How to Create a Better Agile Marketing Workflow

Key Takeaways:

• Agile workflows can generally be broken down into 6 steps: ideation, planning, execution, review, retrospective, and adaptation.
• The details of how your particular Agile workflow functions will depend on things like the type of work you do, how your organization functions, and the Agile framework you use.
• Agile workflows offer important benefits like speed, flexibility, transparency, and the ability to drive continuous improvement.
• To improve your Agile workflow, you can implement WIP limits, improve visibility, automate processes, use backlogs, collect feedback often, hold regular retrospectives, and convince the teams you work with to go Agile themselves.

As Agile marketers, continuous improvement is at the core of how we function. More than just a thing we do, it’s embedded in our culture and mindset. But actually improving with time also requires an understanding of Agile workflows, the sequence of tasks, processes, etc. you use to complete your work, and how to iterate and optimize them.

No matter how well-optimized everything else is, bad Agile workflows generate endless frustration, process breakdowns, and poor efficiency. Fortunately, there’s plenty you can do to optimize your team’s workflow to ensure your marketing team is more productive and less stressed.

The Agile Workflow Model

Let’s start with an overview of a basic Agile workflow model. Within this series of steps, you can adjust lots of elements depending on the framework you use, like Scrum or Kanban, and the realities of your organization. But regardless, these 6 steps are the foundation.

Step 1: Ideation

Within an Agile workflow, ideation is about more than just brainstorming though. It requires considering your stakeholders, looking at recent learnings from campaigns, experiments, etc., and soliciting feedback and ideas from team members. Skipping all of this means skipping several crucial advantages Agile brings over standard marketing workflows: more experiments, more open cultures, and a greater focus on stakeholder value.

Step 2: Planning

Once you’ve considered all the elements from step 1, you can begin planning. Here you can define project scope, resources, and goals as well as break down tasks. Importantly, in an Agile workflow, the scope of this step is limited. Instead of planning out an entire project in detail, you’ll want to only plan what’s needed to start - often work for the first sprint.

Avoiding too much planning from the start means you can begin work faster and more readily iterate and adjust as you go. That said, finding the right amount of planning can take some iteration on its own, so be prepared to spend some time getting this right.

Step 3: Execution

This step is pretty straightforward. That said, there’s still some finesse involved. Don’t just execute your plan mindlessly and only pause to reflect once you’re 100% complete. Agile workflows are built on iterations and adjustments made within workflows, not just between them.

As you execute, you can try out new processes, structure experiments, and use Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) where possible. Then, you can iterate and make adjustments to your plan based on what you learn along the way.

Step 4: Review

In this step, your team can pause to take a look at the work they produced in the execution phase and gather final feedback from stakeholders. Again, you can get this feedback during the execution phase, but it’s only now that you can present a finished product for feedback. At the end of this phase, you should have a mutual understanding of whether the work is truly complete and feedback you can incorporate into future iterations.

Step 5: Retrospective

While the review phase is all about meeting with stakeholders to review work, the retrospective phase is about meeting with your team to evaluate your processes. Here you can ask what slowed you down, what enabled you to deliver value effectively, how your tools performed, etc.

Ideally, this stage will produce concrete ideas for process improvements that can be tested during your next iteration. That may be something like adjusting how your standups function, improving your prioritization, or trying out a new AI tool.

Step 6: Adaptation

This last phase often gets forgotten about, but it’s worth emphasizing. Adaptation is where you actively incorporate everything you’ve learned from the review and retrospective phases into your Agile workflow. That may sound obvious, but it’s shockingly easy to gather a bunch of valuable learnings only to never look at them again.

Agile Workflow and Methodologies

As mentioned in the introduction, your particular Agile workflow will depend on the framework and methodology you use. Here are some of the ways you’ll want to adjust those workflows based on how your team works.

Scrum

The Scrum approach to Agile workflows is all about short, structured iterations. Each sprint you undertake is a chance to run through the steps outlined above. That said, you may not follow all 6 steps for every sprint. For example, some teams may only have a retrospective every few sprints. 

Crucially, that does not mean you have a retrospective ‘every once in a while.’ That approach often means the meeting just doesn’t happen, meaning your team loses out on the chance to make critical improvements to how it functions. Overall, if your Agile workflow is designed for Scrum, it needs to be structured, explicit, and built around the Scrum cycle you’re going to be using.

Kanban

While Scrum breaks Agile workflows into sprints, Kanban is all about continuous flow. So while it’s easy to know when those steps should happen in a Scrum sprint, Kanban forces you to think a bit more about how to build workflow steps into your processes. After all, if your workflow is continuous, when should you hold retrospective meetings? When should you do planning and prioritization?

A good rule of thumb is to schedule such meetings every few weeks, much as you would with a Scrum sprint. You have more flexibility to decide on what cadence works best for you, but once again, it’s vital to not neglect those steps. Get them in your calendar and stick with them.

Hybrid & Scrumban

Scrumban and similar hybrid methodologies generally take Kanban and add Scrum-like sprints to the mixture. For that reason, you can essentially follow the Scrum advice mentioned above for adapting your Agile workflow to this approach.

Before proceeding to learn the benefits of Agile workflows in marketing, why don't you take a second to grab our latest State of Agile Marketing Report?

Benefits of Agile Workflows for Marketers

Whether you’re trying to build internal support for using Agile workflows or just want to understand them better, it’s useful to look at the benefits they provide.

Continuous Improvement

By creating built-in opportunities to identify processes that can be improved before using data-driven testing to validate those improvements, Agile workflows drive continuous improvement. Instead of working so hard, teams never feel they have a moment to pause and reflect, ensuring those moments happen gives marketers time to breathe, think, and really understand what’s happening.

Speed

Despite the fact that Agile workflows set aside time for things like planning, reviews, retrospectives, etc., they’re actually excellent at delivering work quickly. There’s a few reasons why. First, all of the process improvements that result from Agile workflows help ensure teams are efficient and effective.

But that’s only part of the story, because plenty of teams out there are amazingly efficient at producing the wrong work. By regularly checking in with stakeholders, Agile teams ensure the work they produce actually delivers the value those stakeholders want. Put another way, Agile workflows enable teams to not just deliver work more quickly, but also create value more quickly.

Flexibility

A classic flaw with traditional marketing workflows is that they aren’t designed with flexibility in mind. A bad decision is made during the planning stage and that gets carried through all the way to the completion of the work. But with Agile workflows, it doesn’t have to be that way.

By regularly gathering feedback from stakeholders, teams are able to identify issues early and pivot as needed. Planning adjusts accordingly, with only the level of detail needed for work to commence. Instead, the exact way work gets executed can be decided along the way based on what happens and what is learned.

Transparency

Agile marketing workflows create transparency in several ways. The first is between teams and stakeholders. Those stakeholders have a window into the work the teams are doing and their input is regularly sought. That additional transparency can go a long way towards creating better working relationships between teams and their stakeholders.

But these workflows also create transparency within teams. Retrospectives offer opportunities for team members to voice concerns and discuss how things can be improved. For example, if one team member feels they’re regularly over capacity, they have a specific forum to address that instead of suffering in silence, wondering when would be a good time to raise the issue.

7 Ways to Create a Better Agile Marketing Workflow

Once you’ve set up your Agile marketing workflow, these are some techniques you can use to improve it with time.

Start with Work In Progress Limits (WIP)

If you’re mired in an inefficient and poorly performing workflow, the best ROI you’re going to find is by implementing WIP limits. This is when you limit the number of in-progress cards you can have in a single column of your Scrum or Kanban board.

Why put such a limit in place?

WIP limits force you to finish work that’s already in progress before starting something new. This helps ensure you’re creating value for stakeholders at a regular pace instead of a lot of “almost done” work. These limits also help shape an Agile culture that prioritizes completing work and delivering that value.

Finally, WIP limits are a great way to ensure that bottlenecks and blockages are visible and swiftly addressed. In practice, this can mean that instead of beginning to work on a new blog article, team members know they should put their efforts into completing those in progress. This gets content out there faster.

But there are plenty of other things marketing teams can do to improve visibility in their Agile workflows.

Find Ways to Improve Visibility

First, we’re assuming you’re already tracking your work on a board. If not, then that should be your first step. Whether you’re using Scrum, Kanban, or a hybrid approach, boards are key to facilitating a good Agile workflow.

If you’re unsure or looking for inspiration, you can check out some marketing Kanban board examples to get a few ideas. But for those of you already using a board, improving your Agile marketing workflow can start with something as simple as including more tags, subtasks, colors, etc. Each of these enables better tracking of work and makes it easier to see the status of a task at a glance.

Automate What You Can

For all the benefits boards bring, managing them can also bring an immense amount of admin. That’s why for teams who use software, automation can help so much. By eliminating the need for regular manual interventions and maintenance, you can ensure your boards run more smoothly.

But what can you automate?

It will always depend on the functionalities of the platform you’re using. However, most offer ways to automate the creation of cards for recurring tasks or reminders and templates, which can add a lot of value. There are also new AI tools coming out every day that can help automate marketing processes, so testing those is a great idea.

For example, depending on what tool you use to operate your board, you can create card templates containing subtasks and other important information for tasks you repeat often. You can also create personal boards for team members and have work assigned to them on the main team board automatically copied onto their personal boards.

That said, these are just examples. Be sure you research the automation options your tool of choice offers and start looking for ways to reduce the admin work that’s slowing you down.

Build a Backlog

Our years of experience as Agile marketers have taught us that building a content or social media backlog takes a ton of stress out of your Agile workflow, ensuring that small delays don’t lead to crises. You want to limit WIP, but in cases when, for example, a team member gets sick, other team members can reach into the backlog to ensure marketing continues.

A technique we’ve developed to gradually build up this kind of backlog is doing a little more than what we need in each sprint. This gradually builds a backlog without burdening the team too much at any one time. Done well, it can ensure that vacations, sicknesses, and other unexpected events don’t affect your team’s output.

Collect Feedback Early and Often

Most Scrum or Kanban board tools offer ways to collect lots of data on how your marketing team is performing. If you’re doing estimation right, you should be able to consistently measure your team’s throughput and performance. This enables you to test ideas for improving Agile workflow.

Of course, getting the estimation right is far from easy. Fortunately, you can use tools like Planning Poker to gamify the process and make it far more reliable. These tests and feedback should give you visibility into what’s working and what isn’t.

Then there’s the importance of getting feedback early in the lifespan of individual tasks. You want that visibility and a culture built around giving such feedback to enable you to quickly get input from your team on work that’s in progress. This helps avoid the problem of people doing large amounts of work only to learn later that the task was flawed or inappropriate in some way. 

Don’t Forget to Hold Retrospectives

As much as we’d like to think all our Agile marketing experience makes us real experts, nobody is going to have more insights into how you can improve than your own teammates. Whether you’re working in sprints or not, holding regular retrospectives is essential for gathering feedback from your team members and identifying areas to improve.

That said, the other part of retros that marketers often neglect is tracking those improvements to ensure all the team’s great ideas don’t get forgotten and abandoned. Be sure to ask your team about the Agile workflow, as their perspective on it may differ from your own. For example, you may think your team is in a great rhythm, while in reality, they are feeling overworked and stressed.

Convince Other Functions to Try Agile

The latest State of Agile Marketing Report surveyed hundreds of marketers around the world and found that when all teams are Agile, 64% report significant productivity increases compared to just 12% when fewer than half of teams were Agile. This points to the reality that getting an Agile marketing team to work with non-Agile teams can be frustrating. 

The non-Agile team often expects marketing to function in a traditional Waterfall way and so they don’t understand why the Agile marketers push back on some requests. If you’re already achieving great things with Agile in marketing, it might be a good time to make a case for other departments to transition. If you think you have the support, you may even consider a full Agile transformation of your organization.

Regardless, working with more Agile teams will help ensure the vital inputs of your Agile workflow themselves are consistent.

Agile Workflow FAQs

What Is an Agile Workflow?

Agile workflow is an approach to managing work that balances planning with flexibility and adaptation to ensure high-quality and relevant work is produced efficiently. These workflows generally include feedback loops designed to drive continuous improvement.

What Are the 4 Steps of Agile?

One way to break down Agile workflows is into 4 steps: planning, development, testing, and review/retrospective.

What Is the Agile Life Cycle?

The Agile life cycle is another way to describe Agile workflows. Both are approaches to work that use stakeholder feedback, data-driven experimentation, feedback loops, and a culture built around responsiveness and continuous improvement to drive results.

What Is a Scrum Workflow?

Scrum workflows are a type of Agile workflow that takes its roles, ceremonies, and components from the Scrum methodology. These are rigidly structured to enhance the overall efficiency of the team.

Better Agile Workflows Begin with The Right Resources

With so many ways to improve your Agile workflow, it’s easy to get a bit stuck. How much should you personalize your approach to fit your team? At what point do those personalizations get away from Agile enough to rob you of its benefits? What retrospective cadence works best for your team? The questions are endless.

The answer is usually an easy one, just bring in some experts! Get some training! That’s all great if your team can afford those things. Too often, getting the resources you need to adequately support your Agile teams is expensive and time-consuming. That’s why we created The Edge. 

It’s a single package containing thousands of hours of microlearning, monthly live coaching sessions, self-paced training resources, quarterly workshops, and even an AI-powered bot to help answer your burning Agile questions. For teams looking to enhance their Agile workflows and everything that comes with them, it’s an affordable and powerful set of tools to supercharge your results.