Agile Marketing FAQs: Teams, Meetings, Leadership & Measurement

As the buzz around Agile Marketing continues to grow, so do the number of questions marketers have about what it really means.

I recently hosted a webinar for MarketingProfs titled ” Agile Marketing 201: Creating Persistent Teams.” It generated so much awesome discussion that we ran out of time to answer all the inquiries that marketers had.

Fortunately, we have this supplementary forum available to continue the conversation!

Below you’ll find answers to some major queries about Agile teams, leaders, and measurement, along with many other FAQs. Some questions have been edited slightly for context and clarity, and I’ve grouped similar ones together under the same heading so you can easily find your favorites.

Before we tackle those questions, I want to offer a quick recap of the webinar that spawned the questions (the free recording is available here):

• Marketers are enthusiastic about Agile (42% say they’ve already adopted it, and 42% of those who haven’t say it’s in their plans this year); but, when we try to apply it at the project level only, we risk catastrophe.
• Trying to be Agile part-time creates inevitable neglect around the Agile experiment, because our other projects and “day jobs” keep demanding our time.
• For best results, we want to find ways to build persistent Agile teams that have a clear, shared purpose (e.g., demand generation) measured by a few core KPIs (e.g., increase addressable audience or hit Marketing-qualified leads (MQL) targets).
• Those teams will be cross-functional, meaning they have all the skills needed to complete their queue of work.
• They should also have strong leaders who can help them push back on work that doesn’t align with their goals and metrics, as well as prioritize the work they are going to do so they’re always attacking the right thing at the right time.
• Bonus Agile points if you can design teams based on the customer in some way: e.g., stages of the customer journey.
• None of this has to happen overnight. By piloting one or two Agile teams (that are 100% dedicated to using Agile), you can experiment with the approach in a lower-risk way.