Marketing is a great space to apply agile practices like Scrum. It’s well suited for an iterative approach; usually, you’re marketing a product, so a lot of the cadence from product development can carry over. 

What are topics to consider when applying Scrum to marketing? 

• Agile Marketing Team
• Marketing Sprint Length
• Commitment to learning
• Scrum or Kanban

Agile Marketing Team

An agile marketing team should be customer oriented rather than skill oriented.

This means a dedicated cross-functional team focused on engagement with a particular customer rather than passing campaign work on from one team to another.

In some ways, it’s a return to craftsmanship from our recent history of assembly lines. Maintaining consistent team relationships is also beneficial as you gain efficiency from how people learn to work together.

The Product Owner could be the marketing or creative director. Though it’s a common practice in this space, combining the Scrum Master and Product Owner into a “marketing owner” is not recommended. Having someone serve as a Scrum Master for multiple teams is better than taking both roles.

Some teams may need to share a person if they have a scarce skill. If this is the case, try pairing them with another team member so they can also learn that skill. Cross training cultivated T-shaped marketers, where they have a broad set of marketing skills with strong expertise in one area. 

It’s good to remember that many people have more skills than their title implies.

Scrum Marketing Sprint Length

A traditional waterfall approach to marketing places the work in sequential phases. First, you write all the copy, then you edit, design the assets, and finally schedule. So it’s understandable why a team might think each of these phases should be a sprint. But that’s not Scrum and it’s not agile. 

For reasons we’ll explore in a moment, you want to keep the whole process (writing, design, editing…) within each sprint. This approach means the sprint may need two weeks rather than one week for all the creation, release and learning to occur.

Commitment to learning agile marketing

Scrum can allow teams and organizations to take a different approach than the traditional bid splash, long-standing campaign.  

Instead, you can run an adaptive learning campaign. Start with small campaigns as tests for what works. Evaluate. Adapt. Repeat.

Nail it and then scale it.

Look for opportunities to create value early on in the form of micro-campaigns. Examples could include an article on LinkedIn or a video on YouTube. Use this MVC (minimal viable campaign) to prove or disprove an assumption.

The product owner decides at what point there is enough value to release. But remember, it’s only valuable to our customers when it’s out in the wild.

The campaign is no longer pre-scheduled and set to run on autopilot. This change will feel like a big loss of automation for some. But do you really want to automatically continue spending resources on something that’s not working?

Instead, you’re continually making content visible to your customers, inspecting their responses and adapting the next piece of content accordingly.  When something is working, you run with it. When it’s not, you adjust.

I once heard someone describe it as, “nail it and then scale it.” You can have a plan for a year-long campaign that adapts daily. 

In summary, an agile marketing team asks:

• What’s the fastest way to get feedback
• What do I hope to learn?
• How can I measure results?
• How do we make decisions based on behavior?

Scrum or Kanban for marketing

I know this guide is about Scrum, but I wanted to take a minute and address the option of using Kanban for marketing. 

Kanban can be good for ongoing work like social media posts. Kanban is more fluid and allows for workflows with many steps, which is common in marketing. 

You might consider using Kanban for individual one-off tasks you want to keep visible and use Scrum for major projects. 

Many people will also talk about ScrumBan, which takes different parts of each framework. The best option for teams is often what is closest to what you’re already doing.

How Scrum enables you to get things done

It’s easy to get wrapped up in new ideas. There’s a flurry of excitement around what’s possible and how it could solve significant problems.

The problem is when you move to something new, it’s at the expense of what you were focusing on, leaving a wake of started but unfinished projects.

Scrum helps you to stop starting and start finishing, and it does this by providing just the right amount of structure to time and attention.

Scrum provides a window of focus

Scrum organizes time into sprints, which can be any length of time, often one or two weeks. You begin the sprint by selecting what work you will complete by the end of the sprint, and this will require you to break big projects or tasks down into smaller pieces.

The work you select goes into your sprint backlog, which is the list of tasks you will complete by the end of the sprint. No new work enters this list during the sprint. The time is protected, allowing you to focus on finishing what has been selected.

Each day you will review progress using the questions:

1. What did I complete yesterday?
2. What will I focus on finishing today?
3. Where am I stuck?

Usually, you’d ask these questions during the daily standup within the context of a team. For personal development projects, you might be a team of one, but you may also include anyone else who lives with you as maybe they are a stakeholder.

When you’ve decided to focus on a task from your sprint backlog, work it to completion. Don’t select another task until completed. Keep your work-in-progress limits to a minimum.

Scrum provides clear prioritization

On a typical Scrum team, one person plays the product owner role. They work with internal and external stakeholders and the production team to prioritize all the work to be done.

The backlog contains a list of all the tasks and is ordered by priority. What’s at the top is most important. There are no ties, just a cleanly ordered list. When you maintain the disciple of ordering your backlog, you’re not only finishing work, you're completing the work that matters most.

Next Steps for Scrum Marketing

I hope you’ve found this article helpful and that you feel prepared to go and level up your professional skills. Looking back over the past few years, I’m encouraged by what I see. You can be too.

If you use Scrum to help you learn and grow, I’d love to hear about it. You can reach me on LinkedIn.

If you want to learn more about Scrum in general,  check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum.

Still not sure about your next step with Scrum? I offer a couple of free coaching sessions each month. You can signup for a free 1-hour coaching session, and we can work together to identify a good next step for you.