How a few nerds made me a better marketer
This likely doesn’t come as a shock to most of us marketers, but we’re being asked to do more with less — smaller budgets, shrinking head count, less time. And quite frankly, some marketing departments have a way of becoming excellent tacticians — the marketing equivalent of a server/waiter, just knocking out another spec sheet, box label and web banner request like every other launch without needing to think strategically.
But how did we get here?
In our experience we’ve found that marketing teams tend to lose their way by having one (or more) of the following issues:
- There’s no marketing strategy tied to business goals and outcomes.
- If you do have a strategy, there’s no process to execute that strategy, and no way to effectively test it before sinking your budget on a potentially bad idea.
- The executive team and the finance departments don’t fully understand how a good marketing team, and if you’re reading this, I’m assuming yours is, is integral to the health of the business. (We wrote a blog post about how you can change that; give it a read here.)
What do these factors facilitate?
- Every day feels like a fire drill
- No ability to think strategically
- No time to test and understand customer needs
- No process. No framework.
- Shrinking budgets. Shrinking head count. Shrinking respect.
And so, we spend our days putting out fires, answering emails, and knocking out a few table stakes activities that’ll make you feel like you’ve accomplished something. But deep down you know it’s not what you should be working on, and you know that if you just had a little more structure, a little more time, you could be more productive, more strategic, and bring in more revenue for your business.
How do you get out of that funk?
This scenario hits home for me because I lived it. When I took the job as a marketing director for a multi-million-dollar e-commerce brand three and a half years ago, I did what any new team member does; I spent the first few weeks simply observing what the team I walked into was doing. And maybe this is a familiar experience for some, but I was both amazed and horrified.
I quickly realized that the team was amazing. They were an extremely productive, eager and knowledgeable group; they were accomplishing A LOT of work for the team’s size (five people), but what did it mean for the business? Was their activity tracking towards business goals and objectives? And speaking of those tasks, how were they prioritized? Were they visible to the rest of the organization? I also noticed that because the team was so busy performing all of these tasks, there wasn’t any room for testing and iteration.
In short, I had a very capable team with no strategy and no purpose. But thanks to some previous run-ins with nerds, I had a solution.
Call it a blessing or a curse, but in my former life in a corporate marketing role I was given the opportunity to work with nearly every department in the company. Along the way I befriended a few software developers, data scientists, and product managers. Back then, my idea of project management and organization was writing my team’s to-do list on my whiteboard at my desk, gleefully erasing items from that list and starting the process all over again the next day.
My newfound friends mocked me. The badgering began.
- Why were you working on these projects to begin with?
- Where was the framework to your day-to-day activities? Where’s your breadcrumb trail of activity so you could review how each project progressed, and what worked and what didn’t?
- How do you know how much time and resources to allocate to similar projects in the future?
- How do you maintain a reasonable workload for your team so you can set expectations for those above you?
I asked them for a better method, and that’s when Agile entered my life.
Agile itself has become a bit of a buzzword in the business community. It’s hard to listen to a startup podcast or read an article without hearing or seeing it (should this be a drinking game?) but what exactly does it mean? There are a ton of stuffy definitions and vague explanations about what Agile is (see what we mean?), but it’s really not that complicated. At its core Agile is:
It’s easy to write off Agile as just another way to get things done, but it’s more than that. It’s a framework. A philosophy that fundamentally shifts how an organization behaves — from how ideas are introduced to the business to how they’re brought to market. And while you do get more things done, you don’t do Agile. You are Agile. Here’s a high-level graphic outlining the differences:
There are several ways to put the Agile framework into practice. For this post, we’re focusing on Scrum. At its core, Scrum is a way to implement Agile principles. Think of it this way. Agile is a philosophy. Scrum is a process. It’ll help you organize your work in a transparent way that promotes inspection and adaptation.
So how did this apply to my new marketing team? I took an…agile approach…to implementing Agile by boiling it down to its essence and incorporating the fundamentals as quickly as I could so that my team could have some structure and prioritization ASAP.
Here’s what I did:
Does this process seem…basic? It kinda is. And that’s what I loved about it; if your process takes hours to explain and understand, it won’t stick. After my team implemented Agile/Scrum, we were able to prioritize our daily activities, make sure they were all in the pursuit of our business goals, track the process of each task for future reference, and rapidly test ideas for just as rapid customer feedback.
How do you get started? Here are three things you can do today to turbocharge your marketing organization:
Audit your team.
How are they working now? What’s going well? What could be improved? How can you be more transparent?
Start small.
Don’t try to become a scrum master in a day. You can implement elements of the Agile framework quickly to start seeing results. How? We show you in this handy dandy free guide how to make that happen.
Fill your executives in on the secret.
My guess is that they don’t fully understand the volume of work your team does each day, how it’s making money for your business, and how much your team accomplishes each week. One of the three pillars of Agile is transparency; once your executive teams better understand how hard you’re working to drive meaningful results for the business, the easier it is to make your case for areas of your team where you may be deficient — people, budgets or time.
