How to Adapt Agile Methodology for Marketing, Design, and other Creative Teams

When my content marketing team at ConsenSys first started Agile training, we made what I now consider a n00b mistake. We tried to make our weekly standup more efficient, more regimented. We tried to make it 15 minutes and only give updates and not get off topic.

But we always went over time, and we always ended up joking and laughing.

Someone on the team said “I guess you can’t scrum with friends.”

And from then on something changed. We stopped trying to make our meetings efficient and started trying to make them fun, engaging, inspiring. We wanted to impress each other, to activate each other, to support each other and solve each other’s problems.

We became a real team.

And it paid off. No I didn’t know what everyone on my team was working on at any moment. No we didn’t check each other’s work. No we didn’t have deadlines or assignments. No we didn’t have a backlog. But we hit our OKRs, produced high-impact content, and provided killer creative ideas and content strategies for our internal projects at a high level of efficiency.

The Problem with Agile and Marketing

Warning: If you are unfamiliar with Agile and words like “ceremonies,” “scrum,” and “sprint,” go do some reading and come back.

When I first started trying to adapt the Agile ceremonies to our marketing work, I didn’t know where to start. I got frustrated very quickly. Marketing is inherently a service-oriented part of a company. We are reacting to internal and external events and information. We can’t craft a backlog for even a 2 week sprint and stick to it.

There are a couple reasons why it’s hard at first glance to fit Agile & marketing together. One is that Agile is a framework for product management. It’s designed to help a team concretely define & tackle a project, not to manage the complicated workflow of a service-oriented team. As marketers we’re working on a ton of projects at once. One backlog can’t describe our work.

The other reason is that Agile was originally developed for engineers who are used to solving problems individually. Not that engineering and development aren’t incredibly creative fields - but they are often more individual processes. Whether it’s because communicative, collaborative people are drawn to marketing and design or because the work of communication is best done in groups, marketing and design are highly collaborative processes.

There were a few paradigm shifts I had to make before I could effectively adapt Agile to my work - and in true Agile fashion, I'm still working on it.

Be Agile, Don’t Do Agile

I wanted so badly to do Agile. I googled “Agile marketing teams” and I couldn’t find a single useful result. If you work in content marketing, you know how weird it is to not be able to find a blog somewhere about how to do your job. The situation was dire.

So I talked to the amazing Mary Gribbin and Tony Wong (Digital Onion, Applied Agile) and learned about a different, deeper approach to Agile - not just Doing Agile (i.e. following the ceremonies), but Being Agile.

The idea behind Being Agile is that you should focus on Agile values, not the ceremonies themselves.

This opened up a new door. We could adapt the Agile ceremonies for our own use.

Sprint on Projects

So remember how I said before we don’t have deadlines or assignments or backlogs? Okay, that’s not exactly true, but our content team didn’t have them as a whole. Instead, we each worked on multiple projects which we tried to run in an Agile-ish fashion.

Since we worked on so many projects, it didn’t make sense to run a full sprint for every one. We learned to adapt the ceremonies to our situation. Maybe for a large working group we would run two week “sprints” but mostly do the planning and review. Maybe for a huge important project we’d do it all. Or maybe for our own personal projects we would just make a Trello board backlog.

These projects included people from a ton of different teams and they weren’t always Agile practitioners. Having flexibility in our practice of Agile helped us adapt for the different work situations we found ourselves in.

Beyond Agile: Keep Team Time Sacred

So, if we’re all working on different projects and we have our own backlogs and organization, our team meetings are useless right? After all, they aren’t any of the Agile ceremonies. We don’t have a scrum master or a list of tasks to go through. If we aren’t scrumming or retro-ing, what are we doing?

Another team member said it perfectly. The goal of a team meeting isn’t to tell each other everything we’re working on, be perfectly transparent, or be perfectly informationally aligned. It doesn’t have to be the most efficient meeting you’ve ever seen. It’s a break from the day. It’s a moment to be supported, to let some silliness and creativity come through. It’s a time when we surface issues, crack jokes, and test out our craziest ideas - our dreamlog. What that gives a team is a feeling of support, trust, and freedom that lets us push harder, fix problems, and activate our biggest ideas.

Cover photo by İrfan Simsar on Unsplash