Red_SquareLast week my friend and fellow Agile marketer, Jim Ewel, and I travelled to Moscow to deliver an Agile marketing training that was arranged by a Moscow based consulting firm called AgileSpace. This firm is led by Marina and Dmitry Simonovy—a husband and wife team that appear to be fermenting an Agile marketing revolution in Russia. 

This was the first time I’ve co-led a two day Agile training—or any Agile training for that matter—Jim has more experience running such trainings than I do. Typically I have opportunities to deliver shorter presentations on the value of Agile to marketing leaders but this was opportunity to dive deeply into some of the content from The Marketing Agility Podcast, my book The Agile Marketer, and into Jim’s work from AgileMarketing.net

Adapting Agile

  We had a diverse mix of participants from business owners, to Agile coaches, and marketers who were just getting started with Agile. And the participants represented a broad range of industries from banking to manufacturing and retail. At first that seemed like a challenge but in practice the broad range of perspectives made for great conversations about just how adaptable Agile is. 

There were many takeaways from the experience that will inform any future training that I am part of. Perhaps this is true of other kinds of trainings as well but I walked away with a better understanding of how to teach Agile effectively. Beyond that, the Agile trainers in the audience enriched my own understanding of some key Agile practices such as the retrospective. For example, we learned about how some teams maintain a dedicated backlog of ideas focused on how to improve their method of choice. This feeds the “start” category in the “start, stop, continue” retrospective format. 

Beyond User Stories

One other takeaway of note has to do with user stories—a topic that we discussed at length with Jim on The Marketing Agility Podcast. Marketers really struggle with user stories, a fact that became very clear when we ran exercises around user story development. I won’t go into too much depth here but I walked away with a much greater appreciation for the range of things marketers put in their backlogs from epics, to user stories, tests, and tasks. 

As I reflect on our training, I wonder if there are any rules of thumb around the balance of epics, to user stories (or tests), to tasks? Epics break up into user stories and user stories break into tasks but depending on how granularly you break things up the ratios will differ. And, I suppose that the initiative will cause these ratios to differ as well. Still, I feel like i have a gut sense of just how granular tasks to optimize one’s practice …. now I just need to find some way of translating that “sense” into a framework that others might find useful!

Agile Sales

Sometime in the not too distant future, we’ll host a Marinaconversation on The Marketing Agility Podcast with Marina that will focus on how she applies Agile to sales. In my book, I discuss how sales can support an Agile practice in marketing by helping to prototype and test collateral, messaging, packaging ideas, etc as a representation of a minimum viable product (MVP) but that’s really an extension of the marketing practice rather than a foundational sales practice. 

So what is in the sales backlog? What are the deliverables and how do they relate to the deliverables in the marketing backlog? For example, consider sales decks used in a complex B2B sale—these decks are traditionally developed by the marketing team with input from sales … how would an Agile sales team change that process or dynamic? Is Agile sales an outgrowth of companies that have not yet adopted Agile in the marketing context. I have lots of questions 🙂 so I’m sure we’ll have a great conversation. Stay tuned for that!

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