ScrumOrg Marketing: 0:03

Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West: 0:20

Hello, and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West CEO here@scrum.org. And today, I'm actually very, very excited for this particular podcast. I'm here with Melissa Reeve and James, y'all are, Jim, you're from the agile marketing Alliance. So obviously, a lot of people today are using Scrum and Agile in their, in their marketing context. So it's really exciting to have these two experts on the platform today or on the podcast today. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa and Jim.

Jim Ewel: 0:58

We're excited to be here.

Dave West: 1:01

Right, and I believe you're both speaking to me from Boulder, Colorado. Is that right? Both of you? Or am I completely wrong there?

Jim Ewel: 1:10

Melissa is in Boulder, I'm in Seattle, Washington.

Dave West: 1:13

All that said I knew it was somewhere out west, which is which is great. So I know our listeners always like to know where people are talking to them from and again, I'm on obviously in Boston, Massachusetts. So to get going and Jim, if you don't mind, we'll start with with you. Um, what is the agile marketing Alliance? It sounds a little bit Star Wars II for me. So I'm obviously excited. Tell me a little bit more about it.

Jim Ewel: 1:39

Well, Dave, the agile marketing Alliance, arose out of the what we called Sprint two, okay, which is a meeting where we revised the agile marketing manifesto. And one of the things that the community asked for was some kind of organization began to look after agile marketing to make sure that kept going that we expanded the sound of the depth and breadth of adoption, that would be independent, and all of those things, right. And so, really, what we're trying to do is to bring together the global community of marketers, okay, who are passionate about agile marketing, and help them learn, share and grow together. So we got started last year, about almost a year ago, we're coming up on a year. And we're super excited, we're growing and starting to contribute to that, that goal of making agile marketing, you know, a real thing across a lot of big organizations, a lot of organizations.

Dave West: 2:49

Sounds awesome. And just, you know, the agile marketing manifesto for that, for our listeners who may not know about that, that was really motivated by marketeers looking at the Agile Manifesto and, and other things in the space and not finding it particularly direct to their to their needs. Is that Is that right? A little bit more, maybe, Melissa, you want to add a little bit to that?

Melissa Reeve: 3:16

Sure. It's a fair statement. I think the heart of the Agile Software manifesto still lives on in the agile marketing manifesto. But there were a few words there that were got a little bit tricky for agile marketers. And you know, documentation and software just weren't necessarily resonating. So so when you look at the agile marketing manifesto, you'll see things like focusing on customer value in business outcomes over activity and outputs. So sometimes marketers get stuck in this trap of checking the box. So we did the weekly newsletter. And it's good for them to take a breath once in a while and say that weekly newsletter is it truly delivering customer value. Things like delivering value early and offering over waiting for perfection. Another one where it's always easy to change yet another pixel, another logo, let's nudge it over a couple more pixels to the left. So we really wanted to speak to the marketers. And we did that through the agile marketing manifesto.

Dave West: 4:27

Interesting and that the time is sort of right, because Never before have we seen marketing provided with more data, more ability to experiment more ability to connect with customers that the digital age is really providing us with right and I suppose that it extends the value of agile marketing even more because of the the use of digital technology.

Jim Ewel: 4:51

So absolutely, Dave, let me just speak to that for just a minute. One of the core things about agile marketing is this iterative approach of Delivering minimum viable product type of things and experimenting and getting stuff out, you know, fast. Okay. And digital has really contributed to us being able to do that and to measure it.

Dave West: 5:14

Yeah. Which is actually that's a theme we have here on the on the podcast, you know, when we're talking to car manufacturers or talking to pharmaceutical companies, this digital change has really been the catalyst through an adoption of the agile mindset. And a marketing hasn't been left behind, which is great. So let's lean in for a minute on really the frameworks, particularly Scrum. You know, this is the, this is our community, the scrum.org community podcast. So you can guess we're a little bit biased towards Scrum. So with respect to the frameworks, you know, as you rightly said, Scrum came out of software, you know, delivered, you know, was before the Agile Manifesto, but it was very much now, over the years has become more generic, the last scrum guide actually replaced all of the terms that were software related in there. But, you know, tell me a little bit if you don't mind the role of facts in software versus marketing. Is there a difference? Is there a tension? You, Melissa, you brought some of that up? When we talked about the manifesto, I think our listeners would be interested in that.

Melissa Reeve: 6:24

Yeah, I think how I would characterize it is there's there's some fundamental cultural differences. You know, without stereotyping, I'm going to stereotype. And what I mean by that is we we understand that not everybody fits the mold. But in general, what we see is that software developers and folks over and it are more used to more accustomed to working with frameworks. And so it's natural for them to adopt a framework like Scrum. When we use the word framework and marketing, sometimes we get some puzzled looks. What do you mean by a framework? Is that a process? I think we're a little bit more accustomed process. And then when you introduce a framework, what I have observed is that on the software side, there's a little bit of a relief. Oh, good. We have a model to follow. We have a process that we can embrace. Yay, there's a right way to do things. And on the marketing side, we see a little bit more, I don't know, bristling might be a little bit extreme, but just a little bit more resistance. So is this going to stifle my creativity? How do I fit things that I don't feel like fit in a box fit into this box? And so when we're presenting a framework, oftentimes, we're allowing a little bit more surface area for marketers to make it their own to take that work and say, how do we how do we fit this work into something like a scrum framework?

Dave West: 8:01

Jim,

Jim Ewel: 8:02

I'd like to add on to what Melissa said, in that. Marketers don't tend to practice canonical Scrum, right? They they like to mix and match things practices from scrum practices from Kanban practices that, quite frankly, they make up and that seem to fit their way of working. And so if you ask marketers, what is the number one framework or methodology that they use, they'll describe it as scrum bond, okay? And what they mean by that is not a formal scrum bond, okay? What they really mean is that they tend to mix and match everything until they find something that works for them as a team.

Dave West: 8:51

And the reason why do you think, Jim, that there is so much of a mix and match going on, is because the nature of the work is so diverse, and so different?

Jim Ewel: 9:05

Yeah, if you think about developers, you know, you develop features, you test features, you have different specialties, but marketing has for anything to get out for a campaign to get out. You might have 567 different specialties. To do that. You've got people who write copy, you've got creatives who generate the graphics, you've got strategists, you've got you know, a videographer you I mean, you just have a bunch of different people, right? And some of those people are not going to work in the time boxed parts of Scrum, they're not going to work in two week cycles, right? They get a request to generate a graphic right and they're going to do that. They get streams of work coming in and they're going to turn around and and put that out until over that graphic. And so Kanban feels like a more natural approach for those people, then you get other people who are building websites and they're doing things in two weeks or even monthly Sprint's because it's a, it's a deliverable much like software guys have deliverables. So it's just in the nature of the work that it varies a lot. And and the different specialties tend to gravitate towards different frameworks or methodologies.

Dave West: 10:34

So hang on a minute, I just need to really understand something. So talk a little bit about teams, then in marketing, if you don't mind, because what I heard them was, yes, you may have a team, maybe building a website or delivering a campaign, but there's overlaying that team are a bunch of specialists that that come in and out that may have some unique skills, like graphic design, like videography, like whatever data may be. So tell me a little bit more about that.

Melissa Reeve: 11:11

Sure, and if I can jump in here, too, because you're absolutely right, Dave, that within marketing, I once heard that there's 42 difference, different disciplines. And so you're not going to be able to make a scrum team of 42. So, Dave's day, we're on video for our listeners, and Dave is shaking his head. He's like, No.

Dave West: 11:36

It was a fantastic number, just for the record, but the meaning of life and everything. But the yes, it would be a really hard team. I mean, just even doing the daily, it'd be a challenge. So okay, so you got 42 Different disciplines in marketing. Okay.

Melissa Reeve: 11:52

Yeah, so we've got that. So typically, you'll have your core team. And depending on what that team's objective is, you'll, you'll have a core team, and then you'll have the specialties dropping into that team. And if we're talking about content, if we're talking about a campaign, your core team might be your copywriter, your designer, your person who's going to deploy it, whether that be to production on a website, or through an email. And then your specialists might be exactly what Jim said, you might have a film team that sits on top of that, you might have a data team. And it could be that the team wants that data person on the team. But it's a scarce resource. It's it's a tablet, scarce talent. And so we're not able to embed that person into the team. So we've always got to balance this, the size of the team, the team's mission, with what other talent the team needs on more of a, an ad hoc basis that they don't need in a long lived team.

Jim Ewel: 13:01

It The other thing that happens, Dave is that you have teams that are almost work as a service. So for example, deployment, right? Large customers that I worked with, they had a deployment team that deployed to their website twice a day. And they had deadlines, if you got it in by five o'clock, you know, on this day, it was deployed by 3am in the morning, or whatever the time was, right. And then there's that another time when you got things done. And it was just a service that worked for every single team, you didn't have to have each cross functional team develop that service separately, they just all depended on this one group, which delivered this work as a service in such a efficient way that it was great, and nobody felt a need to have it on their own team.

Dave West: 13:52

But obviously, that can create dependencies, which is, from my experience of working with marketing professionals, dependencies are the things that undermine our ability to go to market. And that's true of software as well. So how, how do you make these is it just by making things more transparent? And making those dependencies or those impediments or those stopped, you know, blocked elements, transparent that you manage that would with? Is that something that you would recommend?

Melissa Reeve: 14:23

How I would deal with those dependencies is the heartbeat of Scrum, which is what I characterize as cadence and synchronization. Right? When we strip away the the labels of sprint planning or sprint review, essentially what you've had is this heartbeat. And for many teams, it's every two weeks. And if you start to take that heartbeat, and you extend it into teams of teams, and make sure that that heartbeat is synchronized, so that you can surface dependencies on a predictable basis. Right. And maybe it's is a scrum of scrums. Maybe it's, you know, it's another way to surface those. But you've got to have that way where everything's coordinated in order to really understand, are we still on track? Can you deliver those against those dependencies. And if you, if you look at that cadence and synchronization of those events of those ceremonies, I think you'll find a way for marketing teams to stay aligned with those specialized in that scarce talent. Jim,

Jim Ewel: 15:36

but I think it also has to do with the SLA and the speed and predictability of that other team being able to deliver it. To go back to Melissa's body analogy, you have the heartbeat of the Scrum teams, you know, and how it beats. But the body also has other facilities like by touch my hand to hot stove, right? It comes on, regardless of where my heart is, in terms of its beating, right. And because it happens so fast. It works, right? So one of the things I was talking about this deployment team, because they deployed so quickly, so dependably, twice a day, there was very little dependency, because I mean, very few situations require more than deploying to a website more than twice a day. I mean, there are situations but not many of them.

Dave West: 16:29

Yeah, and it's interesting, obviously, there's different services and different sorts of dependencies, you know, that that's obviously more of just a deployment connection, it's a regular, you just fit it in, and it goes out, you also have the creative, which are less predictable, you know, dependency, which requires that level of transparency, and that level of coordination, you know, and it's bringing these these these things, I guess, in a transparent and clear way to allow teams to react to them and to, and to manage their work and their view in that context, I guess, which is interesting. So I do want to, you know, push on a couple of interesting questions, around roles or accountabilities, product ownership in, in, in AD in marketing is a real challenge from what I observe. Now, I'm not sure if ever that's just everybody's got an opinion, and nobody wants to or, you know, committees are the only way to get any agreement when, you know, there's a lot of very creative people in a room or I don't know, but tell me a little bit from your experience. And you both got a lot of experience in this. How the heck do you do make that sort of accountability work? Or does it? Do we need to get rid of it? Is it irrelevant to agile marketing?

Melissa Reeve: 17:55

So I have an opinion on this one, and I'd be interested in hearing Jim's as well. So I actually heard you say two things there. Dave, one was around prioritization, and one was around reviewing. So firms have a product owner. You know, and sometimes we call him this person, a marketing owner. I think that role is critical to prioritize work for the team. And to achieve a definition of Done. Now, when we're talking about the definition of done, there's a line and and how I draw that line is, is, is this thing that we're producing complete and mistake free doesn't meet our quality standards? And then on the other side of that line is opinion. So marketers have to get very, very clear on the quality standards, meaning does it meet our brand guidelines? Does it meet our editorial guidelines? Is it free of typos, do the links work? Those are all quality metrics. And then on the other side of that line, you have an opinion, and people are gonna be people and I have seen incredibly bad behavior on the part of executives all the way up into CEO meddling, in the opinion side of marketing. Well, I don't like that color. I don't like that message. I don't like that turn of phrase. And when we implement agile in marketing, and when we implement Scrum, we've got to be very, very crisp on this meets our definition of done in terms of quality. And hey, we're gonna we're gonna allow for a little bit on this opinion side, but we've got to communicate very clearly, when people are overstepping in terms of that opinion.

Dave West: 19:59

You So it sounds like there is the role. So I just want to, for our listeners clarify the product owner is seems to be an appropriate role in marketing, then Melissa? Yes. That's awesome.

Jim Ewel: 20:11

What are the principles of the agile marketing manifesto is learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions, okay. And this is a real issue in marketing, right? Everybody thinks they're a marketer, everybody has an opinion about whether marketing is good or bad, okay. And there is a real tendency to, you know, say I like red. So that should be red, rather than going out and doing an experiment and comparing red and green and seeing which one delivers a better conversion rate. Okay. So this is one of the real challenges when we implement agile and marketing is to move away from this opinions and conventions, and all that sort of stuff, to opinions and data. So that's an important cultural difference. And cultural change, that has to happen in many marketing organizations, in order for marketing owners to be successful, because in the end, they need to deliver value to the organization and value to the customer that really comes about from data and experiments, not from opinions. Okay. The other factor that is really important for marketers is that marketers have a hard time saying no. Developers have no problem saying no, right? I mean, developers are used to saying, Sorry, you're not going to get everything that you asked for, you know, it's a three legged stool, you can pick two of them, you can't get the third one, you know, the whole, the whole spiel, right? Marketers are all the time, what work just gets dropped in from the sky from some executive and said, and the executive says, You must do this marketing thing, just as soon as possible. I don't care if you planned out your sprint, and it's gonna totally throw everything off, you got to do this. That's kind of the way marketing has worked. Right? Now, some of that is, it's always going to work that way. I mean, if you have a brand damaging event, you know, and you've got to respond, you can't say, I'm in the middle of the sprint, wait till the next sprint, okay. But on the other hand, some of its arbitrary executive just dropped something, again, without realizing the impact on everything else. That's got done. And so there are some cultural changes. In most marketing organizations, when they adopt agile, they have to learn to say no to certain things.

Dave West: 22:49

That's really interesting. And obviously, in technology, we have the same it's called, they're called defects, some defects are, stop, we stop the stop the sprint, we've kind of fixed this because the websites down, it's not generating money. And then the other defects are, hey, we can triage that it can go in and it will be prioritized with the view of everything else that we're doing next. And and I think, maybe the discipline of of software and software and technology, we've actually maybe a little bit, we've already got that discipline. And what you're saying is you need that discipline in marketing, which is really, really interesting. And, and also green, obviously, if you're going to be red or green. I mean, why would you pick red? That was just, I mean, nobody was I mean, come on. But I appreciate that. Right? So we're coming into the end of our our time box, which is cash, we can talk for hours. And, you know, I'm hoping we'll be able to have maybe subsequent conversation saying what, we'll deliver this to the world, and we'll get some feedback on it. And then maybe we'll do a second increment now, just to use your your sort of language as it were. But I really a lot of people listen to this podcast are Scrum Masters, or agile coaches, people that are helping teams. And so I'd really like to get your advice, both of you, you know, I'd like you to what would be the three or four things or the one or two things that they should do because many of these agile coaches, Scrum Masters are not marketing experts, but now they're having to help marketing teams. So what should they concentrate on? And, and, you know, maybe, Jim, if you'd like to start what would be the few things that you would tell the Scrum Masters who are faced with these, you know, creative, intelligent, amazing marketeers that are now doing Scrum for the first time?

Jim Ewel: 24:46

Well, the first thing that I would say and I don't know if the audience will like this, but it is easier to take a marketer who is steeped in marketing and train them to be a scrum master. than it is to train a scrum master and teach them marketing. Okay, just there's, you know, there's a lot to know about marketing, just as there's an awful lot to know about software development and so forth. Okay. So that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing that I would say is there are some fundamental differences between increments and user stories and how we use some of the language of Scrum. For example, user stories. Most features in software are delivered in one specific way you implement the feature, and it's done, right? Most user stories in marketing are delivered in many different ways. So for example, five, a user story that a user needs to understand my product category and what the best, you know, things are to look at to evaluate a particular product or whatever it is, you could deliver that as a web page, you could deliver that as a webinar, you could deliver it as a podcast, you can deliver it as an e book. I mean, there's probably 10s, if not hundreds of ways that you could deliver that user story. And so every user story has lots of different increments and different ways to deliver it. So that's kind of one of the fundamental differences that Scrum Masters have to realize is they're, they're helping agile marketing teams. Melissa, did you have something to add? Well, I think I would focus on empathy, and humility. So I think Scrum Master certainly can come into the marketing side. And it's just, it's a good trait within any scrum master, right to come into a new team, listening, trial, seeking to understand with humility, even even if you've been a scrum master for a long time, that this might be a different context.

Melissa Reeve: 27:03

And for some reason, I think of the reputation that Americans have when when we go overseas, right? We have this crazy expectation that people will speak English, that, you know, if we just speak louder, somehow we'll get heard. And, you know, gosh, why are things different? And why can't we have things the way they are in America, you know, you have to recognize that you're essentially in a different country, and the norms are gonna look different, the language might look different. And if you approach it with that mindset of acceptance, I think that there's a way for you to be extremely effective in this new environment.

Dave West: 27:46

Alright, just to summarize, then, what what I think Jim, you said was very much find that person that's going to be deliver on those accountabilities of a scrum master and help them to be successful, then don't expect the mechanisms that worked in a software team, or in your experience previously, to be the same user stories is a great example. The definition of done is another what an increment is, go in with some curiosity and focus on the outcomes you're trying to achieve with those mechanisms, rather than actually the mechanisms themselves. And then Melissa, just to sort of summarize, go in with human humility, go in with the ability, curiosity, and be willing to listen and learn and don't be telling everybody that they're wrong, always, and that this is a stupid idea. And I think those, those three things probably work well in any situation, but in particular, in agile marketing. Thank you so much for your time today. I've certainly learned a lot I've realized that I need to be nicer to my marketing team and not keep throwing executive spanners into the works. So I'll try not to do that. Luckily, I have fantastic marketeers, which is awesome. That worked with me. But thank you for your time today. And obviously, for our listeners at home if you're if you want to learn more agile marketing Alliance, look at the agile marketing manifesto. And obviously ping, both Melissa and Jim. I know that they love to talk about this and always there to help. So thank you, Melissa, Jim, for today. And thank you for our listeners. Thank you. I'm your host, Dave West. This is the scrum.org community podcast. Thank you for tuning in today. And hopefully we'll continue this interesting conversation about agile marketing in future episodes.