Agile Marketing

Catching up on my backlog of data and topics from before #MartechDay earlier this month — which featured the 2022 marketing technology landscape and the 2022 Stackies — the top of my list is the latest State of Agile Marketing report from AgileSherpas. As always, this is a terrific, comprehensive report on how and why agile methodologies are being used in marketing. You can see from the chart above that agile has found its way …

Have we entered a post-agile marketing age? Continue Reading »

Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates. But I am excited to share with you some exciting news about real agile marketing adoption. AgileSherpas and Forrester just released their new State of Agile Marketing 2021 report, and it reveals an important milestone: for the first time, the majority (51%) of marketers surveyed reporting using agile …

Majority of marketing departments now use agile (and they’re more strategically aligned as a result) Continue Reading »

Agile management was born 20 years ago, to help teams operate better in a fast-moving, ever-changing, digital world. Agile originated in software development circles, with a bunch of programmers high in the mountains, and spread to other disciplines, eventually marketing. (“Hey, what are you all doing, standing around, chatting in a circle? With a whiteboard? Looks like fun! Can I join?”) Without even having to know what agile marketing actually meant, marketing teams knew it …

Introducing Scram: Hyperagile Marketing Practices for a Hyperautomation, Hypergrowth World Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post curated by Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas, sharing reflections from leading agile marketing practitioners and analysts on the findings from her latest State of Agile Marketing report. As we learned in the 3rd Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, there are lots of different manifestations of marketing agility. Most marketers use a hybrid framework, and we employ tons of different practices within those frameworks. To tap into this vast array …

Reflections on agile marketing by leading practitioners and analysts Continue Reading »

There are a handful of reports I eagerly look forward to every year, and Andrea Fryrear’s State of Agile Marketing is one of my favorite. The third annual edition is available now, and like last year’s, it’s has a number of great insights into the “process” corner of the people-process-technology triangle. The big trend: agile marketing adoption is up from 32% in 2019 to 42% in 2020. Almost all of the growth in agile comes …

Latest data on agile marketing, at a time when we can really appreciate it Continue Reading »

One of our keynote speakers at last week’s MarTech conference in Boston was Matt LeMay, author of the excellent book Agile for Everybody and partner at Sudden Compass. After my opening keynote (reenacted here), Matt presented a fantastic, 20-minute talk: Agile Is Marketing. And because Matt arranged for a videographer to capture his presentation — far better than my day-after reenactment strategy — it can now be shared widely over the Interwebs. Matt’s given me …

Agile Is Marketing, Matt LeMay’s excellent MarTech keynote Continue Reading »

Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas is one of the world’s leading agile marketing experts, author of Death of a Marketer, and instructor for the Agile Marketing Advantage workshop at the upcoming MarTech conference (a few spots for her workshop are still available!). She’s an amazing force for the betterment of marketing management. So I was excited to read the latest

“Agile marketing” is a crutch for those who do not have a real strategy. That was the headline from an article published this week by Samuel Scott on The Drum. Now, I’m a fan of The Drum. They generally have sharp coverage of marketing and media topics. I’m also a fan of Samuel in particular. His writing is punchy and makes you think. But painting agile marketing and strategic brand leadership as polar opposites is …

Choosing between being strategic or being agile is a false dichotomy Continue Reading »

In reflecting on the “greatest hits” of chiefmartec.com over the past decade, it’s been exciting to see how many ideas that were once on the fringe of marketing have shifted into mainstream practice. For example: agile marketing, the adoption of agile management approaches from the software development profession in modern marketing. What do marketing and software development have in common? It used to sound like a set up for a bad joke. But in a …

Agile marketing reaches 37% adoption with a wide variety of techniques Continue Reading »

The following article is a guest post by Monica Georgieff, marketing manager at Kanbanize, a company that provides Kanban software for lean management, describing her experience adopting this lean management method with her marketing team. As I discussed in my book, Hacking Marketing, I believe there are tremendous opportunities for marketers to borrow and adapt management ideas like this from the software community to master the digital dynamics of their evolving profession. You might be …

Running marketing like lean software development Continue Reading »