Driving Market Impact through Operationalizing Agile Marketing
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The document discusses an approach to operationalizing agile practices in marketing organizations. It describes the speaker's experience helping marketing teams adopt Agile for Marketing (A4M) practices. The speaker outlines key topics that will be covered, including an overview of agile, scaling agile practices, making agile sustainable long-term, and examples of how other companies have successfully implemented agile. The presentation emphasizes that truly transforming an organization to be agile requires changing its underlying culture and mindset, not just implementing new processes. Case studies are presented showing how organizations improved behaviors and drove strategic alignment through agile adoption initiatives.
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Driving Market Impact through Operationalizing Agile Marketing
- 1. Driving Market Impact through Operationalizing Agile December 10, 2015 Presenter: Nicolina Nelson Miller
- 2. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION About CMG’s approach to agile EXPERIENCE Two decades of bringing new technologies and products to market, working in collaborative, cross-silo, highly effective/efficient processes. RESEARCH Three-plus years of research among leading chief marketing officers, agile practitioners and other experts to gain insight on the state of the art. BUILD We have helped marketing teams of five to 100+ people make the transformation through the trial, adoption and scaling of Agile for Marketing™ (what we call A4M) across their marketing organizations. 2 Nicolina Miller Agile Marketing Specialist
- 3. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 3 1. Agile overview 2. What it means to scale agile 3. How to make agile last 4. How other companies have made agile successful What we’ll talk about
- 4. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION A new marketing operating system 4 AGILE • Customer centric approach to business • Disciplined in execution yet flexible in operations • Accountable and empowered teams
- 5. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Agile drives operational excellence 5
- 6. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Yet, most organizations look like this 6 POWER & STRUCTURE Authority Formal roles Hierarchy Stable process Toll gates/check points/formal reviews COMMAND & CONTROL
- 7. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Where is your organization today? COMMAND & CONTROL INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY COLLABORATIVE CULTURE SHARED ACCOUNTABILITY Source: 7
- 8. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Agile organizations live here Source: COMMAND & CONTROL INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY COLLABORATIVE CULTURE SHARED ACCOUNTABILITY 8
- 9. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 9 Moving to a more decentralized structure enables organizations to have: 1. Better understanding of market 2. Speed of anticipation and response 3. Better decision making 4. Happy and proactive teams 5. Clarity of mission - people marching together in the same direction
- 10. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION “Alright, I’m in. How do I get there?” 10
- 11. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION There’s a difference between . . . DOING AGILE BEING AGILE 11
- 12. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Methodology vs. Mindset MINDSET Right brain Flexible Collaborative Empowered Experimental Customer-focused Transparent METHODOLOGY Left brain Set structure Set roles Self-organized Focused Data driven 12
- 13. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 13 To transform requires changing the system Leadership Agile Operating System
- 14. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION MetricsPeople Process Components of operating at scale Focus STRATEGYPROGRAMEXECUTION Program Manager GovernanceCommittee • Progress against goals • CSAT • Revenue • ROMI x • MarketingGoals & Objectives • Marketing Priorities • KPIs MARKETING ROADMAP Marketing Leadership Team Prioritization & Budget $$$$ $$$ $$ $ $ • Progress against program KPIs • Product • Solution • Initiative KEY PROGRAMS Business Owner/ Team Lead • Objectives • Priorities • Segmentation/C ustomer Knowledge • Strategy Program Backlog • Progress against sprint cycles • Delivery efficiency DELIVERY ACTIVITY Delivery Teams • Objective setting • Planning • Sprints/ iterations • Learning cycles • Customer feedback loops Sprint Backlog 14
- 15. @cmgpartners.com | © CMG PARTNERS 2015 But . . . the culture is the biggest barrier 15 Source: VersionOne State of Agile Study Barriers to further agile adoption 53% Inability to change organizational culture As expected, the same reason agile projects fail is also what keeps companies from further agile adoption – culture. An ‘inability to change organizational culture’ and the ‘general resistance to change’ were the two most commonly cited barriers for respondents, followed by trying to fit agile elements into a non- agile framework. *Respondents were allowed to select more than one answer. 28% Project complexity 25% Customer collaboration 13% Budget constraints 13% Perceived time to transition 13% none 42% General resistance to change 35% Trying to fit agile elements into a non- agileframework 30% Management support 33% Availability of personal with right skills 23% Confidence with the ability to scale
- 16. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 16 Three areas to get started 1. Focus on the behaviors you need to change (mindset) 2. Identify strategic drivers by which to align operations (methodology) 3. Establish leadership governance to drive change
- 17. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 17 • Focus on culture as much as process – really understand what behaviors need to change • Do your diligence on your customer – internal and external • Get people comfortable being t- shaped 1) Focus on behaviors you need to change Breadth of knowledge + depth of expertise
- 18. @cmgpartners.com | © CMG PARTNERS 2015 CASE STUD Y 18 Changing culture: A telecommunications company 1 Focus first on people, then process 2 Set up ongoing measurement around behaviors 3 Align team goals, objectives and incentives
- 19. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION Collaborative: Working together versus in silos Case study - impact 3.2 4 0 5 Iterative/ experimental: Taking small calculated risks and learning from them Empowered to make decisions: I believe I am empowered to make the necessary decisions 2.6 4 0 5 3.2 4 0 5 2.6 4.4 0 5 Customer focused: Putting customer needs at center of decision making Pre Agile Adoption Post Agile Adoption 19
- 20. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION • Push the marketing organization to have a clear strategy and clear priorities • Align your teams in a way that reflects your desired end-state of business • Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize 20 2) Identify strategic drivers by which to align operations MARKETING ROADMAP
- 21. @cmgpartners.com | © CMG PARTNERS 2015 CASE STUD Y 21 Strategy to execution – At Version One 1. Generated annual marketing goals and 5-7 key priorities set for the year 2. On a monthly basis, revisited priorities: Identify what they need to do vs. where they need to get better 3. On a weekly basis, plan – execute – review work – adjust: 3 teams (programs, creative, & Web) 2. MONTHLY Planning 1. Annual Goal/ Priorities Setting 3. Weekly Sprints
- 22. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION • Take the time to put together a purposeful change management plan • Inspire active and engaged leadership • Build a thoughtful approach to bringing along needed stakeholders 22 3) Establish leadership governance to drive change
- 23. @cmgpartners.com | © CMG PARTNERS 2015 CASE STUD Y 23 Leadership: An Internet company Oh yeah, I’ve heard of “Agile Marketing” Context 1 This initiative will improve Marketing’s impact on revenue delivery for the business. Awareness 2 A new operating model will transform the way we collaborate and manage the business to influence greater revenue. Understanding 3 I believe this project is integral to sustaining our growth strategy. Acceptance 4 I understand the value of this initiative and must be a part of our way forward. Commitment 5 I can speak from experience that this process delivers results. Advocate 6
- 24. ©2015, CMG PARTNERS – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION 24 1. Focus on the culture as much as the process. Really understand what behaviors need to change 2. Do your diligence on your customer – internal and external 3. Get people comfortable being t-shaped 4. Push the marketing organization to have a clear strategy and clear priorities 5. Align your teams in a way that reflects your desired end state of business 6. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize 7. Take the time to put together a purposeful change management plan 8. Inspire active and engaged leadership 9. Build a thoughtful approach to bringing along needed stakeholders 10. Be patient – know that you will break things Wrap up: 10 key learnings
- 25. cmgpartners.com | © CMG PARTNERS 2015 THANK YOU! ANY QUESTIONS? If you want to talk further, I’m all ears: 25 Nicolina Nelson Miller Agile Marketing Specialist nicolina.miller@cmgpartners.com 203.803.0520
Editor's Notes
- CMG Partners is a marketing strategy consulting firm where we help companies with their growth strategies, their product commercialization, and their marketing performance. We have two decades of bringing new technologies to market, working in highly matrixed organizations. For years we have seen the same challenges in driving effectiveness and efficiency – lack of integration across functions, no cross view of data, no cross view of customer (or no customer-focused approach at all) – and have worked to help organizations break down these self-induced barriers to drive meaningful productivity. For the last 3 years, We have been digging into what agility means and how people are getting there. We have conducted research among leading CMOs on what agility means to them, how they achieve Agility in their organization, and Agile users on key lessons and insights. As a result of what we have learned, we are now helping companies adopt agile. We have worked with marketing teams 5 to 100 people to help them make the transformation to Agile. Often times the symptoms are different in an organization but the solution is the same. Yet, Agile for Marketing is different than Agile for Software – you can’t just take an agile coach for software and expect the “right approach”. I witnessed it yesterday – my client was getting a demo from one of the big 3 agile software companies. He lost her in the first 5 minutes. He didn’t know how to talk to a marketer – he only knew how to position the product for development. It’s very different.
- I presume you already know what Agile is and why organizations use it… this is after all a webinar on scaling agile, not learning about what agile is. My talk today is going to focus on what it means to scale agile in an organization, what makes it last, and examples from clients and others One thing I’d like to highlight is that today’s conversations should run about 45, not the full hour. I’ll be chatting with you for about 30 minutes and then I’d like to use the last 10-15 for discussion and questions. So as we go through the first half hour please submit any questions through question section and we will try to get as many of them answered.
- We call agile an operating system because it fundamentally changes the way you work, think, and act as an organization. At least it should if you do it right. One thing to stress, is that it is not just the way you work, but also the way you think. A4M is a collection of principles, organized into a customer-focused operating system, which increases an organization’s capacity to deliver better business results: Get to market faster for new products and technologies Deal with complexity in real time Deliver greater impact and more effective campaigns Empower data-driven decisions Create meaningful customer experiences We call it an operating system b/c it fundamentally changes the way we work, behave, and think. It empowers a mindset that enables rapid learning and decision making while integrating a methodology that enables teams to achieve goals otherwise unachievable.
- Operational Excellence is the ability deliver to marketing performance. Operational Excellence is the alignment of the critical marketing organizational elements (marketing strategy, organization design, people, results, culture, and leadership) resulting in the optimization of marketing. Agile gives you a structure to make sure your resources are being used on the most important things given what you are learning about the business A4M helps achieve this by focusing highly collaborative, empowered teams on the things that matter most to driving business results or creating positive customer experiences. Holding each other accountable for doing better the next go around. In an agile environment you have cross functionality, collaborative teams working together to achieve a goal, and being head accountable…..
- But most org looks like this. A boss who is driving down goals and objectives and they have a really structured hierarchy, and really bureaucratic processes that cause delay and inefficiency in the ways teams work.
- So I urge you to think about where your organization is on this continuum. Organizations move often from a command and control approach to an individual accountability where the higher you grow in the organization the more accountability you have. Some organizations have moved to create a highly collaborative culture but have yet to get to that shared accountability where performance really elevates because teams members feel accountable to each other. Environments with Shared accountability are typically Highly decentralized Very empowered Highly collaborative
- Agile organizations have gotten to the place where there really is that shared accountability. They are empowered teams.– the decision-making is at the front line and as a result the teams are not only jointly accountable, they feel accountable to each other – like teams. They don’t want to let the team down, vs. themselves. As a result of being able to be empowered and make decisions, they not only feel accountable but they start to ask themselves the right questions, and what are the biz implications here? One of our clients recently shared that one of the best outcomes of going to agile was that her team really grew in their ability to own and drive marketing decisions
- If you move from the very formal hierarchy, command and control to a shared accountability, these are the benefits you get from it: Happy and proactive teams: we do a pre/post adoption survey every time we help a company adopt agile so that we can’t quantify the impact the adoption is having on many different measures across the org. one of those metrics is employee satisfaction. Our clients are always shocked when they see how much more satisfied their team members are as a result of this process. Agile teams are empowered teams – the decision making is happening closer to the front line I read Boys in the Boat recently – the UofWashington rowing team who won the Olympics in the 30’s – they were the underdogs. They found the right people in the right positions on the right team and by putting that combo the team really flourished, when you are out on the water rowing you are making all of the decisions, you are calling all the shots - in a way that a coach never could standing on the shore because you are on the front lines, seeing what the other boats are doing, you are much closer to the issues. And having to make the call ensured their minds were in the boat (MIB from Boys in the Boat) at all times – increasing the quality of the decision making and speed in which they were made. Empowerment put everyone in the game, drove accountability down to individual and team level and made the organizations much more agile and incredibly effective.
- So I’ve made the case, hopefully, for why agile is such a great operating system to adopt.
- On the left – you have agile teams, following agile methods, to delivery work. On the right – the entire marketing organization has embraced agile. You have the teams focused on doing what is right for the teams. Most companies end up just doing agile – they reorganize to address operational challenges and they get some benefit from just working differently. Very few become agile because it requires dealing with changing how people think which is inevitably more difficult. But this is where the real productivity gains come from.
- You need both the mindset and the methodology working together to help your marketing organization propel performance. You need the fundamental structure and roles that come with the methodology, and the desire to experience to innovate to be transparent to work well together that comes with the mindset. You need the team members to feel accountable to do what is right on behalf of the team to achieve business performance. So how, is this achieved? How can you operationalize agile, and not have it be an initiative that dies on the vine in 6 months. In other words, how do you make it stick?
- …to make it stick, it takes fundamentally changing your operating system. It means you need to make sure that you are addressing each of these areas when adopting agile in order to make sure the adoption has staying power. FOCUS – Clear strategy, clear priorities at the organization level. Agile is all about having efficiency and effectiveness, but you need a clear strategy to know WHAT to deliver. CULTURE – Embracing of the Agile principals. Collaborative. Transparent. Data driven. Customer focused. And so on. PEOPLE – Truly empowered teams with joint accountability, and the ability to flex what they work on PROCESS – Agile delivery. Methodology you are using. Really figuring out how the best incorporate into your business. LEADERSHIP – Active engaged leadership championing the change.
- How does everything we have been talking about for the last 15 minutes translate into what it looks from an operating standpoint? This is an example of how an agile process works when it scales. Let’s start with strategy: You have marketing goals and objectives, priorities, KPIs presumably even some kind of marketing roadmap. It’s the responsibility of the marketing leadership to make sure that the strategy is built and the strategy is clear. Then, you will prioritize that strategy. What is MOST important that we accomplish? Once you have prioritized those items, you then put delivery teams against it with a business owner or team lead. The biz owner will be responsible for prioritizing at a program level. Then the delivery team will self organize to figure out how they are going to get the work done for each sprint. So in summary, large organizations are prioritizing at the strategy level, the program level, and at the execution level. And the organization is holding teams and team members accountable at three levels with crisp metrics. At the end of the day, the guiding light is your strategy, agile does not mean you are absent strategy. Need to know what you are trying to speed the delivery up of.
- The most common failure point is when organizations cant effectively change culture. Teams and leaders typically don’t have a hard time getting mechanics in place, they have a hard time getting from doing agile to being agile.
- So what we are going to do with the rest of our time today is talk through 3 places where you can get started to impact, not just doing agile but being agile. How do you make that change and make it stick: In order to reinforce and institutionalize the change. Take a look at your culture. Where are you weakest when you compare against the agile principles? CMG’s Agile Readiness test: We have recently developed an agile readiness test that assess your teams and each individual team member against the agile principles. Please reach out if you are interested. Clear strategy, clear priorities before you get started. Leadership
- Organization more often than not focus on the process more than the culture. We find it is most valuable to focus on the true behaviors you need to change and to develop mitigation plan for them. A great example came from last week’s Agile Marketing Meet-up – Sean Ellis talked about High-Tempo Testing Sometimes it’s not enough to say – we are going to be data-driven, or we are going to be experimental. You need to set the goals for your teams to know what that means. For him, it was 3 tests a week. You need to solve directly for the behaviors you need to change. ______ We all know that agile is supposed to be a customer-centric methodology but more often than not, one of the main reasons for its failure is not doing enough diligence on your customer – both internal and external So when we go to work with a new client we spend a significant amount of time helpig them aggregate what they know abou thteir customers, helping them makes heads or tails of it, and we identiy what gaps are there and we will fill it if need be. This is a major behavioral change to get in a rhythm of using customer insights to drive decisions. Often– companies put together their marketing backlog based on things they just need to get done/ things they believe they need to get done vs. really thinking about: Which customers can I win with? What are their unique needs? How can I influence their buying behavior. ______ In an agile environment, people are well suited for their roles, they are t-shaped, they are entrepreneurial (because the culture allows them to be) and they feel like they have skin in the game. Furthermore, t-shaped people have better business acumen typically as they have more exposure to more facets of the business and the interdependencies that exist. You still want to leverage peoples strengths and expertise but you also want to make sure that they are fully used and balanced on the team. Example: 1) formal training, using development plans/360 on where people need to grow next to contribute greater to the team. 2) Using sprints as an opportunity to cross-train people (shadowing for x amount of hours)
- One way to identify the main behaviors that need to change is with a pre training survey to baseline against agile indicators. What this does is gives us and the client a holistic understanding of where are they are now versus where they want get to, and where need to focus as a result. This helps us prioritize where to get started. We then run this survey every quarter to see if progress is being made on the cultural elements. For a large global public Telecom client, the survey identified 4 priority areas that really needed to change. Collaboration –big challenges between field marketing and corporate marketing in how they worked together. At the root of it was different goals and objectives and different performance drivers. The company aligned the performance review goals of all team members to the same goals and objectives for their agile delivery team. Iterative and experimental - actually learning from what they put in market. We added formal team reviews of data and insights to specifically drive decision making and incorporated it into sprint planning. Set goals for both delivery and “getting better” at aspects of their marketing. Acceptance criteria focused on the learning objectives of tests. Empowerment – Teams felt like they were being told what to do Working with leadership to relinquish control Customer-Focused – There wasn’t a lot of cross-knowledge on the customer. There was a need for the entire team to focus more on who the customer was, what they needed, how to influence them, etc. Instituting data reviews, customer interviews, etc to help inform marketing workstack. When you are very clear on the behaviors that need to change, you can design to it.
- Movement in 3 months across the 4 keys areas we addressed as the greatest problem areas.
- I’ve seen the term “the Marketing plan is dead” used in Agile marketing presentations. I disagree. You still need a marketing roadmap. You have to have a starting point. The difference is you build in the flexibility to change. Without a clear strategy, clear priorities, and an initial plan of the work to achieve your goals, agile teams will struggle. You need to have some organizing principal everyone can understand. As organizations can’t do it all you have to have clarity on the priorities and what will best help you grow the business. You have to make choices about which products, geographies, etc. are most critical to growth. It effects your strategy all the way down to your GTM programs. Most common failure points: Unclear on the problem you are trying to solve Lack of Strategy No clear priorities at the organizational level And once your strategy is set and your priorities are clear -- align your operations against those strategic drivers. ______ We call this picking your orientation – you need to identify your core growth levers and align teams there. how do you want to make trade-offs and what best supports your business goals. So for example, how can you best go to market to reach your customers? -- is it by function (which is how most companies are organized), or is it by customer segment? Or by product? Companies need to think about what are their strategic priorities and how to best align agile teams to deliver against them. ______ You need to recognize that however you structure your teams you will be prioritizing. If you organize by customer segment, you will be prioritizing across your products – which products are most needed by this customer group, where can I best win – If you organize by product, you will have to prioritize by customer segment. Organizations paralyze themselves by not prioritizing. This is really hard for organizations who often try and support everything – products, segments, and solutions to multiple target customers. Understand how you will drive growth in market – for this client – it was by segment (Media & Entertainment, Financial Services, etc) and then align around it. The market depth and the ability to sell solutions was much stronger focusing on segments than focusing on products and the prioritization was much more customer-focused.
- To Operationalize requires determining how you will operate as a team, how your strategy is turned into a fluid delivery approach, when and where you will revisit plans, and knowing that nothing agile is set in stone. Typically, it requires putting all these pieces together. So this example from Version One isn’t one of our case studies per se, but it does is give an example of how exactly a company brings agile to life Strategy – Version One goes into a new year with the 5-7 strategic priorities to achieve business goals determined by the marketing leadership team. Agile does not mean no plan; it means the flexibility to change the plan of record. Strategies are broken into marketing goals – goals are set by the agile teams working with the marketing leadership team. Set the marketing initiatives at the annual level for budgeting purposes but it’s guided by monthly planning. Goals are 50% things they want to do and 50% where they want to get better. Marketing planning happens monthly – gives them an ability to revisit the plan monthly and review what they have learned.
- 1.Think about how you will effect the change, what type of communications are needed to the organization, how you will reinforce the behaviors you are looking for. _________ 2. Active and engaged leadership – it takes time for the culture to take root, to get into the rhythm and feel the impact of the new way of working. Leadership needs to continually support and engage the teams. Celebrate small wins. Show up for Sprint reviews. Help troubleshoot issues. _________ 3. Make sure that stakeholders understand the new approach to working and what they can expect. If you have been delivering complete sales kits to the sales team and you start delivering pieces every two weeks… you need to make sure that your key internal stakeholders understand and are at least supportive of trying a new way of working. _______ Lastly, what’s not on here, is the importance of developing a leadership governance charter: Sets marketing strategy & priorities Priority guidance to the sprint team activities Governs over budgets and resource allocation Identifies/ removes impediments for the teams Enables empowerment and self-organization Champions Agile within & outside of Marketing Recognizes and Rewards Make the Process better.
- The biggest challenge with a very large global internet media client was in getting the leadership on board and supporting the effort. Operationalizing and institutionalizing agile in marketing meant putting in place the Right governance Right change management efforts Right communication plans And most importantly, you need understand where people are, where stakeholders are on this spectrum and where you as leadership team are. Then work to put in place the right comms plan, the right touch points and the right management efforts to move people along the continuum. At the end of the day, you need the leadership at the commitment and advocate level. You really only need your stakeholders at the understanding and acceptance level. As long as they are not working against you, and they are well informed that is fine. But leadership has to be at the 5 or 6 level. So what we did at this internet media client was we went through all the stakeholders and leadership team members and identified where veryone was on this continuum and put a coms plan together for how to get them from A to Z. And as a result we succesful moved every single stakeholder and team lead into their apprirpriate place on the contium to ensure a smooth agile takeoff. -------- To operationalize, you need to align team members and leadership on goals and objectives through how they are incentivized via performance evaluations across the teams. To operationalize, you need to bring the leadership along – have them be part of defining the reason to change and the solution (Agile) AND it’s activation. To operationalize, you need to model the right behaviors and reinforce the behaviors – demonstrate what it means to be collaborative, to empower, to experiment, and make it ok to fail. It can’t be do as I say, not as I do. With so many teams, it required putting in place governance to see across the teams and help arbitrate over decision making, funding allocation, issue resolution, etc.
- Agile for Marketing means growing pains – As one CMO put it WHEN YOU GET STARTED YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU ARE TAKING 2 STEPS BACK BEFORE YOU TAKE ONE STEP FORWARD. with multiple teams make sure there is a forum to understand where and how the process is breaking down. Reinforce that these will be other challenges that arise that will need to be solved for but these three are the most significant short-term challenges to solve in operationalizing agile. You will break things as you move into agile marketing – it will uncover you don’t have a strategy, your team doesn’t work well together, you don’t know how to effect change. -- take it one at a time. Iterate, Improve, adjust.