Use These 3 Agile Fixes To Keep Your Marketing Operations Humming

Use These 3 Agile Fixes To Keep Your Marketing Operations Humming

Common dysfunctions in marketing ops

In the 2023 State of Agile Marketing Report (gated), the most popular priorities for marketers this year include:

• Producing higher quality content (40%)
• Prioritizing the most important work (40%)
• Better aligning with organizational goals and objectives (39%)
• Improving the customer experience (38%)
• Increasing the productivity of our marketing departments (36%)

Also making the list: increasing employee satisfaction and morale (35%), releasing marketing work more quickly (32%), and changing direction in response to feedback (18%).

Improve critical operations

Agile marketing can point you toward the most important and impactful operational improvements. The State of Agile Marketing report identifies the three most common techniques used by marketing departments – daily standup (42%), digital Kanban board (36%), and sprint/iteration planning (35%).

Daily standup

The 15-minute strategy session keeps everybody on the same page for 24 hours. Ideally, you hold them every day and discuss only three things:

1. What have you worked on in the past 24 hours that contributed to the team’s success?
2. What will you work on in the next 24 hours that will contribute to the team’s success?
3. What’s getting in your way?

It sounds simple, but it takes a lot of discipline to hold these conversations to those three topics and stick to the 15-minute time.

If you get it right, standups keep work visible, help team members sidestep last-minute requests that derail mission-critical work, and point to places where team members can help each other to get work over the finish line.

Digital Kanban board

Kanban boards can get more complicated and customized, but a simple one is usually your best bet to get started. By visualizing the goals, the board allows the team to get what’s in their heads and inboxes to a place where everyone can see it.

Good leaders don’t use these boards to micromanage their team’s work but to help team members say “no” to work that doesn’t add value to the business or customers.

Sprint or iteration planning

Sprints are short work cycles, usually two or three weeks, that allow teams to plan, execute, and deliver small chunks of important work. It helps the team avoid missing deadlines or sacrificing quality just to get something out the door.

Also known as iterations, sprints work well to allow clear moments about when to pivot based on incoming data or shifting priorities. You aren’t locked into a giant plan for the next 12 months. Sprints let you adjust what you’re working on closer to real-time.

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