Scott Brinker: Three Agile Marketing Myths That Are Holding You Back from Improving Your Results
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 9:06 am
Content
Agile Marketing in Numbers
3 Myths About Agile Marketing
The popularity of the agile approach in marketing continues to grow. Along with the number of myths about it. We have adapted several articles by Scott Brinker to dispel these myths and understand what to really expect from the implementation of agile.
Scott Brinker is a marketer with 20 years of telegram codes list experience, the author of the popular blog Chief Marketing Technologist and the book "Agile Marketing. Hacker practices for effective business". Last year, Scott was also a speaker at the MarTech conference, organized by CoMagic.
Agile Marketing in Numbers
Andrea Friar of AgileSherpas, one of the world's leading experts in agile marketing and author of Death of a Marketer, has collaborated with CoSchedule on the 2nd annual State of Agile Marketing Report. It's packed with useful agile stats. Here are the key numbers:
50% of traditional marketers plan to adopt agile within this year,
54% of agile marketers report using a mixed structure (up 10% from last year),
31% of marketers cite lack of education as their top barrier to moving to agile.
As we can see, more and more organizations are striving to be agile-oriented, and this is not surprising, because the benefits of agile marketing are extremely compelling:
53% of respondents noted the ability to quickly and effectively change strategy based on feedback;
44% - greater transparency of the current status of projects;
40% - quick identification of problems;
39% - higher quality of work;
36% - accelerated launch of products/projects;
33% - raising the fighting spirit of teams;
28% - better alignment of business goals;
28% - more effective prioritization of tasks;
25% - increase in team productivity.
The diagram below shows the methods and practices that agile marketers use:
44% - daily planning meeting;
42% - user stories;
32% - retrospective;
31% — WIP limits (abbreviation for Work In Progress) — work that is submitted but not finished and awaits sale (for example, in the case of a food business);
28% - short iterations;
27% - sprint / iterative planning;
26% - frequent releases;
22% - sprint/iteration review;
16% — Planning Poker — a task estimation technique for agile teams;
13% - Kanban board.
This chart does a great job of showing that agile marketing is not a carefree “let’s just try a bunch of different things quickly and see what happens.” Agile marketing is a set of clearly defined management practices that reflect a philosophy of continuous improvement.
When someone says, “Agile Marketing doesn’t work,” the first thing you should do is show them this chart and ask, “Which of these practices have you been using and for how long?”
46% of surveyed companies have been practicing agile for less than 2 years
3 Myths About Agile Marketing
Agile marketing itself is still a work in progress. Hundreds of innovative marketers are experimenting with adapting its methods to their own tasks and processes.
Agile marketing is more like chili — a versatile spice for bean-based stews that comes in many different variations. Like chili chefs, agile marketers often pride themselves on their unique blends, tailored to their company and culture. I believe that such experimentation — an evolutionary approach to learning which agile marketing methods work best in different types of organizations — is the right strategy for our industry right now. It is certainly consistent with the agile philosophy itself, which encourages adaptation across industries and teams.
But in the absence of a clearly defined and widely accepted methodology for agile marketing, a number of misconceptions about its essence seem to persist. Here are 3 myths about agile marketing that hold many organizations back from implementing it, and thus preventing them from realizing the true potential of their marketing department. Let’s look at them and dispel them.
Myth #1: Agile means doing things quickly and with poor quality
There are two accusations here: speed and lack of quality - and they are both wrong.
Agile is not about doing things quickly, or working in a rush. In fact, the philosophy of the agile approach is based on the desire for more stable and efficient work, rather than its acceleration. Agile is aimed at preventing burnout, not causing it.
Agile accelerates results in other ways:
1. Agile teams strive to minimize time spent on unnecessary overhead: excessive documentation, superficial meetings, or overly formal protocols between stakeholders. It's about finding the best output-per-unit-of-time ratio that leads to more productive work.
2. Agile aims to break down large projects into smaller ones, each of which is valuable in its own right and can be validated either through internal review or external market feedback. Ideally, it is less about breaking things down into serialized components and more about refining or expanding iterations. So instead of waiting three months for a large project to be completed, smaller iterations of that project can be completed in a matter of days or weeks.
This is the heart of what makes agile so powerful. By enabling rapid feedback, a project can adjust to changes in the market and adapt based on people's reactions. Maybe a smaller project implementation is enough, and you'll realize it in time. Maybe it's not a very successful project at all, and the team would be better off doing something else. Agile gives more room for such adjustments, and thus helps avoid wasting time, effort, and money.
3. Agile eliminates the “burning” issues that depress productivity. When a team’s work is interrupted by urgent issues (drop this, do that), the costs of reorientation—losing momentum, shifting gears, taking off again—have a big impact on productivity.
Yes, change still happens and urgent work arises. But agile accommodates this reality by using short sprints—usually 2–4 weeks. At the end of each sprint, there is an opportunity to reprioritize the next sprint, so the team is not interrupted by urgent requests mid-cycle. This allows for a balance between speed of response and focus on the right task.
Agile also does not reduce the quality of work of specialists.
Where does this misconception come from? First of all, sometimes the most productive way to illustrate an idea is to create a prototype, a kind of “low-res implementation” that is used only for internal demonstration and discussion. For example, web designers may make prototypes of a future website to show the possibilities of the layout. However, no one would ever say: “Okay, let’s just take these prototypes and call them a website!”
Second, because agile encourages breaking large projects into smaller iterations, some people assume that “smaller” is synonymous with “low quality.” But that’s not necessarily true. In most scenarios, you can create a smaller project that’s still high quality. Small doesn’t mean sloppy.
If you are faced with a situation where a small project (release, product, etc.) is kept internally, that is fine. There is no requirement that the results of each sprint have any weight in the market. They can have a lot of value as part of a chain: the team will review them and continue to the finish line in the next sprint. C agile marketing management is completely under control, so you can quickly decide when the results of a particular iteration are good enough to share with the world.
Don't wast
Agile Marketing in Numbers
3 Myths About Agile Marketing
The popularity of the agile approach in marketing continues to grow. Along with the number of myths about it. We have adapted several articles by Scott Brinker to dispel these myths and understand what to really expect from the implementation of agile.
Scott Brinker is a marketer with 20 years of telegram codes list experience, the author of the popular blog Chief Marketing Technologist and the book "Agile Marketing. Hacker practices for effective business". Last year, Scott was also a speaker at the MarTech conference, organized by CoMagic.
Agile Marketing in Numbers
Andrea Friar of AgileSherpas, one of the world's leading experts in agile marketing and author of Death of a Marketer, has collaborated with CoSchedule on the 2nd annual State of Agile Marketing Report. It's packed with useful agile stats. Here are the key numbers:
50% of traditional marketers plan to adopt agile within this year,
54% of agile marketers report using a mixed structure (up 10% from last year),
31% of marketers cite lack of education as their top barrier to moving to agile.
As we can see, more and more organizations are striving to be agile-oriented, and this is not surprising, because the benefits of agile marketing are extremely compelling:
53% of respondents noted the ability to quickly and effectively change strategy based on feedback;
44% - greater transparency of the current status of projects;
40% - quick identification of problems;
39% - higher quality of work;
36% - accelerated launch of products/projects;
33% - raising the fighting spirit of teams;
28% - better alignment of business goals;
28% - more effective prioritization of tasks;
25% - increase in team productivity.
The diagram below shows the methods and practices that agile marketers use:
44% - daily planning meeting;
42% - user stories;
32% - retrospective;
31% — WIP limits (abbreviation for Work In Progress) — work that is submitted but not finished and awaits sale (for example, in the case of a food business);
28% - short iterations;
27% - sprint / iterative planning;
26% - frequent releases;
22% - sprint/iteration review;
16% — Planning Poker — a task estimation technique for agile teams;
13% - Kanban board.
This chart does a great job of showing that agile marketing is not a carefree “let’s just try a bunch of different things quickly and see what happens.” Agile marketing is a set of clearly defined management practices that reflect a philosophy of continuous improvement.
When someone says, “Agile Marketing doesn’t work,” the first thing you should do is show them this chart and ask, “Which of these practices have you been using and for how long?”
46% of surveyed companies have been practicing agile for less than 2 years
3 Myths About Agile Marketing
Agile marketing itself is still a work in progress. Hundreds of innovative marketers are experimenting with adapting its methods to their own tasks and processes.
Agile marketing is more like chili — a versatile spice for bean-based stews that comes in many different variations. Like chili chefs, agile marketers often pride themselves on their unique blends, tailored to their company and culture. I believe that such experimentation — an evolutionary approach to learning which agile marketing methods work best in different types of organizations — is the right strategy for our industry right now. It is certainly consistent with the agile philosophy itself, which encourages adaptation across industries and teams.
But in the absence of a clearly defined and widely accepted methodology for agile marketing, a number of misconceptions about its essence seem to persist. Here are 3 myths about agile marketing that hold many organizations back from implementing it, and thus preventing them from realizing the true potential of their marketing department. Let’s look at them and dispel them.
Myth #1: Agile means doing things quickly and with poor quality
There are two accusations here: speed and lack of quality - and they are both wrong.
Agile is not about doing things quickly, or working in a rush. In fact, the philosophy of the agile approach is based on the desire for more stable and efficient work, rather than its acceleration. Agile is aimed at preventing burnout, not causing it.
Agile accelerates results in other ways:
1. Agile teams strive to minimize time spent on unnecessary overhead: excessive documentation, superficial meetings, or overly formal protocols between stakeholders. It's about finding the best output-per-unit-of-time ratio that leads to more productive work.
2. Agile aims to break down large projects into smaller ones, each of which is valuable in its own right and can be validated either through internal review or external market feedback. Ideally, it is less about breaking things down into serialized components and more about refining or expanding iterations. So instead of waiting three months for a large project to be completed, smaller iterations of that project can be completed in a matter of days or weeks.
This is the heart of what makes agile so powerful. By enabling rapid feedback, a project can adjust to changes in the market and adapt based on people's reactions. Maybe a smaller project implementation is enough, and you'll realize it in time. Maybe it's not a very successful project at all, and the team would be better off doing something else. Agile gives more room for such adjustments, and thus helps avoid wasting time, effort, and money.
3. Agile eliminates the “burning” issues that depress productivity. When a team’s work is interrupted by urgent issues (drop this, do that), the costs of reorientation—losing momentum, shifting gears, taking off again—have a big impact on productivity.
Yes, change still happens and urgent work arises. But agile accommodates this reality by using short sprints—usually 2–4 weeks. At the end of each sprint, there is an opportunity to reprioritize the next sprint, so the team is not interrupted by urgent requests mid-cycle. This allows for a balance between speed of response and focus on the right task.
Agile also does not reduce the quality of work of specialists.
Where does this misconception come from? First of all, sometimes the most productive way to illustrate an idea is to create a prototype, a kind of “low-res implementation” that is used only for internal demonstration and discussion. For example, web designers may make prototypes of a future website to show the possibilities of the layout. However, no one would ever say: “Okay, let’s just take these prototypes and call them a website!”
Second, because agile encourages breaking large projects into smaller iterations, some people assume that “smaller” is synonymous with “low quality.” But that’s not necessarily true. In most scenarios, you can create a smaller project that’s still high quality. Small doesn’t mean sloppy.
If you are faced with a situation where a small project (release, product, etc.) is kept internally, that is fine. There is no requirement that the results of each sprint have any weight in the market. They can have a lot of value as part of a chain: the team will review them and continue to the finish line in the next sprint. C agile marketing management is completely under control, so you can quickly decide when the results of a particular iteration are good enough to share with the world.
Don't wast