Operational Agility for Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and Advertising are important business capabilities that drive client acquisition and revenue generation. Integrating agility into these business operations can yield positive results that drive value, improve time to market and reduce investment costs long-term.

One of the key aspects of both Marketing and Advertising is that often they are often associated with big upfront investments to create content and messaging before any important feedback can be captured and evaluated. Updating your marketing and advertising business operations for agility is not hard, but it often will challenge long-held beliefs about being successful. Remember the people who are leading these functional capabilities have had success in non-agile ways of working so they will resist change as they can’t easily envision how agility will continue to allow them to deliver success.

Marketing Working Example:

For our purposes, we will utilize the website Vacations R Us, whose business is focused on people looking for a place to go on vacation, for practical management for agility examples.

Problem Statement

The business has noted that there has been a drop-off in people adding additional activities to their vacation plans, resulting in a 10% drop in revenue month to month.

Ideation – Marketing has identified that they believe there needs to be a better or different way to have a customer call to action throughout the customer journey on the site.

NOTE - When Marketing is going through their ideation process, they need to engage someone from the product development team, if they work in Scrum, the Product Owner, at a minimum, would be engaged in these initial discussions and provide Marketing with approaches and limitations in what can be a potential solution.

Operational updates – It is common for functional groups to exhibit territorial ownership, as leaders of Marketing and Product, you will need to instill in your teams that collaboration is the key to successful outcomes. Break down these barriers and get involved as well. Being involved allows you the leader, to model the right behaviors for your teams to see. Everyone can provide unique experiences and perspectives to identify creative solutions to business problems.

It is important for Marketing, the Product Owner, and the entire team to perform a Discovery session to understand the problem, discuss and model out some different ideas that would help in the development of the teams’ product backlog of work that contains a prioritized set of changes to the site that the team will develop.

Though Discovery is often thought of as a waste of time, don’t skip this important ideation and team building activity.

What are Discovery Sessions?

Though they potentially go by many different names, such as Design Thinking, the purpose of a Discovery session is to assemble everyone on the team, along with the key people from Marketing, and any other subject matter experts who may provide insights that will help deliver the changes necessary to address the current problem of lower adoption of secondary activities with a vacation purchase. Essentially anyone who can provide input, can and should be there..

Expected Outcomes

Discovery sessions should deliver a initial Product Backlog that is focused on delivery of the first important features and functionality. UX, Architectural design, key development Themes, and user stories for the first few Sprints will build confidence in the teams ability to deliver consistently. The important takeaway as a leader or manager is to make sure you don't expect more detailed plans from the Discovery efforts. The team is delivering an initial plan, not a fixed set of scope and dates to work towards. The goal is value delivery.

Operational Updates

One of the biggest changes from a management perspective will be how you track and monitor work from a delivery perspective. You have likely been trained to expect a project plan, that contains milestone dates and expected scope delivered with those milestone dates. Updating your operating processes will require a high level of engagement from you and your other managers. Instead of fixed milestones and scope, the team will convey the first set of functionalities they expect to deliver. It is important that you as the manager and leader engage with the teams on their level, which means you will be attending demos on some regular cadence perhaps not every 2-weeks but expect at a minimum at least every other sprint. The reason for your engagement is that you have the ability to change direction, add more functionality than originally planned, or even stop development if it’s clear what is being developed won’t deliver the value or solve the problem as currently designed. Agile is all about flexibility, but for there to be flexibility you must be engaged. Unless your engagement level increases, you will end up with the team simply delivering what was identified in their Discovery session, working through their backlog of ideas until they decide they are one.

Real-life example - At one large media company, their UX, Development, and Product groups worked independently of each other, resulting in the UX and Product teams selling the business on web designs that could not be supported by the current technology. As part of updating their processes, they began having Discovery sessions that included - UX, Architecture, Product, and the team(s) that would be developing the solution. This change had dramatic impacts and when the business stakeholders were engaged in the Discovery process, their engagement was crucial in teams delivering exactly what the business needed. This was often different from what they thought they wanted at the beginning of the Discovery and development processes. The business went from having little confidence in solutions being successfully delivered to them having the confidence to make multi-million-dollar investments for exciting new products for their customers. None of this would have happened if not for changing the way that they worked.

Ways of working

There are many ways you can support agility within the Marketing and Advertising capabilites. Below you will find some examples that show how to integrate a collaborative approach to them.

A/B Testing

The most common way to maximize the speed of change is to leverage A/B testing with your product development teams.

What is A/B testing? A/B testing for websites involves a methodical approach to comparing two versions of a web page or specific elements within it to determine which version performs better in achieving a specific goal.

Collaboration - The Marketing Lead and the Product Owner should be in constant contact with each other reviewing current usage and conversion analytics to see if they are in line with expected targets. When there is a variance in the behavior of the customer that should be cause for a deeper analysis as to what may be causing the variance.
Goal Identification - When Marketing has identified a goal for improvement or mitigation they will work with the PO and team to discuss various technical approaches that are available for a potential solution.
Select the approach -
- Identify the expected outcomes from the change.
- Determine how the A/B test will be implemented. Often this involves placing the changes on a few select servers and then redirecting a sub-set of traffic to the new functionality and then monitoring analytics to see if the changes deliver the intended outcome.
Monitor and Decide - It may take a few changes before the intended outcomes are realized, so you need to let the teams work through this. Working in this manner is an inexact science and requires an iterative approach, don’t pressure the teams to get things done quickly, your goal as a leader is to ensure that they deliver value to the customer and ultimately the business.