SCRUM

MARKETING
Applying Agile Methodologies to Marketing

Your Essential First Booklet about Implementing

Agile/Scrum in Marketing Organizations

Jam e s
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W r i g h t
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Scrum Marketing
Applying Agile Methodologies to Marketing

by
James S. Wright

Brigham Young University

Provo, UT 84602

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Copyright 2014 by James S. Wright

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2014
ISBN 0-9000000-0-0
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602

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Table of Contents
Implementation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Practice Situations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Warnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

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Chapter 1:

Implementation

his chapter is written primarily to marketing management. You

are the people that make the decisions whether to implement
Agile/Scrum, and youre the people whose bonuses are on the line.
The previous chapter discussed how your employees workflow, time
requirements, and operations will change with the new methodology.
This chapter will discuss how your job will change. This information
will help you make the decision about whether to do it. If you
decide to go forward, this chapter will give you information that will
improve your chances of success.
The Role of the Agile Manager
In Agile, we want to push work decisions down and strategy
decision up. The Scrum methodology will remove the need for you
to decide who does what. It also removes your ability to do it. Your

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Scrum Marketing

primary role is to set the strategic direction and priorities. Read that
sentence again. As a leader, your team needs you to lead.
If you are not the chairman, you have at least one manager. You
may have good management that has created a clear vision, great
strategy, and solid goals. If so, your job is ensure that your team
understands how they fit within that vision, define how your team
will take on its share of that strategy, and set goals that are consistent
and roll up to the companys high-level goals. This piece of wisdom
is at least three thousand years old: Where there is no vision, the
people perish. (Proverbs. 29:18.)
Heres a quick story from Lufthansas former Chief Pilot:
In 1979 a large passenger jet with 257 people on board left New
Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and back. Unknown
to the pilots, however, someone had modified the flight coordinates
by a mere two degrees. This error placed the aircraft 28 miles (45
km) to the east of where the pilots assumed they were. As they
approached Antarctica, the pilots descended to a lower altitude
to give the passengers a better look at the landscape. Although

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Chapter 1: Implementation

both were experienced pilots, neither had made this particular

flight before, and they had no way of knowing that the incorrect
coordinates had placed them directly in the path of Mount Erebus,
an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of
more than 12,000 feet (3,700 m).
As the pilots flew onward, the white of the snow and ice
covering the volcano blended with the white of the clouds above,
making it appear as though they were flying over flat ground. By
the time the instruments sounded the warning that the ground was
rising fast toward them, it was too late. The airplane crashed into
the side of the volcano, killing everyone on board.
It was a terrible tragedy brought on by a minor errora
matter of only a few degrees. (Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Ensign, May
2008, page 5760)

Weve all seen plenty of companies who got their strategies

just a little wrong and figuratively crashed into a mountain. Agile
philosophy teaches us that after weve made our best guess at the
right direction, we start our flight and constantly make course
corrections based upon what we learn. Scrum will make your team
more productive. If you dont properly set your strategy and make the
appropriate course corrections, Scrum will mean that your team will
fly faster toward their eventual crash. The more productive your team
gets, the more important it will be for you to fulfill your primary
responsibility. Scrum will also make your team more flexible. Take
advantage of that flexibility.
Ive always taught that a manager has four responsibilities.
First, managers must do administrative stuff such as managing
budgets, offering jobs to candidates, setting employee goals
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Scrum Marketing

and doing annual evaluations, improvement plans, and the like.

Second, they must be the political umbrella, protecting their
people from any political messes that they cant handle. Their
third responsibility is the strategy thing we just discussed. Their
forth is the next topic: mentoring.
Presumably, youve been given your job because you know more
or are more capable than those you manage. Your job is to give
whatever it is that you have and your employees dont. It could be
the knowledge of how to do something, the wisdom to make good
decisions, the discipline to succeed, etc. Since youve got to work
with each employee based upon their own strengths and weaknesses,
I cant tell you what to do specifically. What I can do is provide some
general guidelines for you within an Agile environment.
Scrum may tempt you to alienate yourself from the team. Your
Product Owner represents your priorities. The team self-manages.
They prepare for their Sprint Review without needing any direct
management from you. A Scrum Master is there to run the meetings
and to help with any blockages that may come up in their work. Their
final meeting of the Sprint, the Retrospective, specifically restricts
your participation. They may not need you to do any day-to-day
management at all, but they do need you to be involved leader.
Depending upon the person and the situation, leadership may
mean several different things. Often, you will need to guide them
as they venture off doing something that they havent done before.
Many times youll just walk beside them as they progress, assisting
them in their own course corrections. There are other instances
where youll need to help them find their own way. Leading, guiding,
walking along, or helping them find the way, youve got to give
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Chapter 1: Implementation

them your support and build their

confidence. Their job is to do the
work. Your job is to set the strategy
and help them do their job.
Implementing Agile/Scrum
can be quite difficult and
frightening for many people.
It requires people to move
forward on their own. Maybe
for some, it will be their first
experience in making real
commitments to peers in an
ongoing and meaningful way.
Sure, if they finish their work
with the right quality, they
know that their manager cant
take the credit from them, but
the flip side is that realization
that if they fail, they cant blame anyone else. Not all of your
employees may be able to handle this new environment, and you may
need to fulfill some administrative responsibilities to replace some
people. More commonly, youll need to exercise your mentoring
muscles and provide the proper encouragement and coaching that
theyll need.
This experience may be new and difficult to you also. Youve
probably never given employees the freedom and responsibility that
Scrum requires. You may initially experience awkwardness, anxiety,
and additional time requirements as your team goes through the
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