How to Stop Drowning in Unfinished Marketing Work

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Questions That No Marketer Wants to Answer. Today's question: how many things is your team working on right now? Not this quarter, right now. Today. Actively in progress, in motion, on someone's to do list. If you run out of fingers and toes while you're trying to add all of this up, or if the number just makes you a little bit queasy, you are in the right place, and this episode is for you.

Because here's what nine years of our State of Agile Marketing report keeps telling us, and it doesn't change year over year: the single biggest thing getting in the way of marketing teams is not budget. It's not headcount. It isn't even leaders or your Martech stack. Or you might be surprised to find out, resistance to change. None of those things are the biggest problem. The biggest problem is too much work in progress. Too many things started and not enough things finished. And that's been the number one barrier for years.

And when I talk about work in progress, or having too much going on, most marketers hear, yeah, that sounds like me, but we're just busy. Everybody's busy, and that's just what marketing is. That is not true, and that is a misread that we are gonna fix today, because WIP, work in progress, is not a busyness problem, it is a system design flaw. And the teams that have actually beaten it didn't do it by somehow working harder, or hiring their way out of it. You can't even AI your way out of a busyness issue. They did it by changing one specific thing about how work moves.

So today: why WIP piles up, why it compounds instead of just adding up, and what software teams figured out a couple of decades ago that sort of saved us, but doesn't completely translate to marketing. So let's get into it.

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 this week's guide on your climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Today we're going deep on the barrier that refuses to go away, work in progress, and the counterintuitive fix that separates the teams who are drowning from the teams who say, nothing gets in our way.

I'm gonna lead with data today, because there is way too much of this volume equals value stuff going on, especially with AI making it a hundred times easier to make more volume. So when we ask Agile marketers what gets in the way of them working in a more Agile way, too much whip comes out on top. But we need to look more deeply at who is saying this. Because among the teams that we label all others, the ones who just haven't cracked great Agile ways of working yet, 47% name too much whip as their barrier. And among our extremely successful Agile marketers, it's only 33%. That is a 14-point gap.

What it tells us is that WIP, high levels of work in progress, is not an immutable law of physics. It's not the weather that we cannot escape. If it were just marketing is busy and that's the job, then the successful teams would be reporting this problem at the same rate as everybody else. But they don't. Something they're doing is structurally holding their whip in check. And it's working well enough to move the needle on the one barrier that everybody complains about.

So the question is not, how do we just make it through this busy time? Because this busy time is going to be followed by another busy time. There is no escaping it. So the question actually is, what are those teams doing that we are not? That is actually a much more useful and realistic question. And ha, ha, the data has an answer for us.

But before we get to the fix, you have to understand why this problem is so nasty and why we're spending an entire episode on it. Because most teams treat additional whip like an addition. One more project on the pile is just one more thing. It's not a big deal, we're gonna get to it. Like one more campaign, one more landing page, one more whatever it is. It's not that big of a deal.

The problem is that WIP does not add. It's not one plus one equals two. It compounds. So here's the mechanism: every active piece of work comes with like a tax that has nothing to do with the work itself. Complexity, size, scope, doesn't matter, the tax is still there. You've got the context switching cost. So every time you jump between three campaigns, you lose the thread on all three. And picking it back up is not free. It is not instantaneous. There is also the coordination cost. More things in motion means more status meetings, more "hey, where are we on this?" messages, and more meetings that exist for no other reason than because there's just too much open at once.

And then we have the aging cost. So work that's sitting around half finished does not retain its value. That brilliant blog post that you came up with six weeks ago and got started on, the moment of impact for that idea has passed. You're gonna finish it anyway because you've already sunk time into it and you've got a deadline, but now you've spent effort producing something that's just gonna be published into a void that doesn't care about it anymore. So the 10th open project does not cost you one project's worth of drag. It costs you the switching, the coordinating, and the aging across everything that's already open.

That's why teams are working flat out and shipping less. You are not imagining this. It is really happening. The work about the work is eating the work. And think about what this does to people as well. This is the through line to something that we also see every year in our report: Agile marketers report higher productivity and lower stress at the same time.

This year we had 87% tell us Agile improved their productivity, and 77% said they feel less stressed. Those things are not usually traveling together. But the reason that they do on great Agile teams is lower whip. When you stop drowning in a whole bunch of half-finished work, you get more done and you feel less frantic. Because the frantic feeling was coming from all of the work in progress.

Okay, here is where it helps to borrow from people who have been fighting this problem even longer than we have. We're gonna go way back here to Taiichi Ohno at Toyota, where Kanban originated. And yes, this started in a manufacturing setting, but the insight, his insight, wasn't about cars. It was about the danger of overproduction. Making more than the next step in the process can absorb does not speed anything up. It just creates piles of stuff. It hides systemic problems. And it feels like progress while actively slowing the whole system down.

Maybe that sounds familiar. That's your content backlog. That's the 14 campaigns in flight with only four ever seeming to ship. Software teams took this idea and made it applicable with two things. One, a board that makes all the work visible. We've talked about this before and why it's so amazing. The second thing is a hard limit on how much can sit in any spot on that board at any given time. That's it. That's the mechanic. A whip limit says this stage of work can hold three items, not four. You want to start a fourth, you gotta finish one first. And this constraint is what forces flow through the system.

And you can see this again landing in the data. Look at what the extremely successful teams actually do differently. When we look at whip limits, 44% of the most successful teams use them versus 26% for everyone else. Kanban boards, 52% of extremely successful versus 32% for everybody else. These are not decorative, nice to have practices. They are the exact things that make your whip visible and then put a cap on it. And the teams beating this whip problem are the teams using both of those things.

Daniel Vacanti, who wrote the book on flow metrics for software, has a line that I think about a lot. He argues that most teams' real problem isn't that they work too slowly, it's that they start too much. And again, can we put an underscore on how AI is not gonna fix this? Your problem isn't speed, it's not that you're working too slow. Is that you start too much, and AI oftentimes just makes it easier to start more things and makes this problem even worse.

So, flow efficiency, the percentage of time work is actually being touched versus the time it's just sitting around and waiting, is often shockingly low for marketing teams. In a lot of instances, a piece of work is actually being touched maybe 15% of the time that it's in progress. The other 80% of the time it's waiting, waiting on approval, waiting on a handoff, waiting because you got busy doing nine other things. Starting more work does not fix that. It just makes it worse. The actual solution is start less, finish faster.

But now, you know, this is a podcast about marketing agility, so I'm not gonna stand here and tell you to just go install software's playbook, because some of it does not survive the trip to marketing. In a lot of instances, software work is more uniform than marketing. Team of engineers is doing engineering. A marketing team is doing a webinar, a rebrand, a paid campaign, an email nurture, and a last-minute thing that the CEO asked for in the hallway. And we're doing it all at once. It's all wildly different sizes and levels of effort, and it all has different stakeholders. So this nice simple three items per column on a Kanban board rule can get messy really fast, because our items are not the same size or shape. And they probably all have somebody different yelling at us about them.

And software has something we usually don't, which is a relatively contained system. Marketing's biggest source of work in progress often comes from outside the team. So we've got an intake issue as well. And just about anybody from the org can drop work on marketing, and nobody's counting what everybody else put on the pile. And this is where we have some connecting data from the report as well. Because if you remember from previous episodes, the biggest cross-department collaboration challenge is slow approvals and bottlenecks. And even Agile teams hit capacity mismatches with the departments around them. So your whip problem is partially a boundary problem.

If you cap what your team starts, but you just leave the door wide open for everybody else to throw whatever they want on the pile, the pile is just at the intake queue instead of on your board. So we're still drowning, it's just a different bucket. So the translation isn't just copy Kanban the way it's always been done. It's take the principle, limit what's in motion. Make the limit visible, protect the boundary, and adapt the mechanics to marketing's reality, which is exactly the kind of judgment call that's worth making with people who have done it before.

This is why Agile Sherpas exists. The people on our team have done this a lot. We make this translation, we hold the line, we teach you how to manage intake, manage your stakeholders. Because the right whip limit for your team is not something that you can just find in a Toyota manual or in an article about Kanban. You need an expert to help you with this. And we're here to do that if you need support.

So, as we know, we want to make this practical and tactical at the end. So, what can you actually do this week? Three things, in the order you need to do them. First, you're not gonna like this one, but you have to do it: count your whip. Honestly, like, really. Not the pretty polished project list that you put on a slide deck during quarterly planning, or the one that you tell your boss about. The real one. Every single thing you andor your team currently has open and in motion. Most teams have never done this, and the number will genuinely shock you the first time you do it. I was recently with a team that just stopped counting after 400. But you can't limit what you refuse to examine. This is the whole first step, and most people would rather skip it, but you can't.

Step two: make it visible in one place. Not my inbox and your notebook and somebody else's Airtable. We need a board. Physical, digital, doesn't matter, but we all use it. And it needs columns for the stages your work actually moves through. And every one of those items from your first list goes on this board. No limits yet, just visibility. Let the team see the pile that they've been feeling on their shoulders.

Final step three: set one whip limit and just hold it for one sprint. Pick your most jammed up stage. Usually it's in progress or in review, and put a cap on it. The cap doesn't have to be three, it might be thirty. Whatever you need to do, but when it's full, the rule is finish something before you start something. That's the whole discipline. And it's gonna feel wrong and terrifying for about a week. Because starting something new feels like progress, while finishing something can feel like standing still. That instinct is the exact thing that got you in trouble, and we need to learn to fight it.

So, one limit, one stage, one sprint. Then measure whether you, whether you finished more things by the end of this sprint, compared to one without a limit. I will bet you one unfinished campaign that you absolutely will.

And of course, if all of this feels overwhelming and scary and impossible, we are here to help. Halfday workshop, we can help you visualize all this and get it out onto a board. So you have taken the first critical steps in finally, completely, once and for all, solving the work in progress problem.

Until next time, I'm Andrea Fryrear, and remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.