An Introduction to Scrumban for Agile Marketing

Key Takeaways

• Scrumban is a hybrid Agile framework that combines Scrum’s structure with Kanban’s pull-based flow, helping teams stay organized while adapting to changing priorities.
• It is especially well suited for marketing teams that need to manage a mix of planned and unplanned work, including content, campaigns, social promotion, email, and web requests.
• Scrumban relies on visible workflows, WIP limits, and context-driven planning to reduce overload, improve focus, and keep work moving smoothly.
• It offers more flexibility than Scrum and more structure than Kanban alone, making it a strong fit for teams that feel stuck between the two approaches.
• Scrumban works best when implemented intentionally, with clear intake rules, defined workflow stages, and regular opportunities for continuous improvement.
• For marketing teams outgrowing rigid sprint cadences, Scrumban can be a practical next step toward a lighter, more adaptive way of working.

Scrumban is a hybrid Agile framework that combines Scrum’s structure with Kanban’s flexible, pull-based workflow. It helps teams keep the visibility, accountability, and planning discipline of Scrum while adapting more easily to shifting priorities, changing demands, and continuous work intake.

If Kanban is the adolescent member of the Agile work management family, Scrumban is the wee toddler.

Although the foundational work on the methodology was published in 2008 (Corey Ladas’ Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development), it hasn’t yet caught on in the software world. But don’t let this scare you away from giving Scrumban a try!

Because it’s still emerging, we have a chance to make our voices heard before its practices become as solidified (some might say fossilized) as those of Scrum.

While Ladas wrote the original book on Scrumban, a more helpful guide to its actual implementation was recently released in the form of Ajay Reddy’s The Scrumban [R]Evolution: Getting the Most Out of Agile, Scrum, and Lean Kanban (2016). This should be the foundational document for any marketing team looking to roll out this method; it’s far more practical than Ladas’ work, and includes case studies and examples. (Software case studies, yes; and we can learn from them.)

Although its name is obviously a combination of Scrum and Kanban, Scrumban isn’t just about mashing together a few pieces of each methodology and calling it something new.

Reddy defines it as:

"Applying kanban systems within a Scrum context, and layering the Kanban Method alongside Scrum as a vehicle for evolutionary change. Ultimately, it’s about aiding and amplifying the capabilities already inherent in Scrum, as well as providing new perspectives and capabilities."

Scrumban emerged to fill gaps in both the Scrum and Kanban methodologies, which seem obvious in retrospect. Scrum covers meetings and roles in detail, but it does little to provide guidance on how teams should go about completing the work they commit to in each Sprint. It focuses on managing the project and the team, but not tasks themselves.

Kanban concentrates on the completion of individual work items. It assumes that some form of project-management system is in place on a team, and promises only to improve existing systems, not to create them.

So, for thinkers like Ladas and Reddy, putting the two pieces together just made sense.

The Basics of Scrumban (Scrum + Kanban)

Scrumban was designed for more mature agile teams, those working in an unpredictable environment where plans and requirements constantly shift, and/or teams who are supporting existing products rather than creating new ones.

At its core, Scrumban pulls together some of the structural components of Scrum along with the intensely pull-based nature of Kanban.

(If you’re new to agile methodologies, you might want to check out our Guide to Scrum and Guide to Kanban for an overview before going ahead.)

Here’s an illustration of a Scrumban board and process flow:

Keep in mind that because it’s a hybrid approach, each team tends to implement Scrumban a little differently. That alone makes it a great option for most agile marketing teams, because we are already customizing any agile methodology that we choose so it will work within our industry rather than in software development.

Anthony Coppedge offered a great description:

"So, to summarize: Scrumban leverages the ceremonies of Scrum and the flexibility of pull-based Kanban, allowing structure and organization to keep the framework in place and accountability and transparency high while also adapting to the realities of change during a Sprint for marketing."

Scrumban is the combination of Scrum (the ceremonies of Sprint Planning, Stand Ups, Retrospectives) and the pull technique of Kanban with WIP (work in progress) limits. Therefore it is actually driven by BOTH demand AND a pre-established schedule. Allow me to illustrate, below.

Scrumban also ignores the focus on egalitarian, cross-functional teams that Scrum emphasizes. Instead, it embraces specialized roles within the team (a more realistic way to handle marketing skill sets).

Like Kanban, an agile marketing team using Scrumban will rely on WIP (Work in Progress) limits to ensure that they are not overcommitting themselves, and that they are focusing on delivering completed projects of a consistently high quality rather than dividing their attention among too many disparate tasks.

Individual WIP limits govern the workload for each team member as well as for the team as a whole. This is vitally important, because it protects your team’s sanity as well as the quality of its work:

If too many issues are in progress, the team is at risk of not finishing anything to high quality standards. Instead, there should be a maximum number of tickets allowed per column. If the number of tickets in that column ever exceeds the maximum, the entire team should swarm onto that column and help move tickets on.

Before proceeding to learn the core Scrumban components, why don't you take a second to get our guide on choosing an Agile trailhead?

Core Scrumban Components Agile Marketing Teams Need

While there are certainly diverse ways of “doing” Scrumban, there are a few key components that agile marketing teams probably need to keep in place. We should make sure to identify the circumstances that trigger particular events or actions, create and adhere to strict WIP limits, and use the power of the Kaizen to keep ourselves on track.

What “Context-Driven” Means for Marketing

Essentially, when your process is based on Scrumban you only do things (meetings, planning, adding items to the backlog) when the context warrants them.

So you don’t spend hours planning or estimating task size every other week just because it’s time to do that. Instead you only plan projects when your team reaches the pre-determined minimum threshold of new projects on their list.

Put simply, demand goes before supply.

For marketing this can work extremely well, because your social media team’s workflow can be triggered by a particular event, such as the completion of a new article or ebook. They can then begin promoting it, and the content team would need to respect that team’s WIP limits with their release timing.

And speaking of respecting WIP limits…

The Necessity of WIP Limits

In Scrumban you don’t have timeboxed iterations as you do with Scrum, so you need strict limits on how much work can be in each category (planning/doing/testing/promoting/etc.) to keep your teams from becoming overworked or scattered.

Corey Ladas, author of Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development, gives this suggestion in a blog post on LeanSoftwareEngineering.com:

You might have a simple principle like prefer completing work to starting new work, or you might express that as a rule that says: try to work on only one item at a time, but if you are blocked then you can work on a second item, but no more. In our example, that rule gives us an effective WIP limit of 6 [two works in progress for each of the three team members].

WIP limits should apply even to your backlog, which should provide your team with the best thing to work on next, and nothing much beyond that. Backlogs can become more like dumping grounds for ideas, requiring time-consuming culling periodically.

In fact, “Scrum-style timeboxed planning usually provides a much bigger backlog than what is strictly necessary to pick the next work item, and as such it is unnecessary inventory and therefore unnecessary waste.”

Calling a Kaizen

Arguably one of the best things about both Kanban and Scrumban is the elimination of huge sprint kickoff meetings, retrospectives, and other meetings that can eat into productivity and begin to feel maddeningly repetitive.

Unfortunately the lack of regular review is also a potential pitfall of Scrumban; this is where the practice of Kaizen comes in.

Kaizen basically means continuous improvement or change for the better, and on agile teams it should be a major focus. This is what scrum retrospectives are supposed to achieve, and teams that don’t use them need an alternative means of self examination.

Team members should be able to “call a Kaizen” anytime they feel that the process is breaking down, and you can also schedule them to occur when particular conditions are met.

Maybe after you release 10 pieces of content your content team has a Kaizen to review their process, quality, and teamwork for areas of possible improvement. Or maybe your team meets to review email performance after every ten thousand sends.

Whatever conditions make sense for you are fine, just make sure you don’t end up running on autopilot and overlooking potential problems.

Benefits and Challenges of Scrumban in Marketing

For marketing teams, Scrumban can offer the best of both worlds: enough structure to keep work visible and teams aligned, with enough flexibility to adapt when priorities shift.

That matters because marketing work rarely moves in neat, predictable cycles. A content team may be drafting a blog post, the social team may be waiting to promote it, a campaign manager may need last-minute email edits, and the web team may suddenly be pulled into an urgent landing page update. In that kind of environment, rigid sprint commitments can start to break down fast.

Scrumban helps by allowing work to move through a visible system based on demand. Content can flow from writing to editing to design to publication. Social promotion can begin when an article, webinar, or ebook is ready. Campaign tasks can be pulled forward when performance data calls for a change. Web requests can be worked in without throwing the entire team off course.

One of the biggest benefits is flexibility without chaos. Teams can keep the parts of Scrum that still help—like planning, standups, or retrospectives—while using Kanban-style pull systems and WIP limits to avoid overload. That’s especially useful in marketing, where one person can easily end up juggling a blog update, email approvals, campaign revisions, and a stack of “quick” stakeholder requests all at once.

Scrumban is also often a better fit for the specialized nature of marketing work. Writers, designers, developers, email marketers, social media managers, and strategists are not interchangeable, and they do not all work at the same pace. Scrumban gives those specialists a shared workflow without forcing every task into the same cadence.

The challenge, of course, is that flexibility without clear guardrails can quickly become disorder. Content requests can pile up, campaign changes can interrupt planned work, and design or web tasks can become bottlenecks that slow everything down. Without clear intake rules, meaningful WIP limits, and regular opportunities to review the process, Scrumban can become just another reactive system.

That’s why it works best when the boundaries are clear. Visible workflow stages, defined WIP limits, and agreed-upon triggers for planning and process review are what keep content, campaign, social, and web work moving smoothly.

For agile marketing teams, the real value of Scrumban is not that it removes structure. It’s that it offers a lighter, more adaptive structure—one that better matches how modern marketing actually works.

Scrumban and Agile Marketing: An Unstoppable Team?

In truth, most marketing teams are already working “on demand.” Scrumban may just be a systematized way to handle how our professional lives already work.

Our team currently uses a hacked version of Scrum for most projects, along with a Kanban board for content marketing, so we’ve tried some of the more common implementations.

The flexible yet structured nature of Scrumban appears to be as close to a magic bullet as agile marketers are likely to get, but I’ll report back on its real world application and see if it holds up to use by our team.

Can Scrumban Save a Struggling Scrum Team?

For the past six months, our marketing team has been implementing and wrestling with Scrum. Things are getting increasingly problematic, so I’m hoping to convince everyone to give Scrumban a try.

In case other agile marketing teams are experiencing similar growing pains, here’s how Scrum is beginning to break down for our marketing team.

• Some iterations go smoothly, but we’ve had to create a special card that we’ve labeled “By the Way (BTW)” to mark new tasks or requests that crop up mid-sprint and need to be addressed.
• Our board is becoming a sort of Scrum Frankenstein’s monster. To try and manage asks and expectations and prioritization, we’ve created a column for stories for this week’s sprint, one for the following week, and a giant backlog of “wish list” items submitted by various members of our marketing team as well as other employees and stakeholders.
• A big team, active executives, rapidly changing market conditions, and more mean that oftentimes team members are working on as many as 8 separate cards in a given sprint. Multitasking (the bad kind) is running rampant.
• We’ve added three new team members with development experience who are helping implement marketing projects on our various web properties. They tend to work on different projects than the rest of the team.
• We are also meeting jointly with another team who handles high level sales. Their work and ours often intersect, but actual joint projects are rare. Nevertheless, we all need to stay up to date on each other’s work.
• All this growth, while awesome, has ballooned our team to over a dozen members. Meeting length and frequency are consequently becoming an issue.

The ever growing complexity of our team and its objectives feels like it’s just overflowing the boundaries of Scrum, and is simply too cumbersome for Kanban alone.

My hope is that Scrumban will give us the structure we need to manage a large team with a huge variety of projects while offering the flexibility to break free of the forced sprint cadence.

When to Use Scrumban

Scrumban tends to make the most sense when a team has outgrown the rigidity of Scrum but still needs more structure than Kanban alone can provide.

For many marketing teams, that moment comes when work no longer fits neatly into sprint boundaries. New requests appear mid-sprint, priorities shift based on performance data, stakeholders introduce urgent changes, and planned work is constantly being interrupted by the realities of day-to-day execution. When that starts happening regularly, forcing everything into a fixed cadence can create more frustration than focus.

It can also be a strong fit when your team is managing a mix of planned and unplanned work. Content calendars, campaign launches, email sends, and website projects may all be scheduled in advance, but they often collide with last-minute approvals, executive requests, fast-moving market changes, or urgent fixes. Scrumban gives teams a way to keep work visible and prioritized without pretending every task can wait for the next sprint.

Scrumban is especially useful for teams with specialized roles and uneven workflows. Marketing work rarely moves at the same pace from one function to another. Writers, designers, developers, strategists, and channel owners all contribute differently, and some stages of work naturally take longer or become bottlenecks. A pull-based system with WIP limits can help manage that variation more effectively than a one-size-fits-all sprint model.

It may also be the right choice when your current process is becoming overloaded with work in progress. If team members are juggling too many tasks, if “in progress” columns keep filling up, or if work is frequently started but not finished, Scrumban can help restore focus by limiting active work and encouraging teams to finish before starting something new.

In short, Scrumban is often the right move when your team needs to stay responsive without losing all sense of structure. If Scrum feels too rigid, Kanban feels too loose, and your marketing workflow demands both visibility and flexibility, Scrumban may be the balance you’re looking for.

Knowing When It’s Time to Manage Your Methodology

Corey Ladas puts it very eloquently:

"Scrum can be a useful scaffold to hold a team together while you erect a more optimized solution…At some point you can slough off the cocoon and allow the pull system to spread its wings and take flight."

How to Transition a Marketing Team to Scrumban

If your team is starting to feel the limits of Scrum, the move to Scrumban does not need to be dramatic. In fact, it usually works best as an evolution rather than a complete reset.

Start by looking at where your current process is breaking down. Maybe new work keeps entering mid-sprint. Maybe your backlog has become bloated and hard to prioritize. Maybe team members are juggling too many tasks at once, or your meetings are taking up more time than they are saving. Those friction points are usually the clearest signal of what needs to change first.

From there, begin with the workflow itself. Instead of organizing work purely around sprint commitments, map the actual stages your marketing work moves through—something like planning, writing, design, review, launch, and promotion. This gives your team a more realistic view of how content, campaigns, emails, social assets, and web updates actually flow from start to finish.

Once that workflow is visible, set WIP limits for the stages where work tends to pile up. If design is constantly overloaded, if approvals are slowing down launches, or if too many projects are sitting half-finished, WIP limits can help your team focus on finishing work before starting more. That one shift alone can reduce a surprising amount of chaos.

Next, decide which parts of Scrum are still serving you. You may want to keep standups for alignment, regular planning sessions for prioritization, or retrospectives for reflection. The goal is not to throw out every Scrum practice; it is to keep the pieces that add value and let go of the ones that are no longer helping your team move.

It also helps to change how new work enters the system. Instead of letting every urgent request instantly disrupt planned work, create clear rules for intake and prioritization. That way, content requests, campaign updates, stakeholder asks, and web fixes can be evaluated consistently rather than forcing the team into constant reactive mode.

Most importantly, treat the transition itself as iterative. You do not need the perfect Scrumban system on day one. Start with a simple board, clear WIP limits, and a shared understanding of when the team plans, pulls new work, and pauses to improve the process. Then adjust as you learn.

For marketing teams, that is often the real advantage of Scrumban: it is not a rigid methodology to “install.” It is a more adaptive way to manage work as your team, channels, and priorities continue to evolve.

Frequently Asked Questions About Scrumban

What is Scrumban?

Scrumban is a hybrid Agile approach that combines Scrum’s structure with Kanban’s flexible, pull-based workflow. It gives teams a way to keep work visible and organized while adapting more easily to shifting priorities and ongoing requests.

How is Scrumban different from Scrum?

Scrum relies on fixed sprint cadences, defined roles, and timeboxed planning. Scrumban keeps some of that structure, but allows work to flow based more on demand. For marketing teams, that can make it easier to handle mid-cycle changes, urgent requests, and uneven workloads without constantly disrupting the entire system.

How is Scrumban different from Kanban?

Kanban focuses on visualizing work, limiting work in progress, and improving flow. Scrumban uses those same principles, but adds selected elements of Scrum—such as planning, standups, or retrospectives—when they are useful. In other words, it gives teams more structure than Kanban alone without the full rigidity of Scrum.

When should a marketing team use Scrumban?

Scrumban is often a good fit when a marketing team needs to manage both planned and unplanned work at the same time. If content calendars, campaigns, social promotion, email sends, and web requests are all competing for attention—and Scrum is starting to feel too rigid while Kanban feels too loose—Scrumban can provide a better balance.

What is the biggest benefit of Scrumban for marketing teams?

The biggest benefit is flexibility without losing visibility or control. Scrumban helps marketing teams stay responsive to changing priorities while still using clear workflows, WIP limits, and lightweight structure to keep work moving and prevent overload.

Let’s Recap!

For marketing teams, Scrumban offers a practical middle ground between the structure of Scrum and the flexibility of Kanban. It gives teams a way to stay organized and accountable without forcing all work into a rigid sprint cadence that may not reflect the realities of modern marketing.

That matters because marketing rarely unfolds in a perfectly predictable sequence. Content deadlines shift, campaigns need midstream adjustments, stakeholder requests appear out of nowhere, and web or design bottlenecks can slow everything down. Scrumban acknowledges that reality and gives teams a lighter, more adaptive framework for managing it.

Used well, Scrumban can help marketing teams improve visibility, reduce overload, and move work through the system with greater focus. But like any Agile approach, it works best when it is implemented intentionally—with clear workflow stages, meaningful WIP limits, and regular opportunities to review and improve the process.

If your team feels constrained by Scrum, unsupported by Kanban alone, or simply overwhelmed by the pace and unpredictability of marketing work, Scrumban may be the next evolution worth exploring. It is not about following another rigid methodology. It is about building a system that helps your team work better in the environment you actually operate in.

Before moving on, don't forget to get your copy of our Choosing an Agile Trailhead Guide.

Portions of this article originally appeared on MarketerGizmo.com