In a rapidly evolving market, traditional marketing approaches often fall short. To stay competitive, many organizations are embracing Agile methodologies. Here’s a concise four-step process to build an Agile marketing organization and design effective Agile teams. Let’s delve in.
4 Steps for Building an Agile Marketing Organization
Here are the four steps you can take to build an agile marketing organization.
1. Make the mindset agile
The first step to introducing any change is to be mentally prepared for it. This is the most important step as if your employees are not ready, you cannot change anything in the system. A firm foundation is required for building a new organization. All employees and leaders should be on the same page and everyone in marketing must understand agility as a concept to help support it in a true sense. This step also includes getting familiar with other concepts complimenting agile such as the theory of Constraints and Design Thinking.
2. Test the practices
Once the understanding of agile is clear to everyone, you can start applying agile practices in the organization. Establish actual practices like daily standup and backlog refinement. When the purpose is clear, the understanding to do the right thing becomes clearer. By testing and evolving practices, you can understand what practices to choose that is the most effective and avoid any expensive mistakes.
3. Create the scaling plan
No change can be incorporated without a plan. For scaling, you need a roadmap to keep track of the progress and ensure you’re heading in the right direction and at the right pace. Regardless of the number of people in the team you’re working with, a roadmap is essential to guide your scaling effort. Start with a primary group. The framework should be designed to be modular so you can add more groups easily and steadily as you go. This is more effective than trying to transition hundreds of people at the same time.
4. Scale smartly
Start implementing the plan by following agile principles of inspecting and adapting. Keep monitoring the agreed-upon metrics regularly and adjust the plan as you keep learning how Agile will work for your marketing organization. Intelligently scaling ensures that you don’t make expensive mistakes as you tread smartly towards a new big change.
Designing an Agile Marketing Team
Here are some important points for designing agile marketing teams.
- Marketing teams should be stable and set up properly as they are the building blocks for scaled agile marketing
- Don’t structure the marketing teams around short-term projects
- Keep the teams small with three to nine members excluding supporting team members such as the Agile lead
- The marketing owner should act as a link between the marketing team and the rest of the organization. The job of an MO here is to ensure that the agile content aligns with the goals of the organization
- The agile lead supports the team members by keeping agile working on the team, removing impediments, and managing the team’s work. The AL is also responsible for escalating issues up the chain when scaling and joining larger groups in a Scaled Daily Standup meeting and sharing impediments and solutions with other teams
- Agile marketing teams should be stable, self-managing and organizing, cross-functional, and aligned around a shared goal
