TIL How Kanban helps Marketing Optimize Value Delivery

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Monica Georgieff, founder of Automagically and coach at Agile Sherpas, and Maria Matarelli, founder of Agile Heros and Agile Marketing Academy to learn more about how Kanban can help marketers and marketing teams to deliver value. I was surprised to learn that the impacts of Kanban practices extend much further than just visualization of the work and priorities. Here are the highlights!

Feedback Loops

Marketing work requires constant examination of how campaigns and efforts are performing to help determine where to reinvest or where to change course.?This means that it is critical to create a Definition of Workflow that enables value to move quickly and incorporates a dedicated state to review metrics that inform decision making and prioritization.?When I think about the marketing efforts we have at ProKanban.org, I know we have a lot of room for improvement here! We are collecting a ton of data but have not yet set a good cadence for reviews or decision making.

Small Batch Sizes

Quick feedback loops mean that the size and scope of each piece of value needs to be as small as possible.?Our guests talked about how A/B testing different campaigns or content needs to happen quickly in order to determine which efforts to continue to invest time and money. I tend to think of marketing work as an effort with a lot of small parts coming together so this concept made me realize how critical it is for marketing to break their work down into small, independent piece of value in order to learn quickly.?

Shifting Priorities

Marketing teams have to pivot quickly as competitive landscapes and industries change day-to-day.?This means that it can be very difficult to plan even two week’s worth of work in advance.?Maria and Monica both shared how Kanban helped their teams plan just-in-time so they can be more responsive to changing needs and customer demands.?I know firsthand how import this can be in the world of software but it was interesting to note that marketers also require the ability to keep that “To do” column lean.

Limiting WIP

And it wouldn’t be a Kanban convo without touching on how to manage the amount of work in progress.?Our guests reiterated the importance of focus and flow on the work they do and talked about how limiting the amount of work in flight made it easier for them to make decisions quickly and reprioritize work based on data. It was clear to me by the end of our chat, that world of marketing moves FAST and requires the ability to deliver more, by doing less. ?

To learn more about Kanban for Marketing, check out the recording of our interview here.?

Addition resources:

?https://www.agilesherpas.com/blog/agile-team-skill-map

https://www.agilesherpas.com/stateofagilemarketing

https://automagically.marketing/blog/agile-marketing-agency/