5 Types of Waste in Marketing

Episode Transcript

Have you ever gotten to the end of a project or a campaign and thought, "That was a waste of time?" My friend, you're not alone. Modern marketing is shockingly wasteful, which is ironic when you consider how overworked and underwater most marketers are. If we've got so much to do, why are we creating so much waste? It is an excellent question, and one. we' are going to try and answer today. Our first task is to reach back to the lean manufacturing tradition to understand the five types of waste? and where they come from. Then we're gonna see what we might be able to do about each one using the tools from our Agile marketing toolkit, as well as everyone's favorite new multi-tool, AI. Of course, we don't wanna waste any time, so let's get going. Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. Every week, we unpack the how behind Agile, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who've traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your WIP, and let's start ascending.

This is your weekly shot of practical, no-fluff Agile insight so you can deliver more value with less busy work and love your marketing again. And now here's your host, Andrea Fryrear.

All right. As I said, there are five types of waste. We're gonna make these very specific for marketing because these did originate in lean manufacturing, where they produce actual physical things, and in marketing, we sometimes make physical things, but most typically, they are intangible knowledge work outputs. So we're gonna fiddle with the definitions a little bit, but we're gonna keep with the overall themes in terms of the types of waste.

So type number one is overproduction, and this is where we create too much stuff. So in marketing, this might be where we create more content, more assets, or more reports than are strictly needed. Another version of this is if we create things too early, and you might have symptoms of this that are like, "We made 12 versions of this banner ad just in case," maybe because we always have to change it when everybody gives their own feedback and we're trying to get out ahead of that, or things like, "This report gets pulled every single week, but nobody reads it," or maybe something like,  "We built out 20 nurture emails, each with 12 complex branches and all kinds of fancy logic, before we even validated that anybody was interested in the lead magnet." All of these are painfully common examples of overproduction, and the places that these usually come from, some of the root causes of overproduction, are things like a fear of rework. We want to avoid having to go back and do things over again, and so we try to get out ahead of it and make extra stuff up front. This ends up being waste because we made a lot of things that did not need to be made just to try and avoid future hypothetical rework.

So this is because, probably, you have a history of getting a lot of rounds of revision, so you're trying to avoid that by making a lot of new, different upfront versions of something.

Those ultimately become waste. Another potential root cause of overproduction might be some just-in-case type habits. We are hedging our bets here. Just in case somebody changes their mind or just in case priorities shift, we want to be prepared for all eventualities, but again, there will only be one path. Only one future will ultimately come to pass, and so all of the just-in-case work that we did to prepare for the alternatives becomes waste. The third and final potential root cause of overproduction is a lack of alignment and appropriate feedback loops. So overproduction can be accidental. You might not have done it on, purpose, but you might have done it because you did not know which path was ultimately chosen, and so you made a bunch of stuff for the wrong path, the wrong priority, the wrong target, the wrong segment, the wrong messaging, and that was not the place that was ultimately chosen, and so the work became waste.

Likewise, if there are not good feedback loops, you may end up creating a bunch of stuff that is going in the wrong direction because you didn't get feedback early enough in the process. Now, in manufacturing, when you have overproduction, it's very, very obvious because it takes up physical space. It clogs up.... the production line. It clogs up the inventory of the building.

And you can start to see it happening in marketing because it does still clog things up, but in a different way. So it starts to clog up things like calendars because there's too many meetings going on, or people are trying to understand what's going on, or there's too many review meetings being scheduled, or maybe it's clogging up your asset folders because everybody's making 12 versions of everything just in case. And it's definitely going to be clogging up your team's capacity because they're hedging their bets. They're making a lot of different options, or they're doing things too early, right? Like the example of the multiple branches of the email campaign, they've done a lot of work before the experiment has been fully validated, so that's gonna take up a lot of capacity that could have been allocated to other high value.

So these are some symptoms and some root causes, so what do we do about it? Now, I'm gonna give you some solutions here and we're gonna go in order of difficulty to implement.

So easiest option here is visualization. Get your board out in the open, document the work that's being done. This is a very commonly recommended solution on this podcast, and here it is again. Get your work out in the open so that wasteful work can get identified and ideally then removed, so we are not gonna do the wasteful work, it's gonna get pulled off of the board and we can replace it with value added work. The second solution is to really get comfortable with MVPs, minimum viable product or swip- switch out the P if that's what you need to do. Make it minimum viable campaign, minimum viable whatever you want to call it. The important thing is to really get to know both the M and the V here, so minimum, meaning it's the smallest possible thing, and viable, meaning that it's going to potentially still deliver an outcome or deliver value.

So small yet valuable. Both of these things need to be true in order for the MVP to be satisfied. So get comfortable doing smaller incremental pieces, get them out into the world and learn from them, and you will do far less wasteful activities. Okay, last one is silo busting planning. So this is the hardest one of the three 'cause you need to get more people together during the planning and review cycles so that we' have the people who are needing to be in alignment about what work's getting done, for whom, and on what schedule all in the same room at the same time, so we avoid miscommunication, we avoid misalignment, and we avoid waste.

It's harder to do, but it will save you a lot of wasted cycles down the line if we can get everybody together during the planning process and then ideally get people together again for a couple of touch points for reviews during the work. And now you are gonna want to, at the heart of all of this, work on improvements in psychological safety and you're gonna need to remove any underpinnings of a fear-based culture because you can't accomplish any of this if you've got people doing a CYA move. Uh, that CYA stands for cover your ass, right? If people are just looking to protect themselves and they don't really care about adding value to the customer or supporting business objectives and they just want to make sure that they look good, then you're not going. to succeed in visualizing all the work, delivering MVPs or breaking down silos. So you got to get at the heart of some of these things which is psychological safety and getting rid of any fear-based culture, right? So if we're thinking about our agile marketing operating system here, you can see we are cutting across a lot of sections of that Venn diagram here. We're thinking about mindset and culture when we think about psychological safety. We're thinking about planning when we think about busting silos during that process. We're absolutely thinking about how we work and execution level activities when we think about visualization. So a lot of stuff comes into play when it's time to remove waste.

All right. Second type of waste is handoffs. I'm sure you never have these. Modern marketing is not about handoffs. No, there's never any of these. Yeah, no, these happen all the time.

So this is pretty straightforward definition, right? This is when we transfer work from one person or team to another, particularly when that transfer introduces delays or confusion, right? That's what a handoff means. My son just, uh, was in track last year, junior high- track for the first time and they were practicing the baton handoff.And it definitely introduced confusion and delay a lot of the times because it's not a natural process.

They had to learn to hold their hands a certain way, they had to practice it. It was not something that was intuitive. And handoffs at work are the same way.

You' need to have a clear process that everyone agrees on and is following, or you're going to drop the baton. Just how it is. So if you're dropping the baton and you need to work on this, uh, particular source of waste, here are some symptoms that you might be noticing. You might hear things like, "We are just waiting on legal, or design, or the data." Any of those things are a symptom of handoff-driven waste. Things like, "Oh, it just sat in Andrea's inbox for three days and she didn't know that she needed to do anything, and so it just stalled out." That happens a lot.

Or nobody knew who' was supposed to pick that task up and do something with it, so it just got stuck.

So all of these are symptoms of handoff level waste. Some of the root causes of this are going to be really familiar if you've listened to previous episodes of this podcast because it's coming down to a lack of shared systems and visibility, silos and unclear ownership, and an over-reliance on old school work management tools like email and instant messaging to handle complex inter-team workflows. So if you haven't kind of brought your work management into the modern era, you're gonna have bad handoffs. There's really just no- getting around it. And every handoff that you have is a chance for the baton to get dropped. So the question you need to be asking yourself is, how can we' lower the number of handoffs and how can we smooth out the ones that we can't get rid of?

So some options for you here. Just two, because both of them are going to be a little bit challenging. But as you can imagine, handoffs can be the place where if the baton gets dropped, it might never get picked back up again. Very dangerous, this type of waste, because projects and tasks can sort of fall into a black hole and never get picked back up again. Or by the time we know that they were dropped, it might be too late. So this one's quite critical to address.

So the first one is get a shared visualization project management tool that everybody uses and everybody trusts.

I'm gonna repeat that because it's really, really important. Get a tool that everybody uses and everybody trusts. If only some people are in there and some people are not and not everybody trusts it, it's almost as bad as not having one at all. Because the only way that you can avoid dropped handoffs, if everybody is looking in the same spot for work. We all know that this is where work lives and this is where I go to get work, this is where I go to check on work. Not everybody has to live hours and hours a day in the same project management tool, but we at least have to know that I will get an email notification from that tool when it's time for me to do something and I will monitor my inbox at the very, very least. But you got to get everybody together in the same tool. It's just not optional, period. If you've got people that are dragging their feet and they don't want to do it, just re- show them the recording of me saying this, "It's not optional." You have to do it 'cause I said so. You can tell them I said so. All right. Then the second one is coming back to the first, uh, waste reduction tactic that we talked about, which is to revisit your planning processes. So you want to get more robust during your planning cycles to make sure that there are clear owners and sub-tasks and due dates in that project management tool that everyone uses and everyone trusts so that you've got clear lines of ownership and that people actually care about and believe in the owners and dates that are assigned. So if you set it all up during planning and then all those due dates just go whooshing by and no one cares and there's no accountability and no repercussions, it was just another source of waste to go through all those activities. There has to be realness attached to the work.

When are they happening? Who owns them? That has to be real or it doesn't matter. Same thing with the tool actually being used and people trusting it. All right. Third type of waste is delays.

All right. Delays. These hurt because a lot of these are out of our control as marketers, but they are still wasteful.

All right. So types of delay waste. When we're waiting for reviews, waiting for input, waiting on data, waiting for somebody to make a decision, or waiting for some kind of approval.Pretty common, especially because we are such a service-driven function, and some symptoms that you might be experiencing if this is the type of waste that is dragging you down. "We built something. We built a thing. We built a campaign. We built some assets. We built an entire project, but it's been stuck in legal review for two weeks." Or you might say things, like, "We can't launch until we get the final go-ahead, and I don't know when that will be." Or you might say things, like, "We're waiting on a brief," or,

"We're waiting on edits," or, "We're waiting on alignment," everybody's favorite. Delays come from a lot of places depending on who your ultimate source is, but some root causes might be decision fatigue. The people who are trying to give you feedback might be sick of making decisions. There might be bottlenecks in the review or approval process, and there might be a lack of clarity on what's actually good enough to move forward.

And yeah, delays are annoying, but they also add cost, they reduce our overall agility, and they erode trust between teams. So, we' do need to try and work on them even though oftentimes these feel like the things that are the least in our control. Now here's some things that you can try, again, in order of difficulty. So the first is to establish a definition of both done and ready with all of your stakeholders. So, a definition of done is a clear set of criteria that means we' can't start work until all these boxes are checked, and we've all agreed together that this is how it works, that our team doesn't start work until all these criteria are met. And likewise, we will not hand work back until all of the criteria that meet the definition of done are checked off. So this avoids the need to go back and forth a ton of times and gum up the system with people needing to give too much feedback or give lots and lots of input really quickly, and that can introduce a lot of delays when there's a lot of back and forth at certain areas in the process.

So, those are pretty straightforward, uh, ways that you can avoid delays at the tail-ends of the process. Another option here is to try using AI as a first pass reviewer to eliminate the need for some human oversight. So maybe it's gonna take a look at the brief for you first and make sure there aren't any missing pieces. Does it meet the definition of ready? And if not, it can go back and forth with the person submitting it until all the fields are full, the criteria are met. And likewise, when work is trying to get submitted, maybe it can look at it first. And if it doesn't meet the definition of done, it can go back and forth to avoid handing it off to a human bottleneck that may have it stuck in a delay cycle for a good long time. Little bit more difficult would be to get your middle and upper management maybe some training on modern management practices that would, um, maybe prevent them from being the source of delay, because if we push some decision-making authority down into teams and not have it consolidate into the management layer, that is obviously a great way to remove some of these common delays. That's gonna be a bigger, heavier lift, but it can be a permanent way to eliminate some of these more significant delays. But you are gonna have to work with these managers who are usually the source of this kind of delay, uh, to change their mindset of what their role is like and how they add value, and that's not a quick fix. It's gonna take some more time. All right. Fourth type of waste. in modern marketing, is rework. Now, this is gross and nobody likes doing rework, but it's basically redoing work because of unclear requirements, misalignment, or just straight up errors. And some of the symptoms, so you know if this is happening to you, you probably know, but symptoms are,

"We had to scrap the entire first draft because it wasn't what the stakeholder wanted." Or, "Design had to redo everything after the brand team weighed in." Or, "We launched based on outdated data and we had to pull the whole thing out of market."

Um, none of that feels good aside from all of the waste and the, um, effort that has been done for nothing. It's not a good look to have those kinds of problems enter the system. So, we obviously don't want rework happening. Some of the root causes are bad briefs that are unclear or incomplete, and obviously if we have missing context, we don't understand some of the why and some of the deeper business reasons for work being done, and it's easy for things to get off track.

And if we don't have our stakeholders involved early, and often, then...We are at risk of things veering into the wrong direction. So, uh, we don't want to do this kind of double work. It's demoralizing and we don't wanna do it. It's wasteful, it's not fun. And so the, the general principle that we wanna have in mind here is the fewer times we can touch a task, the faster it'll flow to the end. So, fewer touch points is better. Ironically, one of the best ways to accomplish this is to increase our cycle metabolism by implementing sprints. So, that's our first and easiest solution to the rework problem.

So, if we are running in shorter cycles, two to three weeks, where we can bring stakeholders in for the planning and for one or two of the standup conversations, and then for the review at the end, that is the entire reason that sprints were invented, to get feedback from the end user often during the development of the stuff that's being built. So, sprints exist to get rapid feedback, so use them to get feedback and avoid rework. And once again, we can blend in some of the other components that we've talked about for some of the other waste mitigation, like, definition of done and ready, that, really can help with avoiding rework and having trustworthy data. So, if we have all agreed that certain sources of data are reliable and we can act on them with confidence, then we can avoid one of the examples that we talked about, which is releasing work that was based on inaccurate data and having to pull it, back.

All right, last, but certainly not least, in 2025, a source of waste in marketing is underutilized talent. And now, the way we're defining this is team members who are spending too much time on tasks below their skill level or outside their particular zone of genius. So, if you feel like, you're doing stuff that is beneath you, then you're being underutilized and we shouldn't be having that happen because all of us have special, unique talents and we wanna leverage those, not just to be happier and to enjoy our jobs, although that is very important, but because when we are happier and enjoying our jobs, we produce better stuff and that provides better outcomes for our businesses and that's what we want too. Everybody wins.

So, if you're wondering if you've got some underutilization happening, here are some potential symptoms. Our strategists are formatting slides.

We have senior marketers manually tagging leads. Ew. Copywriters are spending their time tracking down missing briefs. Not good. These are not people working within their zone of genius.

Some root causes of this may be that you don't have a good delegation system, that people are just taking in requests and doing whatever comes across their desk, that there's no system, no process, no mechanism that allows work to get distributed to the person whose zone of genius it might fall into. So, if we don't have a good system, the work isn't gonna fall where it should. We might also be doing things too manually.

It's 2025, people. Manual is not the vibe. We have all kinds of tools available to automate, to streamline. Manual is not the look. This is not the way we should be doing it. So, we need to get in there and get the tools to be helping out.

Okay. So, it's time for us to be focusing marketing time on creating, on connecting, on strategizing. We don't want to be underutilizing marketers anymore. So, this is really where AI should be making our lives better. If there's something you or somebody on your team really hates doing or it's detracting their time from something they're amazing at, find a way to make AI do it. It never gets bored, it never needs a break, and it has an endless capacity for repetition and minutia.

Automate, streamline, connect systems, turn AI agents into your little marketing minions that are gonna go out and do all your busy work so you can do the fun and creative stuff. AI, I think we're getting to the point where we see it this way, but it's really important to underline this. AI does not have to mean the apocalypse for marketers. It can mean the promised land if we think of it as a fast track to waste reduction, especially when we think about this fifth area of waste of underutilized talent.

So, that's it. That's our five types of waste in modern marketing with lots of tactical solutions to deal with all of them. If you're still feeling like you don't know where to start or you're confused about where the waste might actually be,

I would suggest our marketing agility scorecard, which is gonna help you understand how your team stacks up in areas like speed and focus and effectiveness by giving you a score across nine dimensions of your marketing work. It'll only take you about 10 minutes and it's totally free. You'll get a clear picture of your team's overall health. You can find the link in the show notes and always at agilesherpas.com. Till next time, I'm your host, Andrea Fryrear. Don't forget, the struggle is real, but so is agile marketing.