Andrea Fryrear is CEO and cofounder of AgileSherpas and the author of the Agile Marketing Credo.
In recent years, agile marketing has exploded in popularity outside the software development space, and many organizations have rushed to adopt it without really understanding it. The result has been teams that adopted a few agile practices but never really adopted the culture and mindset necessary to unlock its full benefits.
The result for many companies? Agile is broken and marketers are suffering the effects.
But at the same time, I believe real and effective agile practices have never been more important. Marketers in particular can use agile methodologies to thrive in a world where the ground underneath them often feels more like quicksand than anything else.
Why Agile Marketing Is Failing So Many Organizations
Let’s take a classic example to really understand the problem. You have a marketing team that’s decided to adopt agile practices to become more competitive. They start using a kanban board and holding daily standups.
A few months later, the kanban board is consistently clogged with overdue tasks. Standups have become a dull chore that team members skip whenever possible. Work still feels chaotic. Everyone is so focused on tackling the backlog that they barely know what marketing’s goals are. What happened?
In reality, agile marketing never failed here because it was never really implemented. It’s like you took someone who doesn’t know how to drive, gave them a car and expected them to compete in a race. When they failed, you blamed the car.
Let’s take a closer look at common aspects of this problem:
• Quantifying ROI
Many organizations assume that the purpose of agile practices is to become more efficient and do more work. In reality, agile is about doing the right work at the right time—in other words, prioritizing work that matters instead of focusing on volume.
When teams get fixated on efficiency or productivity, they can end up buried under a constant avalanche of tasks while still struggling to quantify the ROI of those tasks. That results in a lot of frustration. After all, who wants to work themselves to the bone only to be left wondering what the result was?
• External Dependencies
When organizations hand teams some agile tools and practices without really considering whether their existing team structures are appropriate, you can get issues like dependency loops: Teams struggle to plan, prioritize and deliver work because they’re constantly held back by unpredictable external dependencies.
I’ve noticed that this is only getting worse as new technologies like AI become more integral to the work we do. Teams often need to work with a higher number of marketing teams, in addition to other functions like tech and compliance, creating more opportunities for unpredictability and delays.
• Order-Takers
The overall result is that marketers can feel more like order-takers than strategic partners. Their stakeholders tell them what to do and how to do it, and that work just gets tossed on the ever-growing backlog. Marketing isn’t empowered to push back on work that doesn’t contribute to their strategic priorities, and they may not even know quite what their strategic priorities are. This can drag down team morale as workloads increase and the work itself feels increasingly meaningless.
A Different Kind Of Agile Marketing
To be fair, agile wasn’t originally designed for something as chaotic as marketing. Software development in the 1990s and 2000s was not changing at anywhere near the pace that modern marketing is.
That’s why it’s so important to view agile marketing as its own kind of operating system. In fact, I’ve noticed we often forget that adapting agile ways of working to our unique organization circumstances and challenges is at the core of how agile should function.
So what distinguishes real agile marketing from the version that’s frustrating so many beleaguered marketers?
• The Difference Between Practices And Mindset
I’ve found that effective agile marketing begins with mindset and culture because agile practices require marketers to make hundreds of small decisions all the time. How many items should you bring into your backlog this sprint? How should you prioritize them? Should you cancel a standup or retrospective this week?
These seemingly minor decisions are actually very important. In my experience, they are where the rubber meets the road and where agile succeeds or fails. That’s because they offer countless small opportunities to drift back toward non-agile ways of working without even realizing it.
But if your marketing team has an agile mindset and culture, they’ll know how to use agile principles to make these decisions. That means pushing back on work that isn’t a priority to keep the team focused on what matters, adapting or evolving standups so they can continue to provide value, etc.
Having mindset, culture and principles as a foundation can enable your team to evolve and adapt as new challenges arise. Considering the state of modern marketing, that evolution has only grown in importance.
• Moving Beyond Order-Taking
Effectively implementing real agile marketing should get your team beyond being order-takers to becoming real drivers of strategic goals. But that process doesn’t just require a mindset shift. It also requires a reimagining of strategic planning.
Make sure your marketers are involved in setting strategic priorities. Those priorities should form the basis of everything they do: what work gets prioritized, how operations optimizes processes, etc. In the process, your team can take charge of execution, giving them flexibility to use their skills and resources to achieve goals that can move the business forward.
Fixing What’s Broken
We’re back to the irony that while agile practices can be highly effective for marketers, agile marketing itself is broken for many teams. Happily, there’s a way to fix it.
In order to rise to the challenges posed by AI, fast-moving market conditions, intense competition and more, I believe marketers need to reimagine agile marketing so it can deliver on its promises. Otherwise, we may never get out of the frustration funk we’re currently in.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
