We were delighted to have Laura Powers and Bernie Maloney from Powered By Teams as our expert Agile facilitators last week to experience the mystery and magic of this growing trend in marketing.
We began our evening with a roundtable review about what each of us had heard (good and bad) and experienced to date about using agile approaches in general. Failing “fast”, breaking down scope of work into bite-sized chunks, creative iterations, we had lots to contribute. We also talked about the myths around agile and misconceptions (no planning, no documentation) about using this approach.
After reviewing the SCRUM Alliance’s mantra of “respond fast, minimize waste and maximize value” and the Stacy Matrix for decisionmaking, we learned that by looking at Agile as a mindset versus as a process or set of tools, we could go far in managing complex decisionmaking challenges – even in marketing. In fact, we learned, by using an agile approach, we could deliver 4x to 10x in ROI!
It was time to start experiencing agile as a group. Our team was given an assignment, a timeframe and clear rules of the road. We had 2 minutes. Go! After initially making projections about what we could accomplish, we wildly exceeded our goals. In three repeated efforts, this happened over and over again. We were hooked. And we got to experience ourselves the values of agile (openess, respect, transparency, focus, commitment and courage). We built confidence in our team, motivated each other, tested and learned, prototyped and planned, collaborated, managed through the facilitators distractions and organized ourselves around the common challenge at hand. And we had fun!
Afterwards we talked about applying this to our own marketing teams and work. How could we use agile to promote customer collaboration and discovery? Adaptive campaign development? Laura then shared some interesting data about marketing’s adoption of agile techniques showing that the 23% of marketers who had started applying agile to their work, were seeing a 58% improvement in ROI. Wow!
Did you catch our Storify recap?
Missed the event: WATCH THE VIDEO
Many thanks to Laura and Bernie from Powered By Teams for sharing an exceptional agile experience with us at MENGNorCal!