What Sets High-Performing Marketing Teams Apart in 2026

Episode Transcript

All right. I'm gonna start today with a question that really, if I'm being honest, I already know the answer to. Does marketing feel like a lot right now? I mean, yeah. We've got more channels, we've got more AI, we've got more pressure and more scrutiny, and all with the exact same headcount. Or if you're extra lucky, maybe even less headcount than you used to have. We've got our leadership watching ROI like a hawk, and maybe the platform that used to drive the majority of your leads just changed its algorithm again. And then there's somebody in the Slack thread wondering whether AI is gonna replace your entire department.

If that feels like your reality, I'm sorry to say that you are not alone. But this is not a podcast where we talk about how bad things are and don't offer any solutions. This is the Agile Marketing Edge, and this week I am coming to you with brand-new data-driven ideas of how Agile marketing can help you manage the madness of modern marketing. Because we just wrapped up the ninth annual State of Agile Marketing report, and if there is one headline finding that I want you to sear into your brain, it is this: Agile marketing is not just helping teams survive this moment, it's helping them lead it. Today I'm gonna unpack exactly what that means and, more importantly, how you can use these findings to make your own team stronger starting now.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we dig into the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and cutting waste, measuring what actually matters, and scaling success across teams. And today, we're talking about what the data says about Agile marketers right now and, of course, what you should do with it.

So here at Agile Sherpas, we have spent the past several months collecting data from around four hundred and thirty marketers around the world. And when we stepped back and really looked at the whole picture, one theme rose above really everything else. Agile marketing is uniquely positioned to help marketers navigate change, uncertainty, and complexity with confidence. And if you've been paying attention lately, marketers could really use the help. Tariffs, AI disruption, budget pressure, customer behavior that seems to shift every single week, leadership turnover, platform volatility, you name it. The moment is not calm or stable or predictable. And yet, despite all of that, Agile marketers are reporting fewer bottlenecks, higher rates of collaboration, more strategic influence, more experimentation, greater confidence in planning, lower stress, and higher productivity. Yes, you heard that right. I said, "and" all of those things. None of this is a coincidence. It is a direct result of effective structure, clear processes, and a modern operating system.

So let's break down some of these benefits a little bit further. One of the strongest signals that we're seeing in this year's report is that Agile strengthens marketing's credibility across the organization because we have smoother cross-departmental collaboration, we've got fewer bottlenecks within marketing itself, but then also within the inter-team, cross-team collaboration, and therefore we end up with higher levels of trust in marketing as a function. People actually believe that when marketing says, "We're gonna release this campaign in this month," they do it. And when marketing says, "Yes, we will deliver that landing page for you," or, "We will have that nurture series launched for you on this day," they actually do what they said they would do.

And think about what that actually means right now. In a moment when every marketing budget is under scrutiny and the ROI of what we do is being questioned and AI is throwing everybody's job description into chaos, that kind of credibility is not a nice-to-have. This is like survival infrastructure. Having that kind of trust and that deep level of integration and collaboration with the rest of the organization, that is job security, my friends. And credibility — that kind of real credibility, like legit trust in your expertise as a marketer — does not come from flashier presentations or better AI prompts. It comes from predictable delivery. When your work is visible and your priorities are clear, your work in progress is limited, and stakeholders can see real progress in real time, trust starts and then it compounds over time. So if you really wanna meet this moment, this is where you start. You've got to make your work visible, you clarify your priorities publicly, and above all things you show outcomes instead of just outputs. And agility helps you build trust because it replaces typical chaos where everybody in marketing is running around like headless chickens in different directions. It replaces that feeling of chaos with transparency, and that is how we start to build trust.

Okay, this next finding from the State of Agile Marketing report, I'm gonna ask you to sit with for just a second 'cause it's a big one. Agile marketers tell us they are more likely to help shape organizational strategy, not just execute it. And I'm gonna keep using that word, and they're more likely to be given protected time to actually think strategically. And this makes sense given what we just talked about in the last data point because when you're not drowning in reactive chaos, you can actually pick your head up and look around and see what work you ought to be doing, not just what is the most on fire right now. So Agile helps us move marketing as a function and as a team from, "Hey, can you just do this landing page for me real quick? I don't really want your input," to, "What do you think we should do?" And that is not a small shift, people. That is a fundamental change in how stakeholders and leadership perceive your function.

So if your team is stuck in reactive, chaos-driven marketing mode, your first move is not to schedule a strategy offsite again. It is not to try and figure out how to make stuff faster with AI. And it is not, I'm sorry to say to our friends in SaaS, it is not time to buy another piece of MarTech. Your next move needs to be operational. Protect your sprint capacity like it's your job. Build a real, ruthlessly prioritized, single-source-of-truth backlog. And stop — can we just stop? Stop accepting last-minute work without a trade-off conversation. Stop saying yes to everything and starting it right away. Just quit it. If you stopped that right now, today, the things that you would be able to get done in the next week would astonish you. So just stop. Just stop. Because strategic influence over organizational strategy, that level of influence doesn't just get handed to you. It is not granted, it is earned through operational discipline and, of course, agility.

All right. Third portion of the report that I wanna call out for you all. This one hits me in the feels. I love this one. Because Agile teams are responding to change through testing and learning, not by sitting around and waiting to be completely certain about things. And in the AI era, that kind of mindset, that kind of way of approaching change is everything. And Agile marketers tell us that they are far more likely to have experimentation built into their daily work. They can test things before scaling, and they're confident that they can adapt quickly when conditions shift. When conditions shift, like every day. So all the time. So they're not trying to predict in advance what the perfect AI strategy will be, which is great because there isn't one. They're running experiments. They're figuring out what works and what doesn't, and they're figuring out what doesn't work quickly, and then they can iterate in real time. And that kind of discipline is what's helping them integrate new technologies like AI throughout their workflows, and this part is important, without blowing up the whole system or taking it all offline for weeks.

Because really here is an uncomfortable truth about AI. It's gonna amplify whatever operating system you already have. So a messy process gets messier faster. A clear process gains more leverage faster and faster. So Agile teams are ahead now. They were ahead during last year's report. They are farther ahead now, and they will continue to have that advantage compounding over time because they have time to think strategically. They are experimenting iteratively and continuously, so they are incorporating more and more good practice into their process faster and faster. They have more time to think strategically. It all snowballs. So all of these things are just going to continue to accrue in favor of Agile teams. So if you want to meet this AI-powered moment, the play here is not just have everybody go do AI. We've talked about this on the show before. The move here is identify the bottleneck, the one most critical bottleneck that is gumming up everything else. Test the application of AI there, measure the impact and iterate. Improve the whole system so AI can amplify something that's actually good and working instead of turning chaos into a complete catastrophe.

Okay, I don't like to play favorites with the data, but this next one is one of my favorite components out of the whole report because it tells us that Agile marketers are more confident in their planning, they're more likely to focus on high-impact work, they are more productive, and they are less stressed and less burned out. Now, this is a good time to go ahead and hit your "go back ten seconds" button and listen to that last part again because it's really important. Agility is not just improving marketing's outcomes, it is improving how work feels. And this might seem like sort of a squishy, fuzzy, nice-to-have benefit, but it is not. This is a real critical component because if your team is burned out and anxious and reactive, no strategy is going to stick. And they're sure as hell not gonna be coming up with innovative ideas or the kinds of game-changing experiments that make an impact with an audience that is inundated with AI slop.

So you need a team that feels cohesive, that is not overwhelmed, and that is not always teetering on the edge of burnout. So this stuff really actually matters. The ability to both be productive and feel okay at the end of the day, that combination is kind of a superpower right now. And the fact that Agile teams are reporting that combination in extraordinarily high numbers is really, really important to note. So meeting this moment requires this kind of emotional sustainability. We have to be able to do this as a marathon, not a sprint, even though Agile uses sprints. We've got to be able to understand the work being done and confidently execute it and not worry all the time that there's gonna be a bomb thrown into the middle of everything and set us back six weeks.

And Agile helps us do this because it creates clear priorities, a very specific, defined definition of done. We have fewer zombie projects that are always hanging out over our heads, and we're wondering, "Am I supposed to be working on that? Is that still important? Am I the one holding up this whole thing? I don't really know. I guess I should go check on it," and then I've spent the next two hours trying to chase it down. And then only to find out — yeah, actually we canceled that and it got deprioritized. In an Agile system, we just don't have those kinds of zombie projects. We have less rework, so fewer things going back and forth and ping-ponging from one person to the next for weeks. And we have better boundaries. We can say no. We can hold on to a sprint and focus on what really matters for that time box without having things come in and derail everything that we chose to prioritize.

At the end of the day, the thing that I want you to remember is that Agile structure is not here to suffocate. It is here to stabilize. And if you need a reminder of exactly what this looks like, I encourage you to go back and listen to my interview with Nicole Crawley about how their integration of creative teams into their Agile process actually helped empower the creatives to work more effectively. It did not stifle their creativity. And the same thing goes for marketing more holistically. The Agile structure is there to support and lift up and empower the function, not to clamp down and create some kind of suffocating scaffolding that doesn't allow you to flex. That is not at all what an Agile system should do when done properly.

All right. One final finding from the report that I wanna call out here directly is that Agile is gonna work best when teams actually commit to it. I know this might seem like a weird thing for me to actually have to say out loud, but there is a very, very strong distinction in our data between the marketers who report a highly successful Agile implementation and those who do not. So Agile in and of itself is great and comes with a lot of benefits, but there is amazing, excellent Agile, and then there's just okay Agile. And so if you want amazing, excellent Agile that is gonna give you a better chance at enjoying all of those benefits and a larger share of all those benefits, you need to go all in. Commit to this way of working because those benefits are gonna be more likely when you're fully committed. And that means you're gonna have to invest in building up the capabilities of your team. You need the reps here. So you can't just buy the gym membership and never actually pick up a weight or get on a treadmill. You actually have to sign up and do the work.

So what this looks like is, for example, ninety-eight percent of our Agile marketers are actively educating themselves. You have to commit to investing this time, and there are tons of ways to do this. You'll see in the report that there are online learnings, there's in-person learnings, there's coaching, there's training, like all of these things are out there. There's a vast menu, but you need to make the investment of capacity and budget in order to actually be committed to changing your ways of working. You can't just tell everyone on your team, "Agile's a priority. We're gonna adopt it this year," and then not give them any time to learn or experiment or not expect any kind of slight slowdown in their productivity while they're learning. These are unreasonable expectations, right? We've talked about on the show before, this is basically professional gaslighting, and it's not cool. If an improvement in your way of working is actually important — and it really should be — then you need to make the investment, and you actually need to make it a priority, actually act like it's a priority.

And this is really not a "let's just stick our toe into the water and see what happens" kind of situation. Agile was never meant to be a part-time operating system. I mean, the use of that word "operating system" for me is very deliberate. You don't partially install a new operating system on your phone. You hit install, and the whole thing is there. You don't get to have it in some parts of your computer and not others. The whole thing is there, and that's all you use going forward. So same thing with Agile. It is a capability for your team, and that kind of capability compounds over time. It's like a snowball that just builds and builds and builds and gets more and more powerful. But the teams that are pulling ahead and actually picking up speed and momentum are not the ones that are experimenting or dabbling. They are the ones who have gone all in, are using Agile day in and day out on every aspect of their work, and it's become central to how they operate. So fully commit. No partial installs, no dabbling. If Agile is important for you — and the data suggests that it really, really should be important to you right now — you need to make the commitment.

Okay, time for my favorite part, the practical, tactical, what-the-heck-do-we-do-now component of the podcast. So the full report is dropping tomorrow if you're listening to this podcast on the day that it was released. If you are listening to it on any other day, the report is out, and you can see all of the data. So we wanna make sure that you know what to do with it. We don't want you to just nod at it and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and then put it down and never look at it again. We worked really hard on putting this report together, so I want you to actually do something with it. So there is a section in the report for "here's what to do now," and it's gonna have a link for you to join a brand-new Agile marketing community that we are launching in order to help marketers meet this moment. It's a hundred percent free because everybody, every marketer in the world needs agility right now, and we wanna give as many people access to it as humanly possible. So download the report and go join the community because it's free, and it's gonna help you handle all the craziness that's happening.

But also, four things that you can begin doing in your teams right now. One, benchmark honestly as you read the report. Don't just look for validation in the data. Read it as a comparison and try to realistically compare yourself and your team and your marketing function with the data that you're seeing. Where do you think you're ahead of the respondents, and where do you think maybe you're a little bit behind the curve? And be honest. Nobody's gonna see. Nobody's checking your work or looking over your shoulder. Be honest about where you fall so that you can focus your efforts in the right place.

And then I would say pick one dimension and start there as a single focus area for improvement first. Agile is not a partial install, but we do wanna start somewhere. So maybe it's cross-team collaboration, maybe it's planning, maybe it's better experimentation, maybe it's operational sophistication. Pick one. Pick one area and work there first. You don't have to fix everything tomorrow, but you do need to start somewhere.

Third thing to do with the data is run a 90-day experiment. Don't go start running around and talking about transformation right after you read the report. Freak everybody out. Figure out how you can do an experiment. 90 days is a good window where it's small enough to be manageable, but meaty enough to be real, and long enough to generate some actual signal, some directional data about whether this is working. So find the 90-day experiment where you can actually go all in on Agile in an isolated area so that you can actually get some performance data and figure out how this is gonna impact you and what kind of benefits are really possible.

All right. Speaking of KPIs and benefits, it's my fourth recommendation. Measure something real that's related to the data that you're seeing in the report. So maybe this is an Agile performance metric like cycle time, so how long is it taking you to finish work? Maybe it is the presence of bottlenecks, so if you map out your flow of work and you find where things are getting stuck, how many do you have? How long are things getting stuck there? Measure those things. Measure your rounds of rework. How often does work ping-pong back and forth between your stakeholders? Maybe it's throughput. How much work just gets through your team in a certain amount of time? That one's super easy. It's just a raw number. How many things, whether it's projects or tasks, however you're visualizing your work now, just pick something, track it, and then try to make it better. Measure something and try to make it better. This is a core Agile value and aligns to experimentation.

'Cause here's the thing I want you to remember. Meeting the moment does not require a total overhaul on day one. It does require deliberate directional movement consistently sustained and iteratively improved. In other words, it requires agility. So if this year's State of Agile Marketing report proves anything, it's that the moment is not slowing down, and Agile marketers kinda don't care. They are not waiting for it to slow down. They don't need it to slow down. They are doing fine. They're adapting, collaborating, experimenting. They're earning trust within their organization. They're building strategic influence, and they're doing it systematically, not heroically.

The report is coming out tomorrow, March twenty-sixth, or if you're listening to this anytime after March twenty-sixth, it's already out, and you will find links for it in the show notes. Download it. Read it. Use it. Because the moment you've been waiting for to get your act together, it's not coming. It's here. It's now. This is it. Let's get going. Until next time, I am your host, Andrea Fryrear. And remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.