How do you see growth marketing and agile marketing? Are they the same? Are they related? Are they different? How do you think about those two things?

LAURA:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two and growth marketing as we experience it at Colt really follows a lot of the agile marketing methodology. We’re looking at agile and lean principles, very much an iterative approach and always with that continuous feedback. When we talk about growth marketing, we’re specifically referring to really a partner that we work with, Growth Method. So we’ve been working with them for a couple of years now and we use their experimentation methodology. So we look at having a hypothesis, we do six week experiment cycles, we then fail or pass those and change or scale those experiments. They also provide a platform that they’ve created to help make sure that there’s a repeatable process.

Melissa:

So Laura, you know, one part of hypothesis building and experimentation is being willing to fail. And you wrote an article on LinkedIn called, ÒI Need You to Fail More.Ó Can you explain what you meant by that provocative headline and why you wrote the article?

LAURA:

Yeah, sure. Something that I came up against when implementing growth method at Colt is that fear is really the enemy of innovation. So at the beginning, when I first started looking after digital marketing in particular, we were sort of looking at these six month waterfall type projects. And you’ll know this, that you kind of get to the end of these projects or even to the end of the year, and it’s not always clear if things really worked or even which specific elements of those projects had the most impact. So you’d kind of be getting to the end of the year, you’d be doing it and your reviews and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to say, what worked well, what didn’t work well and what are our learnings. So really, there can also be a focus on delivering stuff in corporates. So often, you look at your list of achievable for the year and it can often be, I did this thing rather than what did we learn from it. 

So really, when we brought in this, focus on growth methodology, you really had to, we really had to change how people felt about trying things. And it’s actually quite a cultural shift because if you’re used to this waterfall, if during that waterfall, anything doesn’t work properly, it breaks a project, it delays it. Whereas with growth methodology and that experimentation framework, you’re allowed to fail and actually you learn from failure. And you’ve got to really try to encourage people to fail and fail fast because then they can take that learning, they can go back and they can iterate. on that project. So really, it fundamentally changes your team’s culture, as I mentioned, and it means that people can be a lot more open to kind of giving things a go.

Melissa:

Yeah, I really love what you said. You know, you’re reframing failure as learning. So we’re just learning. And then you hit upon two things that I’m very passionate about. One is this notion that as marketers, we run these A-B split tests. Oftentimes they’re A-B split tests. And then we get the results and we kind of shrug our shoulders and we’re like, eh? Because a lot of times they’re very, very close in nature. And if you don’t structure those experiments in advance and really outline your hypotheses, how do you really know if you’ve succeeded or failed? So I really loved what you were saying about that. And I think the second thing that I heard in your response was this notion of marketers liking to check the box, right? So what I’m hearing you say is by failing more, we not only… are learning about what’s going on rather than just shrugging our shoulders at the end, but we’re focused on the outcomes. And of course, in agile marketing, that’s one of the big shifts that are out there is this shift from output to outcomes. So I appreciate what you had to share, Jim.

Jim Ewel:

I love it as well. And I particularly like Laura, that you talked about the cultural and the mental shift that marketers need to make as they think about this approach of experimentation and learning and being willing to fail and thinking outside the box. Not trying to do simple experiments that don’t change anything, but really trying to do ones that could potentially make a huge difference. And if they work and they might fail, but if they work, they can make a huge difference. So let me ask you another question. In addition to getting your people to be willing to fail more, what are some of the other challenges that you encountered in implementing growth, marketing growth method at Colt?

LAURA:

Yeah, so I would say definitely the first one is sort of getting that buy-in from management and I’m lucky that I have an amazing management team. My manager, Mizu, has been very, you know, supportive of this process, but I do think it does take a little bit of time for people to understand it. So particularly if you’re in front of them and you’re talking about, hey, we had a great result this month, we had 10 failures, it was fantastic, you know, that can take a little bit of getting used to for people. 

I think you really have to get that a little bit of education early on about how you’re doing things and why you’re doing them. And I think having that database of information and particularly as I mentioned, we have this experiment methodology and so we have this rich database of learnings that we’ve made and being able to show how, you know, that was a failure, but here’s the learning that we got off it. And then in the future, when we do a related experiment that might be successful, it’s because we made these failures in the past. So there’s definitely a piece of education there and helping people to understand how you do things and why you do things. And then always tracking it back to the data. 

And I’ve, as mentioned, been working in marketing for a long time and people, you get accused of being fluffy or there’s all these ideas about playing with colored pencils, et cetera. And I think it’s really important for us to be able to go into meetings and be data-driven and be able to show the results and show the impact. And I would say with what we’ve been doing with growth methodology, really the results speak for themselves. We’ve seen year on year improvements across all our metrics and up to 500% improvement in some of them as well. And I think the other thing too around encountering challenges, I think, is really about influence can be really interesting and… I think other marketers will understand this, that sometimes the things that you think aren’t important, so it might be changing some visuals on your homepage, will somehow get the biggest impact where something that you’ve spent months working really hard on in the background that fundamentally changes how you do experiments or how you do automation gets no buy-in at all. 

So I think it’s also about understanding how sometimes you have to do some activities because they’re going to have an influence and they’re going to have an impact. and also balancing that with the stuff that is in the background and might not be as impressive, but are actually the ones that are really going to make those changes. So balancing that as well in terms of your influence. 

And then the last thing I would say really is about helping sales teams on that digital journey. I do think it’s part of the responsibility of marketing to help sales teams on that journey as well, help them understand the data points and signals and understand how digital or marketing in general can be of benefit to them. And that it’s a, you know, I don’t even say it’s a handshake, it’s an arm around the shoulder. And that’s the relationship that you should have between sales and marketing as well.

Jim Ewel:

You know, that’s really great to hear because so often marketing and sales are at odds, right? You know, the classic is that sales says, those leads you sent me are terrible, and marketing says, well, you didn’t follow up on them, you know, or something like that, right? I mean, there’s the thing. So you’ve been able to create a really good relationship with your sales team and just Tell me a little bit more about that. I really want to hear about that.

LAURA:

Yeah, it’s honestly, it’s incredibly strong, the relationship that we have. And there’s a couple of different elements to it. So one thing that I will say about agile marketing and growth marketing is that collaboration is built into it, right? You need to be engaging with other teams. You need to be getting different opinions and different ways of doing things. So the more people are part of the process, the more buy-in they have to see it succeed. So I think particularly with sales and marketing at Colt is that we bring sales into the process as early on as we can. I also would say that everything that we do has a sales element. So if we’re doing, let’s say campaigns, or if we’re doing events, et cetera, we always have sales packs, we have sales training, we have sales education. But then also, I would say that we got to a point with our marketing experiments that we have a 30% conversion rate on what we hand over. So they trust us, right? They trust us that we’re giving them good stuff. So we’ve built a lot of trust over the years as well.

Melissa:

Yeah, that’s really great to hear. And I really feel like and hope it’s the future of marketing and sales and the finger pointing stops and we become just more responsive to each other.

LAURA:

Yeah, I also particularly as we’ve seen digital marketing change over the years, right, is that it’s no longer linear sale cycle. And they appreciate that and they understand that now. And I think more than ever, they’re seeing the value and watch marketing can bring to the table that you’re not looking. And particularly a company like mine has big deals, right? So you’re looking at a two-year sale cycle sometimes. They want your help. They want you to help nurture. They want you to help engage with those customers. They want to see how they’re tracking. Are they engaging with experiments? Are they engaging with campaigns, et cetera? And all of those data points are super useful to them. And they really help to build up that profile and that customer intimacy as well.

Melissa:

So as you’re experimenting and as you’re building these long-term campaigns and relationships with sales and the customers, how do you avoid getting caught up in just tweaking little things? How do you make sure that you’re achieving your strategic goals?

LAURA:

That’s a great question. And I think it’s an ongoing balancing act, to be completely honest. So at the moment, we kind of split things out. Some things are still project-based. And as mentioned, we try and be more agile with that. And then some things are more experiment-based or lend themselves to experiments more. What we’re also finding is that projects can be a mix, right? So they can have an element of the project that is much more sort of linear, and then they can have elements of the same project that is more, you’re able to create experiments around as well. So a great example is campaigns, where the planning of the campaign might be more linear, but then once you get into the execution, then you can start with the experiments as well. So we’re still understanding which things lend themselves more to experiments and which still need to have kind of project. focus. But I would say, you know, things like Always On, we’ve found is a great way to have an experiment funnel. So creating specific types of activity, as mentioned, like Always On digital marketing activity, we know that that’s going to be really rich for experiments.

Melissa:

Yeah, I really like what you’re saying about the blended approach. And I know that people have combined what they call waterfall with more agile or growth approaches. But it really resonated with me what you said about being able to plan out your campaign, because you do need a plan.

LAURA:

Yeah.

Melissa:

And that’s part of the agile marketing principles. But you also need a plan that bends and changes with your learnings. So it’s a great point.

LAURA:

Thank you.

Jim Ewel:

Laura, you’ve been doing this for some time. What would you say to someone who’s just getting started? How would you help them? What should they do?

LAURA:

Sure, so first of all, I would say as a leader, you have to create an environment where everyone can thrive. So you really need to be getting under the ways of working. So how different team members work, you need to understand what their motivations are, how they calculate that they’re successful, and then really help them on the journey with you. So it’s gonna be different for every person that you work with. You’re gonna have different stakeholders, you’re gonna have different managers. And it’s really trying to get underneath, you know, how they work, how they’re motivated, and aligning it with what you’re doing. And I’ll say, for example, that we, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’ve encountered is that when you get new people joining your team, you kind of have to start from scratch a little bit again. 

When we first were doing this, we forgot about that a little bit. And we’d have new people, we’d be like, Come on, right, we’re off, we’re doing growth. get on board and they’d be like a deer in headlights. They’d be really scared because they’re just not used to being comfortable with failure. So I think there’s a really big thing that you have to do about making sure that all the people who are involved in this are on the journey with you. They understand it and they’re comfortable with it. The second thing, as I mentioned before, is be prepared to fail and get comfortable with it. Sit in that failure while I’m at it, really, really get comfortable with it and understand that it’s learning. and understand that it’s something that you need to do to be able to be successful. I would say get stuck in. I think you kind of have to just start the process in a lot of ways. 

As mentioned, we work with The Growth Method. It’s a company and they have a tool and that’s really, really helped because it’s provided that structure for us. And I guess that would be another, something I would tell people would be to get some expert advice. So, you know. This is a great podcast. You’re gonna get learnings, get out there, get as much information as you can as well to kind of look at different ways of doing things. But also, and this is kind of an interesting one for an agile approach is that you need to be disciplined. You need to stick with it. You kind of can’t just do it for a year and say, well, I gave it a go, I’m not seeing what I wanted to. You kind of have to stick with it for multiple years and really get it working and get it functioning well.

Melissa:

Yeah, I mean, Laura, I’m a gardener. And as much as I would love to have tomatoes in January, it takes some time for those tomatoes to grow and to mature. So you do have to nurture things and water things to reap the rewards.

LAURA:

Exactly.

Melissa:

So you shared a lot of lessons there. You get disciplined with the approach, and make sure you remember to onboard people. If you were to do this again, what are some of the things that you do differently, maybe in a different company, or if you were to do it again with a different team?

LAURA:

I’m not sure that I would do things considerably different. I do think, and this is part of that growth or agile way of thinking, is everything’s a learning, right? So if I was going to do it again, I would be learning in a different way. So I think everything that we did that maybe didn’t work as well from the get-go was a learning and helped us iterate and improve. Some things I think around our metrics, our early metrics, we looked at things like form fills and things like web visits and things like that. Now I would look at those as not being as effective metrics. I think kind of getting understanding about what metrics are good ones is something to do early on. I think I probably would do that slightly differently. But other than that, I do truly believe that it’s all been a positive learning experience.

Jim Ewel:

That’s great, Laura. One of your passions, it seems, from what I’ve read about you, is women in technology. Okay. And in marketing in general, in both the US and the UK, women make up about 60% of marketers. But when you look at CMOs, the ratio is almost exactly the opposite. Only about 40% of CMOs are women. What kinds of things do we need to be doing? to encourage more women in marketing leadership positions.

LAURA:

Yeah, sure. Women’s progression is such an important topic. I mean, we know that companies with female CEOs are more profitable and perform better. But unfortunately, as you mentioned, there is that broken rung issue that the women aren’t going into leadership positions. Even looking at women entering the workforce, looking at something like digital marketing is only about a third woman, only about 26% of those in the tech workforce are women. And, you know, looking at recent studies, it’s not super positive. A recent PWC study showed that only 3% of women say Korean technology is their first choice. And half of young women who go into tech leave their positions by age 35. 

LAURA:

So there are things that, I mean, there are things that we can do, right? So one is around mentoring and sponsorship. So particularly for younger women, having those, giving those opportunities that they can get into mentoring and sponsorship. Sponsorship in particular, if you find women who are incredibly successful, they’ll often tell you that they had a sponsor along the way. So if you are a young woman wanting to succeed, or if you’re a woman as well, who’s wanting to pull up younger woman, is helping them to find some of those mentoring and sponsorship opportunities. That’s super important. Allyship is obviously hugely important. It’s of everyone’s benefit when women succeed. 

As mentioned, it’s positive for the companies and it’s positive for diversity. It’s just generally a good thing to be happening. So allyship’s super important. Role modeling. One of the reasons I agreed to do this podcast was that I think it’s really important for young women to see women who are successful in technology and in technology or STEM roles. And we kind of think it’s maybe part and parcel when we’re doing it. But I do talk to young women and they actually don’t really see it. And there’s a saying, you can’t be what you can’t see. So it’s really important for women to kind of stand up, be heard, make sure that they’re speaking out and joining podcasts and being able to tell their story as well. And then finally, I think really around policies and best practice, there is… policies about women’s life stages, things like menopause or fertility, looking at companies’ policies. So if you’re in a company, have you got fair and transparent policies that help women at every life stage? What are those development opportunities that they have? There’s a whole bunch of things that people can be doing to look out for other women.

Melissa:

Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. I really appreciate and feel a lot of what you said. And the thing that strikes me is it’s not a one-dimensional issue,

LAURA:

No.

Melissa:

We’ve got to do all of these things. Being a role model, we’ve got to help mentor and support people. We’ve got to support people through life stages. And especially that last one, I was thinking to myself, well, if the roles were reversed and we had a long legacy of women you know, leading companies and men were in the position. I wonder if the companies would have just automatically have had childcare and other things in place. 

Melissa:

We’ve really appreciated your sharing your story today. And it’s been a pleasure to meet you and chat with you. So I know one of the questions we get is people are like, I, I loved what Laura had to say. I want to talk to her, I want to connect with her. For those who want to reach out to you, how can they do that?

LAURA:

Sure, LinkedIn, obviously the easiest one to do. So just look up Laura Perrott, double R, double T, and I should be the first person that pops up.

Melissa:

Great, thanks so much for being here with us today and sharing your stories with us.

LAURA:

It was great to be here, thank you so much.

Jim Ewel:

Well, thanks for listening to our show today. Check out the show notes for this episode at AgileMarketingBlog.com or at the Agile Marketing Alliance.

Transcript

Welcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah.

Hannah Bink 

Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much.

Melissa 

So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale.

Hannah Bink 

I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool.

Melissa 

Tell me more.

Hannah Bink 

So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility.

Hannah Bink 

They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust.

Hannah Bink 

If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market.

Melissa 

So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here?

Hannah Bink 

Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution.

Melissa 

Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis.

Hannah Bink 

Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore.

Melissa (30:27.526)

Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Hannah Bink 

Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information.

Hannah Bink 

What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really.

Melissa 

Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches?

Hannah Bink 

So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise.  And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster.

Melissa 

Well, it reminds me of something we talked about in the first part of our conversation where we were talking about the shift in participatory budgeting being from one where somebody pitches something. You know, you’re in sell mode. You know, I think we should do this initiative and I think it should be funded and this is how we should sell the, or set the budget. And the same thing with these giant presentations, it’s like, you’re in sell mode. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve invested a lot in research. I’ve done pretty slides and I’ll be rejected if you don’t accept my idea. We’re shifting that into a conversation. The conversation goes more like, hey, I have an idea, I have an hypothesis. Here’s what I’m expecting to happen. We could probably have a whole other conversation about leading indicators and guardrails. But the idea here is that we’re in an ongoing conversation around ideas and anything can happen at any time to say, we need to fund this more or less. And I feel like therein lies the power of a lean business case.

Hannah Bink 

Absolutely. And I have to say, I feel like my executive team remembers more and they digest more because it’s iterative, one, so they’re on this journey, they’re part of this conversation as we’re going. But also when we’re talking about at scale, agile at scale, these executives have 400 things bouncing around their heads at all times. So the value of getting to the point, if you’re trying to affect change inside an organization, cannot be understated. And it gives you a tool to do that.

Melissa 

It gives you a tool and it gives you a tool to remain flexible so that it doesn’t feel like careers are on the line. You know, like, oh, my thing, this case that I pitched didn’t work. That’s OK. It allows more room for failure, too.

Hannah Bink 

Absolutely.

Melissa 

So Hannah, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve got one last question for you that’s been burning on my mind, which is this whole notion of lean business cases and participatory budgeting, especially in SAFe, applies to technology portfolios, which I think are very product-centric. And I feel like marketing views things differently. We don’t necessarily have these product portfolios that they do in technology.

Melissa 

So how do you think these practices need to be adapted for use in marketing?

Hannah Bink 

So at the end of the day, it’s back to the principles, right? We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as… We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as we both well know, there’s a lot of technology in marketing that can easily be your first step to using Lean Business Case as you’re trying to adapt it in your organization.

Hannah Bink 

I’ve actually done that recently. I’m trying to get some more investment in our website. I’d like to translate it into seven languages. So I’m working on the lean business case as part of safe lean portfolio management approach, and I’ve found it’s really, really helpful. There’s a, there’s a standard step-by-step process that allows me that exploration time to better understand the business impact. What am I actually proposing here? And the approach of having a portfolio Kanban offers me that visibility into all of the strategic investments my company is making. To understand one, as someone already discussed this, that would be wonderful. Two, what are the other strategic investments our company is making? And as a marketer, how did those investments affect what we do every day? And it just gives me more context to understand when my leadership comes back to me and says, we’re a little overwhelmed on WIP here. I have that level of visibility to understand fully the impact of what I’m bringing to the business. But in marketing, whether it’s technology or maybe we’re investing in a new research area, or maybe we’re investing in a new channel mix or event strategy. There’s a lot of high cost things that we do on a day-to-day basis, or we’re thinking about doing. It just, it gives you that tool once again, where you can explore safely with that visibility and that iterative approach that Agile is truly core to the way Agile operates every day.

Melissa 

So Hannah, I feel like you and I have been talking a little bit, geeking out on lean business cases and participatory budgeting. And I’m thinking about some of our listeners who might be brand new to Agile. And I could see this feeling a little bit overwhelming. So for those of you who are at the end of this show and feeling like, “oh my gosh, I could never do that,” what are a couple of first steps that people could take in this direction without having to jump all the way into the deep end?

Hannah Bink 

Choose something that is key to your leadership, but they’re a little stuck on. Maybe you could introduce one of these activities, maybe both of these activities as a way to start thinking about investment differently. I’ll give you an example. Maybe your CMO is thinking about targeting a new segment.

Hannah Bink 

Well, a new segment targeting strategy takes a lot of investment, right? There might be systems that have to be stood up. There might be education that needs to happen. You might have to hire new sales reps. Who knows? Starting to break down some of those long-term or strategic things that are still a little murky and using this as a pilot could be a really effective way to do that.

Hannah Bink 

Another approach is if you find yourself as a marketing organization truly overwhelmed with all the competing priorities coming your way, not that would ever happen in any company, this might be a tool to help focus the new requests that are coming in, the new investment proposals that are coming in, or the new staffing strategies, or the new product investments that are coming in as a way to either bring the customer closer or get a clearer view of what the proposer is actually pitching you. Just a few ways to pilot it early and learn.

Melissa 

Yeah, I’m hearing you really articulate the Agile principles, right? Which is break things down, experiment, adapt and learn, and apply that to this as well. You know, pick a starting point and continue to iterate. So, you know, Hannah, you’re just a wealth of knowledge around this. If people are interested in connecting with you, how can you be reached?

Hannah Bink 

I am available on the interwebs on LinkedIn under Hannah Howard Bink. They can also reach me through Scaled Agile. I love a good email and I usually do respond.

Melissa 

Sounds great. I appreciate your being here with us today.

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figure
out how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgeting
process, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency.

Transcript

Melissa

Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile.

Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah.

Hannah Bink

Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you.

Melissa

Great to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Hannah Bink

It was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing.

Melissa

Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time?

Hannah Bink

What I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear.

Melissa

Yeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned?

Hannah Bink

I think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear.

The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually or

in person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about.

Melissa

Yeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting.

And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups.

Hannah Bink

Absolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful.

Melissa

For sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world?

Hannah Bink

So we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives. 

 I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas.

 You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds?

You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fair and a collaborative approach that aligns to your shared goals. It’s a really fascinating way to bring partners or bring customers to the table and closer to the decisions marketers are making.

Melissa

Well, and it’s so powerful because you not only are bringing them into the room, and you and I have certainly seen examples where you’re asking somebody and asking a partner, asking a customer what they might prioritize. But I think it is different. Like you’re saying, if you’re thinking about it in monetary terms and saying, if you were in sitting in our shoes, what would you fund? And having them actually put, literally put money on the table around that because I feel like that forces a mental shift as well.

Hannah Bink

I really, really love the monopoly money concept, to your point, because there’s something interesting about having a physical bill in your hand that you’re now putting on a table and giving to a collective pile to fund something. It’s very different than just looking at a sheet and saying, I support XYZ. But when you’re giving away money, even if it’s fake money, there’s something psychological about that experience.

Melissa

Mm-hmm. All right, so we talked about engaging partners in channel marketing. Talk to us a little bit about how you could use this with ABM.

Hannah Bink

So with ABM, I really like bringing the customer in if you have that really close collaborative strategy. Marketers can adopt this approach to involving that client’s team into that budgeting process. It’s really fantastic at allowing clients to sort of see behind the curtain, especially when your ABM strategy aligns with that client’s goals. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re trying to sell internally or they’re trying to affect some sort of internal change. Bringing them into the fold as part of that account expansion strategy could be really powerful for everyone. Not to mention, you’re going to create a long lasting relationship which should lead to higher retention rates, maybe even account growth just inside the one business segment that you’re working with. Similarly, if you’ve got a SaaS product or if there’s like a physical thing that they can buy, I’ve never met an account that doesn’t want a say in how they’re sold to. Often they’re genuinely appreciative to have a chance to have some sort of say in it or shocked that they’re invited into the conversation. Again, this could be an incredible tool for long-term or customer retention.

Melissa

Yeah, I mean, we’re really shifting the paradigm, not only in participatory budgeting, but also in or with agile techniques. And in my mind, it’s the paradigm is shifting from a tennis match where we’re lobbing a ball over to another person, another group, another outside entity and waiting for the return, to really a team sport and inviting those people that we used to lob the ball to onto the team and saying, no, let’s think this through together. And that’s the shift that we’re trying to create.

Hannah Bink

I’ve always said that the wildest thing about marketing is that we’re asked to sell a product we’ve never used to people we’ve never met working in context we’ve never worked in. And people ask questions like, well, why doesn’t the marketing work? Bringing the customer closer is a great way to bridge that gap.

Melissa

Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made in marketing for sure. So talk to us about a time that you used participatory budgeting. You know, I’d love our listeners love real world examples. So what did you notice that surprised you? Did it change your mindset or your behavior?

Hannah Bink

So I’ve actually used it successfully in staffing strategy. Every department, marketing, sales, anyone is gonna have their own wish list of the skills they think they need, the roles they think they need. And when there’s budget at play, it can get pretty contentious or just frustrating because you’re not quite sure how decisions are being made.

 We took a participatory budgeting approach to the staffing strategy where we sat and came up with our ideas ahead of time, did the research of just how much it costs to acquire or develop those skills. And then in traditional company, each department has their own budget. But especially when things get tight, or if you have a centralized budget where staffing is held in one place, you really need to bring all the voices to bear to understand the impact of these skill-oriented decisions. I’ll give you an example. I can tell you for a fact that my sales department right now wants nothing more than a field marketing department. They want that built. It is a major wish list item.

 But they don’t necessarily understand the full business impact of what field marketing means. If I put a field marketer in every region, that means I also need to empower them with potentially an agency in that region because no one person can do everything in marketing. I probably also need to staff up headquarter support to support all of these regional marketers suddenly.

 And then I probably also need to expand my system investment so that they have some sort of malleable support system that works 24 hours a day and has some sort of approval process, built-in automation. This is a significant investment. It’s not just hiring six people. So by using the sort of feasibility study or cost analysis step that other people are doing, we’re talking about staffing strategy using real dollars. What is the actual impact of field marketing investment versus more data analysts or more electrical engineers? How do you compare these skill sets? We’ve used participatory budgeting at Scaled Agile to get each department to the table and to have a really holistic view of the hiring strategy. And the conversations are hard. I’m not going to lie, they’re really difficult. But that’s kind of the point, is to have the hard conversation because this is real dollars. There are real impacts to the decisions we’re making. I was taken aback by just how willing people were to have those conversations and make those trade-off discussions in real time.

 Melissa

Well, you’ve got the smartest people in the room, right? And you’ve got the people with the most information about how it impacts them and the cost. And what’s different is, again, we’re shifting away from this hierarchical notion that the person at the top knows the most. And they don’t often know the most. And you need real conversations happening in order to make the best decisions and get the most information out on the table. And I think that’s another great benefit of participatory budgeting and this type of approach.

 Hannah Bink

I remember our HR leader was very skeptical, thinking through the example I’m mentioning, very skeptical of all the fighting she thought was going to emerge. And she was genuinely shocked by how collaborative people were. I think there’s power in just having more information that’s digestible. Having the details in front of you. O ranges in many cases, as opposed to apples to helicopters. You don’t know what you’re looking at, but this forces you to bring that information together, bring the right people in the room, and most people just want to do what’s best for the company at the end of the day.

 Melissa

So thank you, Hannah. This is the end of part one of two. Appreciate your sharing your stories with you, so rich, so full of color. And listeners, stay tuned with us for part two of participatory budgeting and lean business cases.

Joan’s Bio
With deep experience in Lean and Agile transformation, Joan has spent the past 30 years getting hands on experience of identifying and implementing strategic changes to operating models, systems and processes to drive transformation within Financial Services. An experienced qualified Agile Coach, Scrum Master and change professional with a huge passion for people psychology and enabling high performing teams, she has helped deliver change at NatWest in a variety of roles within Finance, Technology and transitioned to an Release Train Lead role in Marketing in late 2022.

We had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Llewellyn-Maxwell of Planview where she serves as a Senior Manager of content marketing. Liz has a deep background in Agile Marketing, including being on a team that started doing Agile Marketing, stopped, and started doing it again.

In this episode we talk with Elizabeth Venter. She is an Agile Transformation Lead at Agile Sherpas and an experienced Agile coach. Previously  she worked as an Agile Transformation Consultant in various industries including financial services and automotive.

Transcript

Jim Ewel

Brandy, can you share with us what motivated you to adopt?

Brandi Starr

Our marketing team was fairly new and we were getting things done but it felt like everything was taking forever. We tended not really hit many deadlines and so I started looking at different approaches to try to improve efficiency and move things through and so that’s where I stumbled across agile marketing in my research and the fact that we are a technology company, very familiar with agile on the technology side and so we chose to dive right in and take on agile.

Frank Days

What does agile look like at your firm?

Brandi Starr

A little different than at most companies. We are a consulting firm and so there are two parts of agile for us. We primarily use agile within our internal marketing team and so within marketing, we have our monthly planning.

Our sprints are a month which is long by comparison to most organizations but we do our monthly planning. We have our monthly retros. We have not used the whip limits.

We tried and we found that that just didn’t really work for us. However, we are planning with story points and looking at how much we’re able to move through in a given sprint. Then on the client side, we are using what I call agile light because our clients all work very differently within their organizations.

We can’t go full agile but we have adopted using a Kanban with our clients for planning the work that we’re going to be doing, having monthly planning meetings and then we have an internal retro on how we’ve managed the client and the work that we’ve done and how we continue to improve and so far that’s going pretty

Jim Ewel

one of the things I’m really interested in when people adopt agile is how they organize the teams. Are you organized in the cross-functional teams or how to do approach?

Brandi Starr

super small. Our marketing team is three people. I had operations and marketing and then I have two marketing managers and then we have several people on the team who support marketing.

One of our client strategists and two or three of our technologists also support the marketing function. For all intents and purposes, it is a cross-functional team and we are all using agile. We’re making sure that we’re publishing the plan for the sprint and that everyone’s signing off on it. We have our standups which are mainly with the smaller team. It’s quasi-cross

Frank Days

As you’re using agile with your clients, you talked a little bit about Kanban. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the interactions and processes and how that compares with what you use for your internal non-client

Brandi Starr

With our clients, our contract structures can vary. For some clients, we are working on very specific projects. They will contract with us to do a specific body of work.

Those clients, we aren’t using an agile process. For our larger clients, where we are involved in the day-to-day, so in many cases, they are outsourcing their email or marketing ops to us. We are involved in defining the strategy and all the initiatives that are happening in marketing will have our hands in.

The plan is a bit more loose. With our Kanbans, we keep it simple. We use smart sheets.

We have it set up with the card view. We have our backlog. Anything that comes up as a potential project goes into the backlog.

Then when we are doing planning, we are looking at, okay, here’s what we said. We were going to work on this month. This still makes sense. What do we need to grab from the backlog, anything we need to add to the backlog? Because clients are working on contracts where we’ve planned out their hours for the month of the quarter and we have estimates on each of the cards, we can determine if we’re putting too much into work in progress. Is it the right balance? And so that part works really.

And it’s actually created a lot more accountability and insight for our clients where a lot of them are not quite as organized. They kind of are just working on what they work on. They’ll have ideas and then those ideas get forgotten along the way.

And so that has been the most helpful part of agile. And then also so that we are continuing to improve the way that we work with our clients, the fact that our internal team does a retro and we essentially bring anyone who’s worked on the account to the retro to talk about how did it go? How do we improve?

We do the start, stop, continue. And that’s also helped us to improve how we manage our

Jim Ewel

Brandi, you talked about some of the parts that have helped you. What have been some of the challenges that you’ve encountered as you’ve adopted?

Brandi Starr

so initially the sprint duration was a challenge. We were trying to go with weekly sprints, which is what’s the most common. And it just, we just don’t move that fast.

And so we quickly abandoned that. And then also having whip limits on the internal side. Because most of the people that are supporting marketing, so other than my two marketing managers, all pull double duty.

So I do some of the consulting work, I own operations, I own marketing. Our strategists are primarily client-facing, but support marketing. It was really, really difficult to actually assess bandwidth.

There may be one month where I lean in and I’m doing 30 or 40 hours of marketing work. And then there’s some months where they’re kind of on their own and I only do 10 hours. And so you can’t really define an actual whip limit because it changes day to day. And so that was the other piece that really did not work

Then also with clients, daily standups trying to meet more frequently than weekly. Also didn’t work like we couldn’t other than one client where the volume is high enough that daily makes sense. Our other clients we’ve shifted to like a weekly standup process because it just didn’t work for schedules, didn’t work for budgets. And so we had to abandon that part as

Frank Days

You talked about WIP limits. So we had a recent guest on the podcast who’s talking about work in progress and the challenges that it introduces to the team by having too much work in progress. I’ll freely admit that when I’ve practiced agile with my various teams work in progress has always been too much WIP is always been the killer.

Everyone is whether it’s pressure from above or it’s over ambition or whether it’s underestimating the value. Can you share what your process looks like around managing your WIP limits?

Brandi Starr

So what we’ve started tracking is days. So define is our first stage when it comes out of the backlog and so we’re looking at how long it sits there before someone actually starts working on it. So we’ve been tracking that I think for eight or nine months or so as well as our percentage of work that’s getting completed on time.

So based on the dates that we set we always are focused on clearing the board because the goal is that at the end of the month, everything is done and the middle of the combo board is empty. And so tracking those two numbers as well as how many story points were able to put through month over month has really helped us to see what is realistic for our team. So even though we’ve not been able to set like an actual work-in-progress limit to say like if we’ve got too

much in this stage, then nothing else can move there. What it has done is it has helped us to not be overambitious and to actually really be realistic. And so when we see that okay, our percent on time is going down and our day.

is and define is going up. Yeah. We probably put too much that sprint.

Much better. And so that’s been kind of our approach to creating balance. And I was able to build some excitement around Clear the Board. So far, we’ve only had one month where we’ve actually cleared the whole board. That’s great. And it happened. I made a big deal of it. Like, we posted in Slack. I sent virtual confetti gifts, all sorts of things.

Get a big deal. And so that has also really helped everyone involve to be more conscious of what they can actually do. Because nobody wants to be the reason that we don’t clear the

Frank Days

I was just wondering about the little sibling of WIP, which is the unplanned work. The stuff that comes up in the middle of the sprint, do you have a process on how you triage things as a month is a pretty long sprint? There must be tasks that come up in the middle of the sprint people have. It is someone being ruthless about, OK, this one comes in. That one goes out kind

Brandi Starr

We are fortunate that we don’t have a high volume.

There are times when it peaks something happens, especially things in the national crisis or things that people are paying attention to. Sometimes you have to stop work or take things out of market or things like that. But for the most part, we do pretty good at planning ahead and not having a lot of last-minute stuff.

However, when there is, we do in our marketing daily standup, we have that gut check of, can we really get this done without putting something else on hold? Or do we need to put something on hold? And so it is really quick.

And I try to not make it a whole discussion. Like, it really is a gut.  if we can get this done or not.

And I’ve gotten my team comfortable with being able to say no. If we do this, something’s got to give. And so that’s why I say I wouldn’t say it’s ruthless because if there is something that really has to get done and we can’t put something on hold, we do make it happen. And we do occasionally stretch ourselves then. But for the most part, we do pretty

Jim Ewel

Brandi, I’m curious if you have applied some of the iterative aspects of agile to your practice. What I mean by that is oftentimes we kind of work in a waterfall method. We get a creative brief in, we do the campaign, we declare victory.

We said the campaign’s over, right? And the essence of Agile is iterative to try to do a little something and see how it works and then iterate on it. Have you applied that aspect of agile to your practice with your

Brandi Starr

So we’ve been able to take that iterative approach in a couple of small ways. With our clients, I have started to really get them to think about what’s the MVP? Like what do we need to actually get done to get something in market or to get this project complete? And how do we iterate on it

Because we do, I do see probably more on the client side where projects will kind of just drag on and on and on because there’s this desire to be perfect. And instead, I try to shift them to “done is better than perfect”. Like how do we get to good enough?

And that works on certain things and with certain clients. So I do at least try to preach the iterative mindset where I can so that we don’t get stuck in those cycles of revisions and all of those things. On our team side, I think we actually do a little better in just being comfortable in certain places with the process of iterating.

Because we’re consultants, there is a little bit of a different expectation of we can’t put anything in the market that’s half done because it reflects poorly on our brand and it impacts our business. Our digital ads are a great example. We’ve found that LinkedIn has been most successful for us.

But our social ads aren’t quite yielding the revenue that we’d like. So we’re going through an iterative process. Like we had our phase one, we put it in market, we’re looking at what’s working, what’s in there. not and we’re as we’re going into January, our fiscal starts in November. So we’re now going through our second iteration of that and keeping what’s working, trashing what doesn’t. So we have an iterative process very much at the forefront of our minds. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve nailed it. Like it is still, there are still a lot of things that I do think stay in progress that maybe could have been done earlier in the month.

So earlier in the sprint, that comes down to the last day because we’re trying to make it perfect. So there’s room for growth there, but we are at least, we are at least being iterative.

great to hear. It hoists as a challenge for all of , do all that stuff completely do this iterative approach. I mean, I know I find that very challenging. So can

how you work with your clients in terms of like you said some of your clients, your smaller clients, it’s, it sounds like it’s fairly waterfall, right? You have a statement of work and you deliver against it, right? That probably makes sense. Given the size of the project, you can, you can actually define it. You probably have a pretty decent amount of certainty around scope and scale of the project. As they get bigger, what does it look like? Are these bigger clients that they just on retainer and

then, and so the way that we work is we will plan their hours by the year, but broken down into quarters. So okay for simple math, let’s say they’re buying a thousand hours from us, and they know that there’s a ton of work that happens in Q1, but Q4 is kind of coasting. So we may say that Q1, we are planning for 400 hours and Q4, we’re only planning for 100 hours and then in Q2 and 3, it’s going to be 250 each.

And so based on how their business flows, what they have in their annual plans, we will estimate just at a really high level where the hours should live in the year. And for some clients, there’s a little more detail there like some clients like to have specific projects in their statement of work that they believe that they’re going to work on for those larger clients, it really is just hours. And so we start off planning that in the annual retainer.

So that’s what’s in the statement of work. And then from there is where we have our con bond at the beginning of the year, we start to throw everything in the backlog that we know that we might work on, even where it is just a nice to have or some of those some of those cleanup type things that you only really do when you’ve got some extra time, we get all of that in the backlog and then we start to plan against what their planned hours are. So , what do

need to and then we also break it down so that it’s not whole projects as a single card. In most cases, we will do the strategy, the development and the execution as like three separate cards. So we might develop the strategy for an initiative in January and then the planning and build in February.

And so that way we’re able to take projects in an appropriate chunk. And so that’s been really, really helpful. It gives clients into visibility of what we’ve committed to. It creates some accountability for their teams because again, they don’t like to be the reason we don’t clear the board. And so that that part has really been really good in giving them structure where the statement of work is more

Jim Ewel

Do you have to anyone in a consulting or an agency environment who is just starting on their journey?

Brandi Starr

Don’t feel like you have to implement it in a textbook case we went through an agile marketing certification we learned all of the best practices, the standard way of doing things. And initially, I was real gungho to implement it straight out of the textbook. Like, here’s what my material says.

Here’s what we’re going to do. However, in a consulting environment, whether you’re leveraging agile for your marketing team or with your clients, there are nuances that are just very different than a lot of other organizations. And so it’s not all or nothing when you are implementing agile even if you just take some of the principles, it moves you in the right direction of being a more efficient more scalable organization.

And so I would… keep going iterate. We talked about being iterative, but iterate on your agile journey, and keep the parts that really work for you and make your teams better, and don’t use the parts that don’t. Like it seems like really simple advice, but sometimes it can be frustrating when you feel like you got to stick to what you learned, and that’s just not the case.

Jim and Frank talk with Tricia Broderick. She is the Founder of Ignite Insight +
Innovation, the co-author of Lead Without Blame: Building Resilient
Learning Teams and someone who is passionate about helping
people and teams succeed.

Transcript

Frank Days  00:02

Joining us is Esther Derby. She’s a consultant and author who draws on four decades of experience leading observing and living organizational change. She has been particularly active in the Agile community serving two terms on the board of the Agile Alliance and co-authoring a book called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good teams Great. Her latest book is Seven Rules of Positive, Productive Change: Micro shifts, Macro results. Esther, thanks for joining us today.

This episode, we’ll talk about why organizations find change difficult, how to lead positive, productive change, and the role of retrospectives and making teams better. So let’s get started. Jim.

Jim Ewel  01:07

So Esther why exactly is change difficult for many, if not all, organizations?

Esther Derby  01:13

Well, I think there’s a lot of reasons. But if you think about it, you know, people make changes all the time, right? So, change is not inherently difficult, you know, change happens all around us all the time. People choose change all the time. Often, it is the way companies go about it, that creates friction and makes it more difficult. For example, I see a lot of changes where a dictate falls from the Elysium, the corporate Elysium. And people have really no context, no understanding about what it’s about, you know, they might get some talking points, but they don’t have a deep understanding of the rationale. So you know, that makes it more difficult. Sometimes people are asked to make, you know, enormous changes, but yet keep up their previous workload. That makes it more difficult. Sometimes companies say they want to do something very, very different, like maybe, for example, that they want to be Agile. And so they overlay a process on top of all of their existing patterns. And they don’t address the patterns. And so the patterns reassert themselves that makes change feel difficult.

Jim Ewel  02:31

In some sense, I hear you saying it’s that people resist being changed. It’s not that they resist change. Is that right?

02:39

Well, I think that’s generally true. I mean, I don’t think any of the three of us here would particularly like it if someone we don’t know particularly well comes in and tells us to start doing things very differently when we have developed expertise in it for many, many years, which is often how it feels in organizations. Someone who doesn’t understand your work comes in and tells you to do it differently. I’m not crazy about the word resistant, people don’t resist change, they respond to change. Most people don’t like being pushed or told to change, as you just said. 

Frank Days  03:15

In your latest book, you talk about two lessons you learned early on about change, that any given change might be positive for some and negative for others. And the second one being that change is ultimately a social process. Can you elaborate on those two lessons a little bit more?

03:34

Sure. Well, the story I tell in the book is about the first program I put into production, which was a program to automate an estimating process to making the decorative tape that goes along the sides of cars, I don’t know if it’s still a thing. But you know, that used to be a thing. You manufacture these decorative tapes and going cars. It was a very mathy program. And I overheard a conversation between the chief estimator and the head of the company the day before that went into production. And, you know, the chief estimator agreed that it worked, and it was faster, and that was accurate. And he still hated it. Because it was going to completely change the way he did his job. And his job had involved, you know, a lot of interaction with customers a lot of interaction with the shop, and, you know, working out estimates by hand and he loved it, he loved his job. And we changed that. So it meant to you know, less time talking with people more time sitting in front of a computer. It was a good lesson to learn early in my programming career. So, I think that going back to why change is sometimes difficult is people often don’t take that negative space into account that even if the change is great in the long run. It may have temporary losses, people, you know, may feel like “I don’t know how to do my job anymore. I feel incompetent,” which most people don’t like, or they may lose their routines or their social network may break. So there’s always, always some kind of loss. And it very often gets ignored and not acknowledged except to push people harder.

Frank Days  05:25

I agree with you on that. I had a boss who used to say that people aren’t afraid of change. They’re afraid of what potential impact is of that change. And I think you’re definitely right on with that.

05:35

I think when we talk about change, it’s important to acknowledge those things. And, you know, we don’t necessarily have to make everything happy for everybody. But acknowledging that goes a long way. Just acknowledging that, yeah, it’s going to be different, it’s going to be difficult. And we’ll have to figure it out together.

Jim Ewel  05:55

Yeah. And sometimes I think we can make small changes that can accommodate those things. I mean, absolutely. When I was running a company, we reorganized. This is an interpreting company, we had interpreters that sat in cubicles, and we reorganize them according to language instead of where they sat. And it turned out that people like sitting next to the person that they’d sat next to for three or four years, you know, and it wasn’t a big deal, we can make some changes to do that. And we ended up doing that.

But we had some struggles until we realized that we were unintentionally causing pain. In your book, you have seven rules, or you call them and I like this, you call them heuristics, okay, so not a fixed rule, but heuristics, right, for effecting change. So we don’t have time to cover them all. But I do want to talk about the first rule, striving for congruence. And I was particularly struck by that, because in a book I wrote called The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing, I advise people to start with alignment. And I was thinking about that I was saying about the difference between congruence and alignment. Do you think there’s a difference between those two? And if there is, what’s the difference? And why start there?

07:16

Well, tell me a little bit about how you’re thinking about alignment.

Jim Ewel  07:20

I was thinking about it in terms of like, for example, if people are going to implement Agile, I tell them first get aligned on why are you implementing Agile? What does success look like? You know, what are the conditions for implementing Agile, you know, get everybody to talk about that and get aligned on that. I also suggest that they talk about what they like about how things work today, so that they can accommodate those as much as possible. And so I just, I just say up front, you need to get aligned on some of that stuff.

08:00

That’s really interesting. I think it ties in very closely. The first part of what you said ties in very closely with the first topic we discussed, which is why change is sometimes difficult, because people don’t understand what problem they’re trying to solve. And people don’t understand what outcome they’re trying to create. It’s very, very difficult for people.

Jim Ewel  08:20

I also say that people support what they help create. So I think it’s important, absolutely right. It’s for people to get aligned in terms of that, you know, their voices heard in ways.

Esther Derby 08:35

And I think your insight about paying attention to what people value about the present is also super important and often overlooked. Think about what you want to keep as well as what you want to change. So I’m going to answer your question about congruence. But first, I want to say it sounds like we’re kind of aligned on change. 

Jim Ewel  08:58

Yes, maybe we’re congruent.

Esther Derby 09:02

Or maybe we’re both approaching change from a stance of congruence. So congruence is a concept that comes from the work of Virginia Satir, who was a pioneer in looking at families as systems. So when someone would come to her with a problem, she wouldn’t just look at the identified patient. She’d look at the whole, the whole family system, and while I am not trained as a psychologist or a social worker, a lot of what I have learned from studying her work is very applicable to human systems. So congruence is this idea that in any interaction, you have to balance the needs of your own needs, skills and capabilities. You have to consider those of the other people you’re working with. And you have to look at the context. So self, other and context. And those need to be roughly in balance. And it’s never perfect. It’s you know, I say strive for congruence rather than, you know, be congruent, because it’s always easy to get kind of knocked off and you know, kind of get back on track. I think of it kind of like a wobble board, you know, like you’re near never perfectly balanced, you’re always making adjustments. But those are the things you have to consider. And I think that’s actually, there’s a lot of commonality in the way you’re talking about alignment. Understanding the rationale has to do with the context, like we are in an organization, we’re in a business that needs to stay in business, the world around us is changing, we need to respond differently, therefore, we need to make some kind of change within our organization. So that’s the why piece that you’re talking about with alignment. And then what, you know, what do we value? And what do we want to keep, I think is very similar in some ways to let’s, let’s look at the other people involved in this change. You know, what are their wants and needs and capabilities and desires. And then the sell part comes from how you approach going about change. So I think there’s it, I think there’s potentially a lot of similarity in how you talk about alignment and how I talk about congruence.

Jim Ewel  11:23

It’s interesting to me the differences because what you’re saying for congruence is that it’s also about meeting the needs much as possible, of the different I’ll call them interest groups for the different parts of the organization, we need to meet the needs of, of management, we need to meet the needs of individual contributors, we need to meet the needs of middle managers as much as we can and still achieve our goals.

Esther Derby 11:51

We certainly have to consider them. Right. If they’re if they’re not considered at all, then you know, you’re not likely to meet any of them. And I don’t think you can always do it perfectly. I don’t think you can meet everybody’s needs perfectly, but I think it’s helpful to consider them, you’ll end up with a much more robust idea of how to go about change, if you give them consideration due consideration, and adjust how you’re approaching things based on that. What other differences do you see, I’m curious about that,

Jim Ewel  12:24

Those are the main differences, I think we’re aligned on aligned, right, where we are aligned on the general approach, but I like the strive for congruence that you you’ve mentioned. And I also like your analogy of the Wobble Board, you know, you can’t meet everyone’s needs, and it’s not a static system, it’s going to, it’s going to change a little bit, and you have to adjust your balance, you know, to stay upright and respond to those things.

Esther Derby 12:58

Yeah, I also think it’s, um, you know, it’s an individual stance, but it can also be the characteristic of companies. I visit some companies where they do generally try to balance those things. And I visit companies where they don’t, and that shows up in the company culture a lot. Like I see a lot of companies that are that have a very blaming culture, which is an incongruence stress stance, because you’re not considering the needs of other people. Generally speaking, if you’re in a blaming, if you’re in a blaming stance, but from an individual standpoint, I think it’s important because that’s where we can access our best thinking. And that’s where we can access our empathy. And it’s hard to access empathy. When you’re blaming, it’s hard to access empathy when, though you’re blaming someone else, or you’re blaming yourself or when you’re not considering anything but the context.

Frank Days  13:51

In your book you have Rule Five is “experiment”. As you say, little changes, limit disruption and allow people to learn. Can you share with us an example of an experiment that one of your clients took that was particularly effective?

Esther Derby 14:07

I can tell you about an experiment that in some ways failed, but was super useful because we’ve learned something from it. And what was learned from it allowed us to take a different approach and discover some other things. I was doing some work with a company who like many companies, they were trying to do Agile, do the Agile, and their sprints were almost always overstuffed. So we started asking questions about what was going on with that. So we did some little experiments to see if we could shift the dynamic in the commitment meetings. The teams weren’t actually present, as it turned out, so people would talk about the team’s commitment, but the teams were never actually in those meetings. And there’s, there’s one problem right there. But we started trying to make the team velocity visible. This is how many stories the team has committed on average in the last six Sprint’s, so let’s not commit to more than that. And having that information visible, we thought might change how people behaved, but it didn’t. 

So the next thing we tried was we gave people physical tokens, we gave them poker chips and said, Okay, you can, you know, move a move one to the next to the other pile each time you add something. And when you’re out of chips, that’s it. And that also didn’t have the effect, we thought it might, which led us to look at some look at some different areas about what was going on in the system. And it turned out that while the teams actually had a very consistent velocity, they also very consistently got stuck in the middle of a sprint because they had some big technical issues. And so the teams would take in extra work. So they had something productive to do when they were stuck on these big technology problems. But it masked the impact of these technology problems. And it created this dynamic where the teams were saying, oh, let’s do 100 But they only finish 70. And so people were mad at them, because they were only finishing 70 Why don’t you follow through on your commitments? So that was really useful in learning something about the system? 

Jim Ewel  16:37

Well, Esther, I can’t leave this interview without talking about retrospectives. Okay, you co-authored a book on that. And I find that a lot of teams, they either don’t do the retrospectives, or they do them ineffectively. So why are retrospectives important? And how to teams make them something that’s a meaningful meeting?

Esther Derby 16:57

Well, first, I want to say there are also a lot of teams that are doing really great retrospectives, and having great results with them. Sure. So it’s not that, you know, everybody’s failing with them, I have, I’ve seen a lot of teams that are really making good use of them. And there’s a company out in Southern California that I think has actually experienced some significant transformations because of their retrospectives. But you’re right, a lot of teams are getting really shallow results or no results. And I think there’s a, you know, a handful of reasons that happens. After looking at many, many companies and talking to some friends who have data on it, a lot of teams have been taught that a retrospective is just you make a list of what went well, what, what didn’t go, and what we would do differently, and then you dot vote. And those teams typically have very shallow insights, they are not really understanding what’s contributing to their issues. So they’re very superficial, they tend to get bored and think they’re useless, because they kind of are. 

Jim Ewel  18:09

Yeah, you know, I mean, okay, so what should they do instead?

Esther Derby 18:13

So it is possible, if you have really great facilitation, to have a good discussion based on making three lists. It’s possible, but I find it much more effective to one to have a focus. Because very often, those lists are scattershot, right, there’s just a kind of grab bag of everything. So have a focus, you know, this week, we are going to look at our patterns of defects. Or this week, we are going to learn look at our relationship with this other team that we need to work with. Or this this iteration, we’re going to focus on our technical practice or whatever it is, but have a focus, and then have some data. You can have subjective data, which is how people feel about things, people’s perceptions about things, are you going to have hard data but have some data? Because otherwise, you know, you’re not grounded. And then once you have some data, you know, that’s related to your focus, you can actually apply your analytical brain to it and have some insights about the nature of the issues you’re experiencing. What is getting in the way of achieving what you hope to achieve? What is the goal that you want to move towards? And with that, then you can think about what are we going to do about it? And then you choose one or two things to do about it.

Frank Days  19:35

It’s interesting, too, because it feels a little bit like you know, obviously we got to change the behavior to get different results. Right. I know I’m a guilty party when it comes to retrospectives that we’ll go and make some insights and then we’ll try to make some changes, but then ultimately, behavior. We come back a month later and we still overstuffed to the sprint with too many tasks. And I think you’re right. It is like trying to ask different questions and look and look at it from different angles. instead of just the staid, same old, same old, what went well, what didn’t go, Well, what can we do differently kind of questions.

Esther Derby 20:08

And what does that mean? It’s also important, like we talked about this at the beginning, you have to look at what holds the current pattern in place. You can’t just expect people to change their behavior, if everything in the system is only to all the other incentives in the system, formal and informal, are holding current pattern in place. If everything is influencing the pattern in one direction, you know, individual skill and will is often not sufficient to switch it. There were a lot of things that kept that old patterns in place. And often you really, it’s necessary to look at those that retrospectives don’t do anything. Another is that the expectation is that teams are always working on features, and that any improvements from the retrospective are, you know, done in all in all of the copious extra time that people have after they’ve worked a sixty hour week.

Esther Derby 21:07

Don’t overstuff your sprint. One, because things are going to come up, they always do. People don’t build in time where the expectation is people are going to be using this time to learn, to work on improvements, to figure out how to do something differently. Because all of that learning takes time. We all went we and we all went to school at some point we put in some time studying why do we forget that when we get to work?

In this episode, we talk with Anthony about the tangible issues and challenges of employing Agile Marketing in an organization like IBM.

Frank Days  00:03

 I’m Frank Days here with Melissa Reeve, your hosts for today’s episode. Joining us is Giannina Rachetta, Product Marketing Manager at 3M and an Agile marketing evangelist. Thanks for joining us today, Giannina.

Giannina Rachetta  00:36

Hi, Frank. Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me.

Frank Days  00:39

Great. Well, in this episode, we’ll talk about how 3M is using Agile marketing, how they got started, and how they overcame the challenges like personnel changes. Let’s get started.

Melissa Reeve  00:53

Giannina, tell us about your journey to Agile marketing, did it start at 3M?

Giannina Rachetta  01:01

Melissa, kind of. It started previously, in 2015. Now that I think about it. I was gonna say 2014. And I looking back, you know, just looking personally, my background has always been in marketing. And I say it happens in the last probably 20 years doing marketing, I’ve always gravitated towards the software, technology company field.  And back in 2000, if you can believe that long, when I was working in marketing at a fast growing tech company in upstate New York, I actually watched how the development team at the time went from a waterfall approach over to adopting Agile methodologies and how they evolved that way. And it made total sense for me from a software development perspective. And again, in marketing, I’ve always been in the product marketing type of marketing, communications, product marketing, but always supporting software products. So I kind of had that in the back of my head. And then when I joined 3M in 2013, the division that I joined that I currently work in, produces software solutions for the Health Information Management, division, among other things, and from the get go, it was very clear that it was an Agile scrum team that I was joining. And, you know, right then and there, I knew I was gonna fit just fine. And part of my job in product marketing, I was very much involved in all the development teams, grooming sessions, sprint reviews, prioritization meetings, etc. So I was very familiar with the methodology from the software development side.  And now, you know, switching to agile marketing, it was really back in 2015, when I came across the really applying Agile to what I do, while I was doing some research on agile methods, and really through working on, you know, launching a product, there was a lot of coordination at the time, back and forth many stakeholders, presentations, updates, things we needed to produce out to the market, and things like that. And we we needed to work fast and independently, and we knew we knew what we needed to do, and have clear goals. So with a cross functional team of product owners, marketing, marketing, communications, advertising and all that, so we applied really very  rudimentary way of looking at what we were doing and kind of applying some Agile principles to it. And so, yeah, so I guess, really, from an agile marketing perspective at 3M That’s kind of how I got started. I did a lot of self education.

Melissa Reeve  04:27

Yeah, it sounds like it it. Along the lines of education, what kind of support did you find?  You know, there isn’t a lot out there specifically around product marketing. So did you find some resources or were you having to make it up as you went along?

Giannina Rachetta  04:43

Well, back then, when I’m talking about, you know, 2015, 2016 Yeah, there was there was not a lot out there. I wanted to train myself on how to better understand the software development team from a marketing perspective, because I was sitting in there, you know, sprint reviews and in the grooming sessions and just the lingo itself, right? It could be a little intimidating. What do you mean sprint? What do you mean, you know, backlog? You know, what’s the story point, things like that, just from the basics of what is this to then you know, little by little, finding online information videos on how to do an agile with a business mindset and then further commercialization of products and into marketing into product marketing. So little by little, I think that when I came across it this book called Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker, that’s the one that’s the that’s the time when I was like, Okay, I got this.

Frank Days  06:05

Can you share a little bit about what it looked like when you got started implementing agile in marketing? Sounds like you were already there was agile was fairly prevalent at 3M. Right? What was that process of crossing the chasm or crossing the department to get people? 

Giannina Rachetta  06:21

Sure. So I mean, I had that mindset, right, I had that a, you know, kind of self education I had done for a few years. 3M as an organization, they, they like, I don’t know, specifically when they started it, but they I know that we all got invited to this one forum where all marketers can join from different areas and online. And it was introduced as a  new initiative, let’s be an Agile team, and how to how to apply some of the concepts. So, back then, I think it was 2018 or around 2018. So to me, that was that was great, because I was right there. Right with it.  And then fast forward to right before COVID. And you got to understand, when you are when you’re in a big corporation has to be on again, I’m just me, right? I’m doing my job. And you know with the team with the division, but there’s so many divisions that we have so many businesses. So it was it was a lot of tapping people, hey, you know, what about this? What about doing, you know, changing the way we’re doing things? So it was a lot of, you know, consider myself an evangelist. Now, because I was I was doing that I was tapping I was I was knocking the doors, I was putting PowerPoint presentations together and say, Hey, how about we do this? We’re going to be solving XYZ problem. And everybody knew that I worked that way. So if I got a new teammate, or an new project that I had to work cross functionally, like that is how I, I organized myself, I very much looked at it from an organization perspective. So how do I organize my work with priorities with story points to to understand the level of effort of any particular deliverable. And then in right before, it was right about COVID, time 2020 is when we did the implementation of agile techniques and tools with my team, that 3M Health Information Systems. So that’s the division that does all the software for healthcare for 3M so we started in 2020, took about a year. And it’s been it’s been great. It was a great learning opportunity. From my part on just how to introduce a such a large concept is a mindset shift is applying new principle principles and also apply new tools in a more practical way. So it was a it was a great learning opportunity, implementing agile marketing at three MHS.

Melissa Reeve  09:48

Could you walk us through that transformation that started right before COVID? I know we’ve got a lot of listeners out there who are wanting to embark on their own transformations you mentioned, you know, this transformation involved an initiative called Winning with Agility. Maybe you could back up, tell us what drove the decision to, to launch into this Agile transformation, maybe the steps you took around training and tooling. And then a little bit about the challenges you overcame?

Giannina Rachetta  10:24

Yes, definitely. So it was, it was, it was almost a story of, you know, when things fall in the right place, as we were, as a team, within my division, embarking into deciding, yes, let’s apply this. Especially because we were all remote. If there was any hesitation of, of changing the way we’re doing things, or improving the ways we were doing things, definitely the fact that we all became remote employees, made things very clear that we needed to have a way of doing things faster, more transparency. You know, visibility into each other’s workloads. We weren’t, you know, sitting next to each other to, to, like, look at a board. If we were to have a board of the things that we’re doing and, and when things are done, and so forth, or if there is any impediment. So we had to look at it very practically. How do we get everybody together? There have been some struggles that we had identified in the past where, you know, I was doing my work, and I used Jira, for my, my own organization at the time. Some other folks also use JIRA that had, you know, slowly but surely converted into, but others used, you know, spreadsheets or SharePoint sites or other tools. And there was a lot of duplication. A lot of duplication a lot of amount of time that was wasted on kind of just updating things, you know, updating people updating places on, you know, different SharePoint sites or whatnot with what are we doing then monthly reports and things like that. So it was a lot of, of that work that was probably necessary at one point.

Melissa Reeve  12:41

Sorry to interrupt, but you were looking for some efficiencies. So that was one of the things that was driving the the decision to go Agile, is that fair?

Giannina Rachetta  12:50

Yes, absolutely. We needed to do a change. And we needed to, to, you know, get rid of some silos and some duplications. So you mentioned Winning with Agility. So right at the time, when we started the charter of our project or on project to do this Agile transformation, 3M, also launched a Winning with Agility initiative, which I thought was great. Under this umbrella of winning with agility, let’s bring in projects that are doing that exactly, or any any project that we have, that we were trying to get done to improve our own processes as an organization. And how that  is going to make us be more agile, that that is going to make us be more effective.  So I tapped into that we were, we were not launched yet, we had not launched our our new process or new, this transformation. We were in the middle of kind of just starting to charter starting the discussions. How are we going to do this? You know, we were a team of about 35 marketers from different areas. We had integrated marketing, we had product marketing, we had marketing communications. We have web experience and things like that. So we were a large team, and placeholder coordinations with an ad agency and so forth and events. So, different different arms, extended arms. And so we were right in the middle of trying to figure out how do we do this and this is when the winning with agility initiative came about and they tapped into that and it was very interesting because 3M is a Lean Six Sigma company that will follow Lean Six Sigma processes for improvements. And it was a very interesting combination of Lean Six Sigma and agile, where I used to some of the Lean Six Sigma.  You know, processes are, for lack of a better word, just methods to bring this project to light. Some of the things that I used what are the things that I really liked about the Lean Six Sigma approach was on identifying the critical why’s. Critical whys are basically the problems to solve. So, what I spoke earlier, getting rid of the siloed work, have that visibility, increased productivity, decrease duplication, those were were very much our goals, and also the metrics that we will use. And then, and then recognizing, what are our critical access, which are basically the things that can go wrong? And how do we, what do we do to control them? Right? So, identifying what are some of the things that could go wrong, like, our team’s going to revert back to what they used to do? Are they? Are we going to go back to having multiple places to keep track of work? Or are we, you know, not really going to follow Scrum or, you know, sprints? Or how are we, you know, how are we going to, you know, other things that we’re implementing, so change management as a change for the organization? And then how, what are the things that could go wrong? And how are we going to control them?

Melissa Reeve  16:53

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Giannina Rachetta  16:55

So yes, it was very, it was very interesting process on how to do that, and making sure that we have those controls in place, to, you know, to keep make sure that the the project is successful,

Frank Days  17:09

You shared a lot about how your efforts have matured over the last few years, right? Where do you see your agile efforts going next?

Giannina Rachetta  17:20

Well, it’s, it’s interesting, because we had a lot of change in the middle of it, like, after we launched the project, we were all you know, utilizing the tools and utilizing the process. As you know, people come and go, you know, roles change, we had a lot of change in the last year. And looking back, and there are definitely some, some challenges that we are as any normal organization going through. Any, anytime there is a new employee coming in, for instance, we have to understand, it is still a very new concept. In, the business world on having an agile mindset, following Agile principles being an Agile team.  I would love to see if there is any part of the curriculum in universities, when you’re getting out of marketing, if you have a something that along the side, the lines of an agile track, right, but there isn’t one right now that I can see. So you have folks coming in. And you have to train them. Well, from from this is, you know, from the practical ways of how this is how we work, these are the tools that we’re using to more of the mindset of having that, you know, uninterrupted buffer, having a prioritization, negotiating, when there is a, you know, a backlog that that needs to be there, you know, prioritize and groomed and how do you, you know, how do you work as a team independently by very highly aligned to the goals of your organization, all of those things combined? Is it it is a constant, you know, being on alert, that that is something that needs to be groomed within your teams, because they, you know, do you’re not coming in knowing that so you got to learn it. And yep, go ahead.

Melissa Reeve  19:47

So, I love what you were saying about teaching it early in the schools, even in colleges, getting people prepared to participate in an Agile team. What other guidance might you have for individuals who are trying to initiate a transformation in their organization?

Giannina Rachetta  20:10

I read this before, so it’s not, I’m not coming up with it on my own, but definitely getting the leadership on board. It is crucial. It’s definitely crucial. You have to have leadership on board. And in not only on board, but continued ongoing support. Because it because it is it is very, it’s very easy to go back to our old habits. And I’m talking from my marketer of, you know, 20 plus years have been been around doing what I’m doing. It’s very easy to go back and be like, Okay, well, let’s just, let’s just, you know, roll with the punches.

Melissa Reeve  20:50

Yeah, that’s really, it’s really great advice. And I totally agree with you, you not only need the leadership support in the beginning, and it can’t just be this hand waving. Here’s a check to do some training. You need that true involvement. And I really appreciate your sharing your insights with us today. And participating in the Marketing Agility podcast. .

• What led him to Agile Marketing
• The challenges of spreading Agile Marketing like IBM
• Real-world success stories
• His vision for what is next for Agile in marketing

Transcript

Frank Days  00:29

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the adoption and evolution of the use of agile marketing at IBM, along with Andrew’s point of view on the future of the movement, and his finally his involvement in the Agile Marketing Alliance.

Jim Ewel  00:45

Thanks, Frank. Andrew, can you share with us how you got started with Agile marketing? Where did you Where did you begin?

Andrew Burrows  00:53

So I should open with the caveat that I do not speak on behalf of IBM, know my opinions on my own. Agile marketing. So it’s quite serendipitous. I’m an accidental marketer. I used to play video games. And that’s how I actually got my approach into Agile. And through doing that pretty badly in the 2007-2008 time, I started to get involved with lots of user groups in the area and building connections that led to an opportunity at IBM and I’ll be honest, I was very naive. I had never worked at a company that size before. The idea that you could have a sub-organization of 5000 people was not really something that even entered my head. So I dived in to solve a problem and found myself in the marketing org.

Frank Days  01:40

At IBM, your colleague, Anthony Coppedge, credited you with quote, “single handedly building the construct for agile marketing at IBM.” Pretty bold statement. What inspired you to lead this initiative?

Andrew Burrows  01:54

You can tell he’s from marketing, right? Nobody at IBM does anything single handedly? I’d say that’s the same for any kind of big organization here. So he’s very, very, very generous with his praise, or his comment. You know, we had the opportunity within IBM, when Michelle Paluso became CMO to really try to do things differently. And to really drive an agile way of working. And we made a few decisions really early on this is this would have been in 2016 or 2017. A few decisions really early on about how we were going to do this that he’s probably alluding to. We said we were not going to be framework first, right?  That the people who would discover the best way of doing agile marketing will be the marketers who do it day in and day out. 

Andrew Burrows  02:49

An agile organization is one where people, in our case marketers, are exhibiting agile behaviors more frequently. And for us agile behaviors were the 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, right? Can you see and hear those things actually happening? So our role would be, you know, stewards for that kind of behavior change. So all of our approach, the way that we set about the teams, the way we set about enabling the organization, fundamentally came down to: What is the difference between a marketing organization and an agile marketing organization? And how do we help the organization grow into that way of being? 

Andrew Burrows  03:33

Another way we looked at it was to say, what is it that a marketing organization does, right? At its core, we believe a marketing organization is really almost behavioral science. But there are people out there who whether you’re B2B or B2C, there are people who may consider you, who may choose to buy from you, who may choose to deepen that relationship with you. So the goal of marketing is to increase the probability that they will decide to engage with you in that way. So clarity of outcome in our financial marketing organization would be how do we behave in accordance to our Agile values and principles and drive more of that kind of marketing outcome? So you end up focusing less on things like how many of our teams are keeping the stand ups within 15 minutes? And more things on like, how should a product marketer exhibit more agile behaviors? And how do you help somebody’s job change to embrace more of those kinds of approaches?

Jim Ewel  04:38

Andrew, I love the message. And I love that you started with kind of trying to create an agile culture mindset or whatever rather than with a framework. But IBM is huge, you know, 282,000 employees, I’m guessing five or six thousand people in marketing. How did you get the word out and change their mind? Setting the culture that large an organization?

Andrew Burrows  05:03

it’s incredibly challenging. I mean, I think one of the skills that you need to have working at a company that size is, is often just knowing who to talk to, right, when you have a problem. There’s just so many people and its so vast, when it came to what we were doing in marketing, we realized pretty quickly that in a really successful agile marketing organization, everybody knows their place. Everybody knows their role. Everyone understands how they contribute to the whole, people understand how the organization actually kind of works as a larger item. 

Andrew Burrows  05:37

So we had to one really work on how do we communicate the necessary information for people to operate within an agile organization? And we created brand new internal communication channels, right, and conduits for how we would establish and scale that. We also said, what are all the different roles in the organization? What does it mean for them to be agile? And how do we scale that approach, which requires not only some internal design work with the leadership around what it looks like, but then hitting the road over the next 18 month period of that transformation. We visited every single marketer, in person first in the US, and then globally, where we held two or three day experiential meetings and workshops, where people could come together to understand how they should actually do marketing within this kind of construct, we hit the road and met people face to face. And we established that core messaging across. We also had, which I will always say we were very fortunate in the way the CMO who saw herself as agile, and would talk about it constantly. So you have that constant drumbeat of a message of here’s our CMO, and she’s doing it right and senior leadership may be saying, we’re not sure on how we want to do it, but we want to do it. So we have that constant drumbeat, which really kind of, I would say opened many doors for us when it came to getting down with people and helping them actually embrace things.

Frank Days  07:09

We’ve had many conversations on the podcast over the years about bottom up versus top down kind of motivations. And it’s certainly, in some ways, I don’t want to say faster or easier to foment that change in the org if you get it from the top. But it’s certainly that kind of leadership really helps. So when you’re out there doing this right, and you’re out, spreading the word, what surprised you most?

Andrew Burrows  07:33

One of the things that surprised me the most was how open people would ultimately be to considering a different way of working. I had some hesitancy right? Starting this hour, I think to myself, there are probably people like who’s this guy, I’ve been at this company for 25 years, I’ve worked my way up the ladder, I’ve gotten to where I am today, by being quite successful, who are you to tell me that I need to work differently? And I would say that we found most people, the vast majority to be very open and receptive to hearing there’s potentially a better way of doing this, my ears open, tell me about it. Now, in those situations, you have to make sure that you can actually say something of value that is going to encourage those people to embrace you and take you seriously. But I found typically the people are very receptive to hearing about this and you know, regardless of tenure or experience, or seniority or anything,

Andrew Burrows  07:37

Can you share with our listeners a specific success story, you know, something that came about as a result of this?

Andrew Burrows  08:42

One of the ones that actually I would call out there, one particular favorite of mine, would be, you think of an organization for the large organizations or even midsize organizations, there’s a fair amount of collaboration with agencies that goes on in order to help get work done. There are a number of situations where the agency and IBM are maybe struggling to work together well. And at some stages, both pointing fingers at each other and saying you’re not agile enough, right? To help us to stay this work through. That what we kind of did in those situations was to acknowledge that you’ve got two groups who are working in their own way and doing their thing try to collaborate together to try this work forward. And then you’ve got the the kind of dark matter in between them, right? Perceptions of each other, how they’re working together, how they’re driving that through. 

Andrew Burrows  09:35

So we were able to work with teams and agencies and actually help them to start to gel and understand how to work better together through shared values and principles. And through these different approaches that would then drive to these more concrete outcomes, even to the point where we would ask them to, you know, analyze the other. We created personas of each group to help them understand the veterans and how they can work together. So you saw kind of efficiencies across all the different groups and different organizations and how they operate, that will kind of lead to better overall performance. 

Andrew Burrows  10:13

The other thing that’s really interesting was IBM did an internal engagement score every year. And engagement across marketing was not very good when we when we started. Now, I was always a big believer in I think Ken Schwaber said, years ago, Scrum teams are happier and more productive. One of the ways that we showed the measurement of agile was we were to say, our agility, we measured our own into internal agile health approach will make people happier, to the engagement survey and more productive through marketing performance. And they can say that we went from one of the lowest in the organization to, I think, the highest in the organization in terms of engagement in two and a half years, which was an absolutely massive claim. And I believe that a lot to do with the cultural and working improvements that agility brought.

Frank Days  11:04

Regular listeners are familiar with me saying that, in many cases, agencies, the process of creating a brief and a proposal and all the sort of waterfall artifacts that come with traditional marketing, a lot of what even people are taught in school, right is, first you write a brief, and then you put a price on the brief, and then you execute against that. And then you send in change orders and all the things that come along with that. But at the end of the day, you know, we’ve talked to Roland Smart and I, when we were doing the podcast for a while, talked to a number of people who had some very interesting and very innovative agency models, much like what you did. They break down those walls, and a lot of that overhead that comes from having that old model, which is really designed maybe to protect people’s margins and to protect people from bad behaviors.

Andrew Burrows  11:51

I mentioned earlier how it was serendipitous how I got into marketing, because I came in to solve the problem. Didn’t really think through the industry. The first problem was we have all these people from different agencies, how do we get them to work together?

Frank Days  12:06

Another thing that I’ve spoken at a number of agile events, and frequently someone will come up afterwards, maybe a software engineer or someone who works in engineering, someone who works in an engineering organization, technical product side, and they’ll say to me something like, is agile, just agile? I mean, can you share a little bit about your point of view of why Marketers need their own flavor of Agile?

Andrew Burrows  12:29

I actually think at its core, agile is just agile, right? I mean, the fundamental values and principles should align whether we’re applying it to software development, marketing or anything else, right? Because it’s still people. At the end of the day, I think agility is a people science. 

Andrew Burrows  12:48

I think that one of the benefits that you get around how do we reframe and point this toward an industry is that kind of an initial acknowledgment that industries are different, that there is some specialization in there and here’s how you can pass this by and apply it in a way that’s actually going to resonate and be effective in the industry that you’re part of. You know, I think a good tactical example of that would be during the Agile transformation at IBM. Midway through I made the decision to stop hiring external agile coaches, and instead, grow agile coaches from existing marketers who were showing that had an affinity for agility because I would find the external agile coaches that came in would typically come from other industries, and wouldn’t have the same knowledge or sometimes respect right before in the industry, like marketing, and would tend to bring with them a, it worked over here for this industry. So this is how I’m going to do it. Whereas if you found existing people who doesn’t work in marketing for years, to then put them in a position to say, how should you do this? Is this the right way of doing it, you get a completely different kind of thing on the other side. So at the end of the day, I believe an agile person is an agile person, regardless the industry they’re in, but how you put that into practice is going to vary by industry and how you understand and pass things is also going to vary.

Jim Ewel  14:22

I have to echo that because I found that marketers, you know, they have their own background, they have their own language. You know, if you look at the manifesto for Agile software development, it says something like working software over comprehensive documentation, right? I mean, what’s the marketer supposed to do with that? So I think you’re right, agile is agile, but we all have our own language and approach and, and all that sort of stuff and to talk to other people. You sort of have to walk in their shoes a little bit. What do you see as the future of Agile Marketing, you know, like, where are we now? And where are we going?

Andrew Burrows  15:03

I am so excited to be in marketing, right, and to be able to look at where we’re headed from industry  I will share this quite openly. Agile, and what Agile is, and all our other practices and approaches and definitions and thought leadership around it may have originated in software. But I believe the industry that is in the perfect position to truly be agile and take it to the next level is marketing. 

Andrew Burrows  15:30

If you think about the technological advancements in what’s happening as an industry, right, our closeness and proximity to the actual customer to be able to learn, right, and all the myriad channels that are now available, that you can do multivariate testing and A/B testing. I think about, you know, you’ve seen like Dal-E, right, and the AI-generated content and how there are other tools out there that will generate not only visual content, but written content to write think about how marketing can start to embrace a lot of that AI technology to do incredibly fast testing of the messaging and the narrative and the actual content that we’re using. And if you can get that kind of speed as an organization, where you’re able to test and understand your marketing content with an actual audience, you can actually then start to feed that thought knowledge back into the ultimate strategy for the organization right around your products and your targeting and your personas. Here are markets we haven’t even thought of, right, here are areas that we could actually get into, here are areas were falling behind. So marketing could really become a powerful engine, right? For an organization where the learning generated through marketing is as valuable as the actual marketing essence themselves. 

Andrew Burrows  16:49

There was a report from Cognizant company, I think it was a couple of years ago, where they looked at the marketing jobs of 2030. And it’s kind of fascinating because that you don’t see product market performance marketer, content marketer, events marketer. You see things like haptic engineers, customer journey Sherpa, right, and all these kinds of different job roles. AI bias ethic scientist, these different kinds of roles. And to me, this is so exciting, because it shows the kind of evolution that the entire industry is going through, and none of those roles, you can’t do those roles in a non-agile environment. Right? You can’t be a non-agile haptic engineer, right? These things are really tied through. So I think that we’re really pleased that we should be thought leaders in the Agile space by 2030, in my opinion.

Frank Days  17:47

I see that you were a pretty early member of the Agile Marketing Alliance, along with Jim and Melissa and a whole bunch of other folks, what motivated you to get involved in the organization?

Andrew Burrows  17:58

So I’m a huge believer in community. And that a strong community is like the tide that lifts all ships. If I could go back into tell a personal story very quickly, and segue into this. In my late teens, early 20s – so we’re talking around late 90s, early 2000s, I lived in the north of England, I was really into music in Manchester, we were into a lot of we used the term EMO bands. There were a lot of really good bands out there in the north of England, as well as across England. And I was obsessed with San Diego, right and Gravity Records. And I’d look for who’s playing in the Shaker and discover bands. And I’d trade vinyl records with the roadie from the Blood Brothers up in Seattle. Right and you had this amazing community. And it was on you, right? If you wanted to hear a kind of if you wanted to hear a band, you put the show up and you called the band and if you wanted to hear any kind of music, you made the band if you wanted certain kind of merch, you printed it right you put out records, you wrote scenes, it’s on you as a person in that kind of community. And it was really about you. There was no preeminence bands went on a pedestal. I remember, I was sharing a house with a friend who would put bands on in the area. And I get home from work and there would be a band like Darkest Hour, right, like just camped out in his living room because that’s where they were gonna stay and everyone’s just on the same level because we’re all part of the community. Then it started to grow. And it started to get really popular, which is awesome, because you want to see your friends do well, especially your artistic friends. And then at some point, it gets it changes. Right. So the term EMO starts to get used on the radio. And then it starts to describe bands that don’t, you don’t recognize right? Like Blink 182. And it starts to be kind of reappropriated and taken in a new and different direction that dissociates you from where you are.

Andrew Burrows  20:03

I think back to when I started getting into agile in like 2007-2008. And you guys were probably on it.  You had the, the Yahoo scrum mailing list by you, and you’d have people like Ron Jeffries, rubbing shoulders with people like me who’d read Scrum and XP from the trenches, and we’re now doing this thing and thought you could do this, and you had this amazing community. And sometimes people would rap you on the head with the back of the hand to get you back into shape, right. And the way you try to contrast story points across teams, but you have this amazing kind of community and this ethic about doing it well, and it being about the person. And at some point, again, I think we shifted as an organization. And we started putting processes on pedestals and certifications on pedestals and things like that. But I think we’ve got to take it back as a community. 

Andrew Burrows  20:11

The way in which we do Agile today, the way in which we think about it has not been designed to work in 2030 and 2035, with where marketing could potentially go. And it’s on us as a community to figure that out. And if we delegate responsibility of that, to existing frameworks, or organizations or something, then we’re not taking control of our own destiny and our own future, we’re not going to shape it the way we need to. So I’m a real believer in a true community of people like-minded people that want to make this really successful and push this industry where it wants to be, to be that kind of thought leadership, as we talked about. So when I heard you know, I have huge respect for Jim. Huge respect for Melissa, when I heard what they were doing, I wanted just to be involved in a little way to help because I anything that brings the community together and helps ameliorate what we do for the better future is something that I’d like to contribute to.

Andrew Burrows  20:52

What would you recommend to someone who’s getting started with agile marketing? Where do they start?

Andrew Burrows  21:10

That’s a great question. I think the first thing we should do is join the Agile Marketing Alliance community, right? Learn from everybody else and, and realize that other people are in the same boat as them and go over there to help him through. The second thing I would do is read everything you can follow as many people as you can on Twitter, right? Follow as many people as you can on LinkedIn, make those connections and see what other people are saying and doing and going through. And then the third one, would this just be to just start practicing, right? Look for something that works, or something that you think would work could be an existing framework like Scrum, maybe you say, we’re just going to do stand up, maybe you say, you know, here are 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, I’m gonna see if we can do three of them. And just stop and be open-minded about where we’re going to go right. And most importantly, in that bring people with you. Don’t point down to people don’t tell people what to do. Don’t mandate that we’re going to be agile. Ask people to go on a journey with you invite them to participate and learn together.

Frank Days  22:59

It’s always great to hear about the successes that people are having out there and the challenges and how people are trying to make it happen in the agile marketing space. I’d like to thank also our listeners for joining us today if you want to check out old episodes of The Marketing Agility Podcast, you can stop by Agilemarketingblog.com You can also, if you have a story to tell and want to share it with our audience, we have a form on the site fill it out. Reach out to me to find out if it makes sense. We are also still on iTunes. The feed is still feeding. Stop there. Subscribe, listen to it on your favorite mobile device. And finally, visit the Agile Marketing Alliance website. Jim Melissa and Andrew and others have done an amazing job of collating some really powerful array of assets. Finally, thank you for joining today and please stay agile.

• What motivated them to start this organization?

• Where is the group in its evolution?

• What is next for the group?

• How can people get involved?

Enjoy the conversation and thank you for listening. 

This episode features Justin Zimmerman of RedX—you may recognize that name since he’s been on the podcast before. We’re checking back in with him to see how his agile journey has progressed and scaled. He talks about the importance of training and onboarding in the scaling process. He gets into what they call a “start right” process designed to make sure that new teams get launched in a way that increases their likelyhood of success over the longer term. Listen closely for his comments about why he avoids using the term “teams.” And, of course, he talks about how they’ve applied and scaled agile methods. 

We hope you enjoy the show! 

This episode features Kiley Vorreiter, a creative program manager at Vrbo (formerly knowm HomeAway). Though Kiley does not have a technical background, she’s completed an advanced Scrum certification and has been putting it to work at Vrbo. Kiley is in what she refers to as the “messy middle” of scaling agile. 

We hope you enjoy the session.

This episode features Kiley Vorreiter, a creative program manager at Vrbo (formerly knowm HomeAway). Though Kiley does not have a technical background, she’s completed an advanced Scrum certification and has been putting it to work at Vrbo. Kiley is in what she refers to as the “messy middle” of scaling agile. 

We hope you enjoy the session.

 In this session Brian touches on the role of:

• scrum of scrum
• an agile leadership guild
• agile methods (both Scrum and Kanban)

Thanks for listening and share you comments below!

In this conversation we set the stage by talking about the role of frameworks, how they complement and extend agile methods, and how they put their own framework to use at Scaled Agile. If you like what you hear you can hear more from Melissa on the SAFe Business Agility Podcast.

Inspired by today’s trend towards seasonal releases and endless binge watching, we have decided to share the next wave of Marketing Agility podcasts as a “series”. Over the next month and a half we will be releasing weekly episodes exploring strategies for “Scaling Agile in Marketing”.

This season’s guests include:

• Melissa Reeve and Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile 

• Elissa Fink former CMO of Tableau 

• Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas

• Brian Homsi of Bose

• Justin Zimmerman of RedX

• Kiley Vorreiter of VRBO

We also created a short teaser with highlights from the coming season.

We hope you enjoy and please stay agile!

– Roland and Frank

ps. Let us know what you think of the new logo and theme music:-)

We talk with Bill Cushard, the author of The Art of Agile Marketing about his experience implementing agile as the marketing director at ServiceRocket. Bill’s background is in content marketing but he’s gone well beyond that in his current role. He’s one of the few marketers that we’ve spoken with who’s been using Jira to manage his marketing team. In fact, the sub-title of his book is A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence.  

He’s articulate, a pragmatist, and someone to follow.  Give the show a listen:

In this episode we talk with Ian Lee, the national digital transformation leader for Deloitte Digital, and Derek Derouin who serves as a manager in Deloitte’s digital marketing transformations group. I was fortunate to meet Derek at the RDV_Marketing event in Montreal back in March and have been looking forward to bringing him onto the podcast.

For our regular listeners, you’ll know that we’ve had only a handful of guests from the largest consulting companies—though I’ve had more interaction through my work at Oracle and while doing research for my book—so this is episode will bring an under represented perspective to the table.

I was impressed with the depth of engagement that Deloitte is driving when it comes to supporting Agile transformation. In short, it’s not just about strategic consulting focused on getting CMO buy-in. They certainly do that but they’re also engaging on the ground level training teams in Agile marketing and driving adoption from the bottom up. They clearly have some valuable experience to share … even if they are leading the pack of large consulting firms, this conversation serves as another validation that broader adoption is coming. Give it a listen!

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 In this episode we talk with Justin Zimmerman who leads the content team at The RedX a company that develops software to support real-estate professionals. This is Justin’s first foray into adopting Agile—like many marketers he’s educating himself and learning on the job. We’ll hear how he’s approaching adoption, what’s working, and what’s not.

We were interested in hearing how he scoped the teams work based on words written per iteration. He also, shared some interesting insights on how he won executive buy-in by representing their previous work in the context of Agile boards. This episode offers inspiration for those content marketers that are getting started. If you like what you hear, check out a recent post by Justin entitled The 2 Metrics For New Agile Content Teams.

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This episode features a conversation with Nicci Shaw of Intelligent Demand, a full-service integrated marketing agency. She’s a Scrum certified marketer who spent time at web-design shops and has significant experience working with technical teams. Like many marketers, that was her introduction to Agile. We don’t hear from that many agency leaders so if you’re at an agency or work with them this conversation should be of interest.

Intelligent Demand’s clients typically do not have an Agile practice in-house already, so Nicci talks about how to introduce Agile without presenting it as “process change” or outside the scope of the engagement. Some of the other topics we touch on include:

• How to prevent the theory from getting in the way of practice
• How her firm mixes elements of Agile and Lean
• How they transitioned to cross-functional teams as part of their Agile adoption
• How to balance planned and unplanned work

Enjoy the conversation!

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In this session we’re thrilled to be joined by Ferdinand Goetzen who serves as the head of growth at Recruitee. Ferdinand is based in the Netherlands but came up working for a number of companies across Europe including The Growth Tribe Academy. In this session, he speaks about how his Agile journey was inspired by The Lean Startup and our good friend Eric Reis. Today his focus is on fueling growth through experiments and testing that are coordinated with both product and marketing teams. Listen in to learn about:

• How Recruitee has adopted some of the structures from the Spotify Model — and, If that peaks your interest you should check out our previous interview with Jonathan Rasmusson from Spotify.
• How focusing on growth has allowed Ferdinand to be a bit more prescriptive that more broadly focused marketers might be.
• How he’s been handling significant growth within his own team.

Finally, here are some great resources to check out that Ferdinand shared after our conversation.

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In this session we’re thrilled to bring on another marketer from CA Technologies, Cameron van Orman is the Sr Vice President of Product Marketing. In this role he oversees product marketing for the entire CA portfolio and reports into the CMO and the Chief Product Officer. In the past, we’ve spoken with people on Cameron’s team so this is an opportunity to up-level the conversation and understand the perspective of a senior executive.

In this session, we touch on a range of topics related to the challenges of scaling Agile. Listen in to get a glimpse into:

• How CA’s transformation was influenced by their acquisition of Rally (now CA Agile Central)
• The role that the Scaled Agile Framework has played (SAFe)
• How scaling on-boarded non-collocated teams and what they did about it
• What drove CA to be a bit less prescriptive over time as the team grew from 30 to over 100
• The need to get middle management involved

And if you’re looking to dive in even deeper check out CA’s great content series on Agile Management.

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 In this episode we talk with Rachel Krug who leads the marketing function at Right Networks, a firm that helps companies bring their accounting systems to the cloud. Rachel was familiar with Agile from her work as a product manager at Constant Contact but found herself adapting Agile for the marketing function in her current role.

She manages a small cross-functional team including a content lead, field marketer, marketing ops lead, and a partnerships leader. Plus, like most marketers at smaller firms, she relies on outside contractors and service providers. When Rachel arrived the team was operating in a reactive fashion without a rigorous operations or planning practice. In this session, she talks about introducing Agile with a handful of rituals and how those have made a huge impact on how the team functions and the results they produce. Listen in to learn about why she focused measurement and tracking out of the gate and how Agile later influenced a major product launch.

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 In this episode we welcome back an early guest from the show, Kirstin Falk who serves as the managing director of brand innovation and social at Charles Schwab. When we originally spoke with Kirsten she was leading the marketing function at Red Brick Media.

In this episode Kirstin speaks about why she did not introduce Agile right away, in favor of deeply understanding the endemic culture at Schwab. In fact, it took a full year before she started introducing the approach. Four years later they are still at the beginning of the Agile journey but she’s seen significant mindset change. Where there was resistance previously, she sees more awareness and significant demand for Agile.  In fact, Agile training is now available to all marketing employees.

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 In this episode we talk with Mathew Sweezey an author and speaker who serves as a marketing insights leader at Salesforce. Mathew joined Salesforce via their acquisition of Pardot, a marketing automation service, where he was introduced to Agile through a close working relationship with the development team there.

In this session, he talks about how Agile is becoming the default operating system for marketing—though he acknowledges that many marketers are still not yet aware of an Agile Marketing movement. In fact, he shares that his own experience with Agile started before his team called it Agile.

Mathew is a content marketing expert to follow—he educates internal teams, clients and prospects about Agile marketing and marketing modernization. Enjoy! Also, in this sessions, Mathew mentions a film called Art&Copy that’s worth watching.

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For this episode we reached out to Claire Drumond who is a content strategist and product marketer at Atlassian.  In this episode we touch on:

• How Claire settled into a blended method between Kanban and Scrum (Scrumban)
• The degree to which she iterates on content
• How she uses Hip Chat (messaging) in concern with task management (Jira)
• and how she views her content as a product

Fair disclosure, we’ve been Atlassian users over the years so bring that as context to our conversation. We look forward to bringing Claire back in 6 months or so after Atlassian has done more to integrate Trello into their portfolio. At present on the most common things that we hear from marketers is that Jira is built for technical users rather than business users. Presumably Trello will help address this but that discussion was a bit premature for this episode.

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 In this episode we talk with Bryan Semple who serves as the GM and CMO at SmartBear (just acquired by Francisco Partners)—Bryan has a lot to say about scaling Agile at a mid-market company that’s completed many acquisitions. Actually, the fact that they’ve done some many acquisitions led to his insights around why he sees cross-functional teams as imperative. In this episode you’ll hear about:

• How Bryan transitioned from functional silo (shared services) to distributed resourcing (x-functional teams)
• Some key differences between engineering and marketing teams that impact Agile method
• How SmartBear connects Agile planning to strategic planning

Bonus, check out a couple of blog posts on Agile Marketing from Bryan.

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 In this episode we’re expanding our horizons a bit by interviewing Marina Simonova about her work bringing the Agile approach to marketing and sales teams. Marina is a Moscow-based Agile Coach with Agile Space and has worked with more Agile sales teams than anyone else we’ve met. She’s a certified coach and Scrum Master who has found techniques for bridging the marketing / divide with Agile practices.
Marina’s recent article 10 Steps of Agile transformation of sales is a great primer on why Agile is a good fit for sales, how to get started, and what some of the most common challenges area. It fascinating to hear from a practitioner who is coming to Agile from the sales side first. In this conversation we discuss:

• Why sales may be a more natural fit for Agile than marketing because of it’s focus on time-boxed iterations.
• How Agile practice can help align marketing and sales
• How combined sales and marketing teams are able to outperform traditional teams

Note, while Marina speaks English she chose to work with her colleague Julia Tegel who served as a translator for this episode.

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In this conversation we really delve into operational aspects of Agile—Mark has a proper enterprise context that means integrating many systems that support his practice. Thus the conversation covers both marketing practices but also some of the platforms that support the practices. Mark’s team relies heavily on Jira which is interesting because many marketing teams initially struggle with more robust solutions like Jira and prefer lighter-weight applications like Asana or LeanKit. There’s some fascinating bits in here about how he’s customized workflows to support his team practice.

We also touch on why Mark’s team gravitated to Scrumban and how they’ve organized themselves with respect to aspects of the supply chain he manages. Give it a listen—as always we want your feedback! Let us know how we’re doing, what questions we should be asking, and where to take the show next.

In this conversation we hear from Jonathan about:

• how Spotify leverages Agile and how their practice continues to evolve
• where the current state of Agile adoption is in context of the larger adoption/maturity cycle
• why Agile transformation is so hard—especially for established companies
• how Agile is truly an empowerment model

During our conversation I brought up the Cynefin framework—here’s a great overview of this decision making framework.

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David has worked as a graphic designer, UX designer, art director and creative director for over 17 years. At Workfront, he leads the creative services team (web, print, and video) as the Creative Director. Prior to Workfront, Dave held leadership roles at Omniture, RiSER Media, Brigham Young University, and Adobe. David’s background is focused on design so this conversation will be particularly relevant for marketers running creative teams or who are within the agency context. David touches on a range of topics including:

• how Agile has helped his team more effectively manage the stream of incoming work requests
• the importance of work estimation
• why he’s chosen to focus on Scrum
• how WorkFront integrates traditional workflows with Agile

Follow David’s latest on Twitter at @davidlesue and visit WorkFront for a set Agile resources. 

Finally, here’s a link to Stately Type the t-shirt company that David runs on the side. Sadly we didn’t have time to ask him about this business … next time!
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In this conversation, we discuss:

• How Kanban and Scrum differ
• Why marketers struggle with Scrum
• What the advantages of a continuous deployment model are

It’s a fun conversation and one that we’ll likely have to continue in another session with Denise. In the meantime, check out two content pieces that will help you take your practice to the next level:  LeanKit’s Lean Business Report and their Kanban Roadmap.

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He’s seen enterprise teams try to make the transition from projects to products—in the marketing world we’ve referred to this as the transition from campaigns to programs—and he’s working on a platform to help enterprises be successful with Agile.

In this session we touch on some familiar themes such as how to keep a large number of implementation teams in sync and what it takes to keep these same teams in alignment with executive led goals. Towards the middle of the conversation we zero in on a discussion about how product management and marketing can use Agile as a platform for alignment and collaboration. And Steve shares his thoughts on the differences he’s seen ramping up product/engineering teams with Agile vs marketing teams.

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This conversation includes a case study on the work that Meghan has done bringing Agile to a large enterprise that has had as many as 17 Agile teams working in parallel in the marketing function. Listen in to learn about:

• Why Agile leaders must have “fortitude” to drive transformation
• How outside consultants have played a critical role in adoption
• What makes for a successful pilot
• Why she pulled back from 17 smaller Agile teams to 5 larger teams

If you find this conversation useful please let us know on Twitter @rsmartly and @tangyslice. And, we want to hear your stories so reach out to us about those as well!

• Using Agile to manage what can feel like an overwhelming amount of incoming marketing requests
• How they are developing an Agile implementation from the bottom up and top down.
• How to implement Agile with highly distributed teams and in a silo’d context.

• How Swift Kanban has expanded across business functions
• How it integrates with other marketing tools (e.g. Salesforce)
• What marketing analytics it provides
• And, how it supports a range of Agile methods

For a first conversation with a tooling vendor this was a very informative discussion. It certainly validates that trend that we’re seeing with respect to marketers adopting Agile. If you’re interested in testing out Swift Kanban they have a free trial on the website, lots of documentation, video tutorial, and even a user community.

One topic that came up in this conversation speaks to a couple recurring questions—how to balance one’s Agile practice with work that either conforms better to a Waterfall approach or that is unexpected. Most Agile practitioners will, of course, immediately recognize that unexpected requests represent an opportunity to revisit the backlog to discuss whether or not the new request trumps what’s in process. But those pragmatists out there will also recognize that approach does not always work—especially when the requester is not an adherent of the Agile process.  Over the past few episodes we’ve heard about a few different approaches that can help:

1. Set expectations with your team that some percentage of their time will be dedicated to Agile and the rest will be Waterfall.
2. Reserve story points within each sprint to accommodate unexpected requests.
3. Establish a stand along Agile team that is focused only on unexpected requests.

These are all mechanisms to support resiliency. While they all will add some overhead—or inefficiency—they have the potential to make you much more successful when it comes to making friends and influencing people within your company.

Finally here’s some information from Peter on a management framework that we had not heard of before called 4DX (four disciplines of execution). The associated principles are:

1. Focusing on the Wildly Important
2. Acting on Lead Measures
3. Keeping a Compelling Scoreboard
4. Creating a Cadence of Accountability

Point # 4 breaks into:

•   Create a rhythm of frequent periodic meetings
•   Same time every week
•  Report on commitments, review and update scoreboards. make new commitments

It makes utilizing Agile tools very natural to implement 4DX. Or conversely, it makes 4Dx very agile-like. I recommend reading The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals to learn more. Or visit: http://the4disciplinesofexecution.com/

In this episode we revisit some of the topics that from our earlier podcast including:

• Is there more tolerance today for Agile experiments that fail—in the service of getting to success?
• How has your approach to driving adoption internally evolved?
• How are you tailoring your Agile method to different parts of your team?

Jascha is a very thoughtful guy that managed to make this episode both philosophically and pragmatically inspiring. Give it a listen … I think you’ll agree that we need to bring Jascha back before another five years goes by!

Scott is a self-taught Scrum Master who speaks to how they’ve adapted their Agile to his company and culture. Beyond Americanizing the “scrum” as a “huddle”, he speak to how he’s integrated some practices from his management consulting days, such as Rockefeller Habits, into their method.

In this episode we discuss:

• How to adapt Agile to your company, team, project and culture
• How Agile can support demand oriented programs
• How long it takes to get to a stable practice from Sprint 0

Thanks for listening and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

Part of what got left on the cutting room floor from our last conversation was the observation that not everything can be represented as a traditional user story—in this episode we dig into:

• what are the limits of the traditional user story?
• what distinguishes testing oriented user stories (or tasks)?
• what types of tests are there (discovery vs optimization)?
• and, how should we organize and related different kinds of user stories to each other

Along the way, Jim shared some fascinating thoughts about how traditional user stories are focused on the user’s conscious needs and desires but that tests tend to be more focused on the unconscious. Pretty heady stuff that I suspect we’ll want to revisit with other guests. Jim also made reference to:

• Startup Metrics for Pirates
• Sean Ellis ICE model (included in this deck)
• The SMART Goals framework

Thanks for listening to the show and we want your feedback! Shoot us a note on Twitter @rsmartly and @tangyslice.

Few companies have this level of executive buy-in, dedicated Agile coaches, and a real track record under their belts. In this conversation we take on:

• How—and when—to leverage an external coaches to support adoption and scale
• How simultaneous top-down and bottom-up coaching accelerates Agile adoption
• How the role of the coach changes with implementation teams and executives
• How long it really takes to get a team to a high-level of Agile capability

And there’s a lot more here, we could have kept talking for another hour or two!

Bonus: Here’s a slideshare with VistaPrint’s interpretation of the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

[slideshare id=63918091&doc=vistaprintsupdatedagilemarketingvaluesandprinciples-160711165556]

He’ll tell us how he used agile techniques to drive business transformation at a big company, in a dynamic industry and how he is dealing with future uncertainties.

“Uncertainty” is the theme of this podcast, and we’ll be considering questions such as:

• How does Agile help manage uncertainty?
• How can marketing leadership embrace uncertainty?
• How do different parts of the business adapt their approach in the face of varying degrees of uncertainty?
• And, will Rob answer any questions about the EMC acquisition before the deal is sealed? (we promised not to get Rob in any hot water)

Data is at the heart of what makes the Agile approach work, so we hope you’ll take away some ideas about how to engage more effectively with the data scientists in your organization. If you don’t yet have a data science practice, we hope that Rob’s insights might help you get started.

To set the stage Peter shared some background on his transition into a marketing role—from a more engineering oriented role. Overall his approach is more prescriptive than many of the marketers that we’ve spoken with though his team has evolved from Scrum to Kanban over time (Kanban being less prescriptive). Peter shares a bit about a failed attempt to implement Scrum and references the well known Chickens and Pigs story to highlight the challenges of implementing Agile across functional teams.

The conversation then moves on to Agile measurement and how he’s implemented measurement in the context of a team that he’s built from scratch. The conversation touches on:

• Estimating stories, scope and business value
• Measuring Average story/task scope
• Measuring Work-In-Process (WIP) and setting WIP limits
• Measuring Cycle-Time / Velocity

Have a listen and we look forward to your feedback. Reach out with questions and comments to @rsmartly and @tangyslice.

This is Part I of a two part conversation with Charlie. We got so focused on the following questions that we simply ran out of time to dive into the case study that Charlie wanted to share:

• What’s the best way to set up marketing epics?
• Just how granular should user stories or tasks be?
• How can marketers get better at estimation?
• And, what are the pros and cons of virtual vs dedicated Agile teams?

In the coming weeks we’ll have Charlie back on the podcast to talk about an ambitious company wide roll out of Agile. Stay tuned that’s going to be a fun conversation. In the meantime, we’d love your feedback on the show!

Part of the conversation references Roland’s recent blog post entitled  Combating Agile Objections: It Doesn’t Scale! At a high-level we discuss:

• How frameworks for scaling Agile might facilitate executive alignment
• What marketers can learn from developer oriented frameworks such as the Scaling Agile Framework (SAFe), which seems too prescriptive for marketers.
• How Google’s OKR framework might serve as a marketer friendly (less prescriptive) approach to facilitate alignment.

Bonus: Here’s a link to the Harvard Business Review article that’s mentioned in this session: Embracing Agile.

Thanks for listening and as always, stay Agile!

Jim’s no stranger to The Marketing Agility Podcast, he was first on the show back in 2012. We had such a great conversation that we’re already planning to have him back in a month to discuss applying Agile to the buyer’s journey.

In this session we discuss how marketers can interpret the canonical user story framework: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>” and we go on to tackle these questions:

• What makes a great marketing user story?
• How should marketers approach user stories vs epics?
• What’s the role of personas in user story development?
• Why is estimating stories so hard for marketers?

Thanks for listening to the show and we want your feedback! Shoot us a note on Twitter @rsmartly and @tangyslice.

Bonus—Jim is a music aficionado and is always sharing new and interesting stuff with us. Here are six selections that are worth a listen:

1. I really like Death Cab for Cutie’s last album, Kintsugi, especially the song Black Sun.  Another beautiful song that comes out of heartbreak.  It’s over a year old now, but still on my playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTbVIfqeDq0
2. I’m a sucker for classic jazz crooners, and one of the best currently performing is Cecile McLorin Salvant.  She’s the nearest thing we have today to Billy Holiday or Sarah Vaughan.  Listen to her performance of “Stepsister’s Lament” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wjDtT4Dr44
3. Ibeyi is a French-Cuban duo consisting of twin sisters, Lisa and Naomi.  It’s slow to build, but I like their song River https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRAPIwsS5I
4. I saw Sean Rowe live about a year ago, and I don’t think he gets enough recognition.  Try Shine My Diamond Ring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZQYML9Wf6k
5. I love musicals and one of the ones I grew up with was West Side Story.  There’s a relatively new recording of it by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Orchestra that is just fantastic.  You can hear every singer in space, and the performance is just spectacular.  There’s a short intro video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGz0PkBXJxw
6. And finally the reference to “I fell from the sky” is from a Cult song called “Love Removal Machine” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vneFS48Z4Ws

In this session we return to questions about:

• What the user story looks like in the context of content marketing?
• How do iterate on content—and prevent creating new content all the time?
• How do you slice and dice content for a range of channels?
• How should you think about content measurement?
• And how do you set the balance between demand vs nurture content?

If you’re a content marketer exploring Agile this is a must listen. And if you want more about Agile from Andrea check out: The Agile Marketing Styles ebook for subscribers to MarketerGizmo, 

He also made mention of the The Pomodoro Technique which will give you an excuse to buy a tomato shaped timer. This technique fits well with the Agile practice of breaking up projects and teams into smaller freestanding units.

From there we delved into the topic of how to involve sales in the Agile practice, how sales can support prototyping, testing, and iteration in general. And finally, this brought up to the topic of account based marketing—an approach that requires strong alignment between marketing, sales, customer support and customer success.

As always, we hope you enjoy the show—please let us know @rsmartly and @tangyslice.

Our conversation with Jeff is part of a series of conversations that we’ve been having with Agile practitioners on the Agency side. We’ve found that agency (and consultancy) leaders can generally speak to their experience working working in a broader range of contexts. Our conversation certainly continues that trend and even surfaced an interesting new pricing model associated with agency engagements—pay per sprint.

For those content marketers listing to the podcast we also talk a bit about applying Agile to content marketing which is the subject of Jeff’s book.  Thanks for listening and enjoy the episode!

Though we didn’t have time touch on this in the conversation, there have been some interesting contributions to this conversation from Spotify lately. Here’s the first of two videos from Spotify on how they approach scaling Agile:

And here’s a great paper on Scaling Agile @Spotify. We hope you enjoy the episode. In the meantime, if you’re a regular listener consider writing us a review on iTunes. And, if you’ve got an enterprise story to tell we’d love to hear from you!

Bence is part of the marketing operations group and was tasked with modernizing the marketing database and making it available to internal groups as a service. This involved upgrading legacy platforms, integrating many data sources, layering business intelligence services on top of the database and developing APIs so that services within the company (i.e. websites, marketing automation, etc) could query the database in real-time to personalize customer experience.

Bence shares how he started an Agile team from scratch, how he won the support of executive management, and some of the challenges of working at a large enterprise. We hope you enjoy the episode. In the meantime, if you’re a regular listener consider writing us a review on iTunes. And, if you’re applying Agile on the agency side, we’d love to hear from you.

If you’re interested in learning more about Scott and Agile marketing, consider attending his upcoming conference, MarTech SF which takes place in San Francisco on March 21st and 22nd. Register with code “MarTechSpeaker” to get 15% off. Roland will also be speaking at this conference as part of a panel that will feature Scott, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff—CMO at Mozilla, Barre Hardy—Associate Partner at CMG, and David Lesué—Creative Director at Workfront. And if you can’t make the event stay tuned to our podcast as we’ll host deeper conversations with each of these folks.

In the Meantime, check out the episode, and if you enjoy it please consider writing us a review on iTunes. And, if you’re applying Agile on the agency side, we’d love to hear from you.

This conversation brought us into some new territory because most of the marketers that we bring on the podcast are on the brand side. Currently Andy’s work exposes him to a broad range of brands because Havas Edge is a direct response focused agency. And, he continues to work with companies in highly regulated industries (pharma, finance, etc)—where Agile has been proven as an effective approach to drive transformational change.

Andy share some great insights into how Agile can be applied in the context of direct response programs and within the context of an agency practice. Check out the episode, and if you enjoy it please consider writing us a review on iTunes. And, if you’re applying Agile on the agency side, we’d love to hear from you.

Ian brings a broad range of experience with Agile to the conversation having worked on a product for highly creative users (Avid) and now for one empowering business users. What connects these companies is their particular focus on facilitating collaboration for end users. Ian shares insights about how helping customers collaborate informed his approach to Agile—as a collaboration framework— within his team.

Check out the episode, and if you enjoy it please consider writing us a review on iTunes. It makes a huge difference.

From there Mike discusses how his experience at Ready Talk compares to working at Avaya. There’s also a brief discussion of a recent article from CMO.com entitled: Mohanbir Sawhney: Why marketers are still struggling to adopt Agile. In this piece Sawhney, the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology at the Kellogg School of Management, talks about the unique challenges of making Agile work within the enterprise. It’s a good backdrop for this conversation because of Mike’s move from a startup to a 12,000+ person company.

Mike shares tips on how to get started with Agile marketing, just how dogmatic to be when it comes to Agile, and how to work alongside waterfall projects.

Check out the episode, and if you enjoy it please consider writing us a review on iTunes. It makes a huge difference on the platform.

Like many Agile marketers, Richard comes from a technical background; as a former web developer he happily tries to embrace the idea that “you don’t know anything without data to support it.” He shares insights about how and where Agile has succeeded and failed in his group, how the acquisition if Intonis impacted his practice, and how Agile integrates with his planning practice.

In the conversation, Roland refers to a 2014 interview with Richard in Openview Labs which serves as a backdrop for where Richard’s practice was about a year earlier.

The panel included me (Frank Days) as the moderator along with:

Lorita Ba, Director of Marketing, NuoDB
Jeff Dale, Email Markeing Manager, Intronis
Sriram Rajagopalan, PhD, Vice President, PMO, Physicians Interactive

This was a joint event with the Boston Sales and Marketing Innovators Group.

I hope you enjoy and leave comments with any addition questions or ideas for future meetups.

Frank Days

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Note: This podcast was recorded in the winter of 2012.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

Listen to more Agile Marketing interviews by checking out the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

• What kinds of agency projects are best suited for agile marketing?
• Are creatives more or less able to be agile?
• What types of clients are better suited to run agile marketing projects?

Check out all of our Marketing Agility podcasts on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.

***Follow our ongoing conversation about agile marketing by subscribing to the Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes.