The Agile
Marketing Edge Podcast 

Episode 38: The Four False Senses Running Your Marketing Team

Every project is green. Revenue is growing. Your team says they're fine.

It's reassuring, until you discover how much those signals have been hiding.

In this episode of The Agile Marketing Edge, AgileSherpas Chief Value Officer Ross Libby examines four assumptions that can leave marketing teams exposed: a false sense of security, stability, scalability, and sustainability.

Drawing on his own leadership missteps and findings from the 9th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, Ross explores how capable, committed people end up concealing problems without ever intending to. 

AI can make these weaknesses harder to ignore, and more costly to leave unresolved. Faster output puts additional pressure on the people, processes, and decisions underneath it.

Episode 37: How to Build a Metrics Culture That Drives Better Marketing Decisions

When was the last time a number on your marketing dashboard changed what your team did next?

If you have to think about it, you're in good company. Marketing teams spend hours collecting data, maintaining reports, and tracking performance. Yet planning decisions can still come down to habit, gut feel, or the latest request from leadership.

In this episode of The Agile Marketing Edge, AgileSherpas CEO Andrea Fryrear explores the missing connection between measuring marketing performance and using it to make better decisions.

Her argument: a healthy metrics culture depends on a regular practice of reviewing evidence and acting on it. Even a carefully chosen North Star metric has limited value if it never changes how your team spends its time.

Episode 36: How Retrospectives Make or Break Marketing Teams

For months, a marketing team in health and life sciences held a retrospective at the end of every sprint. Leadership supported it. Everyone attended. And nothing about how the team worked actually changed.

AgileSherpas Principal Monica Georgieff was in the room with that team. She shares what went wrong, what finally helped, and why showing up for retrospectives can give teams a misleading sense of progress.

Retrospectives give teams a regular opportunity to improve the way work happens. But that opportunity depends on people being able to name real problems, and knowing that something will happen after they do.

A retrospective that changes nothing leaves the team with the same problems—and one more meeting.

Episode 35: Rethinking Marketing Team Structure in the Age of AI

Embed specialists in cross-functional teams, and they gain speed and business context. Centralize them in a center of excellence, and you gain consistency and depth.

Marketing leaders have spent years reorganizing around that trade-off. AI is giving them a reason to reconsider it.

In this episode, Ross Libby explores how AI and integrated platforms are opening up new possibilities for team design. A small team can now access capabilities that once required several specialists, bringing the strengths of embedded teams and centralized expertise closer together.

But making the team smaller is the easy part. Deciding how it should work takes more thought.

Episode 34: How to Stop Drowning in Unfinished Marketing Work

Starting another campaign feels productive. Finishing the five already in progress would probably do more for your results.

But when requests keep coming and every stakeholder needs something now, unfinished work can start to feel like a permanent feature of marketing.

It doesn't have to be.

Andrea takes on marketing's persistent work-in-progress problem in this episode of The Agile Marketing Edge.

Andrea explores how teams can regain control through visible work, practical work-in-progress limits, and clearer boundaries around incoming requests.

Episode 33: Why Marketing AI Initiatives Fail Before They Even Start

Your team has AI tools, leadership support, and a few enthusiastic power users. So why is adoption still stuck?

The trouble often starts before anyone writes a prompt: overloaded teams, unclear goals, and workflows that were already struggling.

Andrea welcomes Melissa Reeves, author of Hyperadaptive, to explore why “random acts of AI” rarely become lasting organizational change. They discuss the support people need to learn, how to connect experimentation to business outcomes, and why incentives and mandates can fall flat.

If you're waiting for AI adoption to take off on its own, this conversation offers a more deliberate way forward.

Episode 32: Why Marketing Teams Get Customer Focus Wrong

Your customers have moved on. Has your marketing?

Campaigns can be built on carefully researched personas and still miss the mark when those insights are months—or years—out of date. Andrea calls it “customer archaeology,” and it's more common than most teams would like to admit.

In this episode, she explores how to make fresh customer feedback part of everyday planning. From support tickets to sales conversations, she shows how teams can use information already within reach to challenge assumptions and shape what they work on next, without launching a major research initiative.

Episode 31: How to Fix Slow Marketing Approvals

The campaign is ready. The sign-off isn't. Three days later, your team is chasing feedback while the opportunity to make an impact slips away.

Slow approvals cost more than time. They interrupt creative momentum, erode trust, and leave capable marketers waiting for permission to do their jobs.

Andrea examines why approval processes often become a way to manage anxiety rather than improve quality. She also explores how clear decision rights, standards agreed upfront, and a healthier approach to disagreement can help teams move work forward without compromising what matters.

Episode 30: How To Earn Strategic Influence in Marketing

Delivering every campaign on time can earn your team a reputation for execution. It doesn't necessarily earn you a say in where the business is going.

So how does marketing move from carrying out the plan to helping shape it?

Andrea explores how teams build strategic influence through fresh customer intelligence, ongoing experiments, and protected time to think beyond the next deadline. She explains why even perfectly run sprints can leave marketing stuck as a production function, and what needs to change for leadership to seek your team's input before the goals are set.

Episode 29: How Marketing Teams Get 3X Better AI Results

Your biggest AI advantage might be a well-prioritized backlog.

Agile marketers are three times more likely to have AI fully integrated into their processes. Andrea digs into what's behind that gap: clear priorities, defined workflows, and the habit of testing whether something actually helps.

She shares why some teams have had to pause ambitious AI rollouts to fix their operations, and outlines a more focused approach built around one bottleneck, one experiment, and a meaningful measure of success.

Episode 28: The Collaboration Gap Killing Marketers

Your marketing team is moving faster. Legal, IT, and sales aren't. Now what?

Improving how marketing works can expose a different problem: the departments you depend on can't keep pace. Meanwhile, your team's view of how well you collaborate may look very different from theirs.

Andrea unpacks the collaboration findings from the 9th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, exploring the difference between internal process bottlenecks and cross-team capacity mismatches. She explains why each needs a different response, and how visible priorities and reliable delivery build the trust that saying “we value collaboration” never will.

Episode 27: What Sets High-Performing Marketing Teams Apart in 2026

Higher productivity and lower stress can sound like an impossible combination when your team is stretched thin. Yet that's what Agile marketers are reporting, alongside stronger collaboration and more influence over strategy.

Andrea brings together the key findings from the 9th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report to explore the working habits behind those gains. From predictable delivery to disciplined experimentation, she explains how teams are building an advantage in 2026, and how to use the research to choose a meaningful starting point for your own team.

Episode 26: How AI Exposes Broken Marketing Teams

AI can help your team produce more. Whether any of it is worth producing is still your responsibility.

Andrea joins MarTech analyst Scott Brinker to explore how AI exposes gaps in priorities, collaboration, and execution. They introduce a useful distinction: the “factory,” where technology supports dependable delivery, and the “lab,” where teams explore possibilities without expecting every experiment to pay off.

Along the way, they challenge the pressure to fill every hour AI saves with more output, and consider what marketing stands to gain by making room for judgment, creativity, and genuine customer connection.

Episode 25: Making Agile Work for Creative Teams

Creatives at Navy Federal Credit Union worried Agile would turn their work into an assembly line. What they gained was breathing room.

Nicole Crawley joins Andrea to share how clearer priorities, earlier creative input, and a dedicated studio team helped protect people from constant interruptions across a marketing organization approaching 300 people.

It's a candid look at the fears, adjustments, and leadership changes involved, and why the biggest win was giving creatives the confidence and space to do better work.

Episode 24: How to Build a Future-Proof Marketing Operating System

If you could rebuild your marketing operation from scratch, what would you keep, and what would you stop doing?

Andrea and Ross take that question beyond the org chart, exploring the gap between a model that looks good on paper and a system that works day to day. They debate when incremental improvements are enough, when a reset makes more sense, and why leaders can't delegate the responsibility for making change possible.

For teams caught between ambitious strategy and frustrating execution, it's a conversation about what needs to change first.

Episode 23: Building Agile Organizations for Today's Complex World

An octopus has something many organizations struggle to achieve: independent arms that respond quickly while staying connected to a common purpose.

Andrea uses the “octopus organization” model to explore why tighter control can leave teams less capable of handling complexity. She examines the everyday habits that undermine clarity, ownership, and curiosity—from micromanagement to information hoarding—and shares how small experiments can start to loosen their grip.

It's a fresh way to think about building an organization that adapts without waiting for permission at every turn.

Episode 22: Mastering the Art of Asking Questions

“What can we stop doing to make this possible?” One question can change a conversation that would otherwise end with another overloaded sprint.

Andrea explores five types of strategic questions and when to use them—from challenging assumptions during planning to uncovering what a retrospective isn't bringing to the surface.

With practical examples for everyday marketing conversations, she shows how better questions help teams turn ideas into action, data into decisions, and unspoken concerns into problems they can actually address.

Episode 21: The People Problem That’s Quietly Killing Agile Marketing

A stable team isn't always a thriving team. Sometimes people stay because leaving feels risky, and quietly stop learning, experimenting, or challenging what isn't working.

Andrea examines how “job hugging,” widening skills gaps, and unresolved tensions over where people work can undermine marketing agility. She explores what leaders can do to protect learning time, address fear openly, and make collaboration purposeful wherever the team works.

For marketers trying to stay adaptable, it's a timely look at the human conditions that processes and tools alone can't fix.

Episode 20: How Agile Saves Marketers from AI Chaos

An AI experiment that goes nowhere can cost more than its budget. It can make the next experiment harder to get approved.

Andrea traces how teams get caught in that downward spiral: too many initiatives, slow decisions, and no capacity to learn before the technology changes again.

Through a side-by-side look at Agile and traditional marketing teams, she explores how smaller tests, frequent feedback, and deliberate prioritization help protect both your investment and your team's credibility as you figure out where AI belongs.

Episode 19: The Worst Time to Pause Agile Is During a Crisis

“We'll come back to Agile once things settle down.” A reorg, acquisition, or new CMO can make that sound sensible. But what happens when things never quite settle?

Andrea shares five reasons to keep improving how your team works through disruption, drawing on client stories where pausing meant losing momentum and repeating the hardest steps later.

She explores how to make change efforts work together, defend their value to new leadership, and use an unusual situation to challenge habits that normally feel impossible to shift.

Episode 18: From Order Takers to Strategic Partners

A 90-minute status meeting becomes a focused 15-minute conversation. Business leaders start asking for more frequent planning discussions with marketing. Small changes begin to shift the team's role.

Jon Weidenheft joins Andrea to share how his marketing team at GreatAmerica Financial Services began moving from reactive requests to strategic partnership. He describes the unexpected ally who helped secure buy-in, why their supposed technology problems turned out to be process problems, and how they adapted Agile roles without changing everyone's job titles.

Episode 17: Scaling Agile Marketing the Smart Way

One team sizes work with Fibonacci numbers. Another uses dog breeds. Both call themselves Agile, but working together is getting harder.

As Agile spreads across marketing, local adaptations can become shared confusion. Enforcing identical practices everywhere brings its own problems.

Andrea explores how to establish a common foundation while giving teams room to adapt. She walks through when customization makes sense, how to test it responsibly, and how to tell whether a change improves outcomes or simply protects familiar habits.

Episode 16: When a Hit Campaign Breaks the System

Half a million photo mugs sold in a week. A campaign worth celebrating, until production called to say they couldn't fulfill the orders.

Agile coach Kamal Hans joins Andrea to revisit a Vistaprint campaign whose success exposed a costly gap between marketing and the wider business. He shares what it took to keep the customer promise, what he'd do differently, and why hitting your team's targets can still create problems elsewhere.

It's a memorable lesson in planning for success, spotting dependencies, and looking beyond the sale to the experience you've promised.

Episode 15: Pilot Like You Mean It

If a pilot shows that your idea won't work, has it failed, or done exactly what you needed it to do?

Andrea challenges the fixation on pilot success rates and explores how to design experiments that produce useful learning before the stakes get too high. Whether you're testing Agile, AI, or new MarTech, she examines the resources, leadership support, and everyday working habits that give a pilot a genuine chance.

For teams stuck debating the perfect setup, it's a case for starting small enough to learn, and taking that learning seriously.

Episode 14: How to Make Change Stick in Your Marketing Team

The launch went well. Everyone seemed on board. Nine months later, the team is back to working the old way.

Elizabeth Venter Botha joins Andrea to explore why change loses its grip, and how to build staying power from the beginning. Drawing on two decades of transformation experience, she shares how involving people in the design, delivering early relief, and spotting quiet resistance can make a lasting difference.

They also tackle a difficult leadership balance: moving fast enough to maintain momentum while giving people the support and breathing room to come along.

Episode 13: The Hidden Dangers of Being Too Nice at Work

Everyone agrees in the meeting. The real feedback comes out afterward, behind closed doors.

That kind of politeness can quietly slow decisions, protect weak ideas, and leave important problems untouched. But being blunt without showing care can shut people down just as quickly.

Andrea explores the balance between psychological safety and radical candor, with practical ways to make honest feedback part of everyday work. She explains how small interactions—from admitting a mistake to leaving room for disagreement—help teams challenge ideas while preserving the trust they need to improve them.

Episode 12: How to Plan in an Uncertain World

You've barely finished quarterly planning when a stakeholder asks for something that isn't in the plan. How do you stay adaptable without making the whole exercise pointless?

Andrea explores how Agile planning connects a clear direction with room to learn and adjust.

She breaks down the roles of vision, discovery, and delivery, explains how OKRs can support that balance, and tackles two things that can quietly undo it all: backdoor requests and budgets that won't move with priorities.

Episode 11: The Habits Modern CMOs Need to Leave Behind

One marketing leader demanded change but never showed up. Another took low-value work off her teams' plates, and personally handled the difficult stakeholder conversations.

Andrea shares both stories to examine how senior leaders can enable or undermine the agility they ask of their teams. She explores eight habits worth unlearning, including delegating transformation without staying involved, assuming you already know your customers, and treating talent development as somebody else's problem.

The habits that helped you reach the C-suite may need to evolve for what comes next.

Episode 10: Too Many Tools Are Killing Your Marketing Team

Another expensive platform. Another rollout. The same problems with getting work done.

When new tools repeatedly disappoint, teams lose more than budget. They lose patience for the next change, even when it could genuinely help.

Andrea examines the cycle of buying software to solve problems rooted in process and communication. She explores how to simplify your MarTech stack, limit simultaneous rollouts, and pair technology changes with better ways of working so your next investment has a chance to stick.

Episode 9: 5 Types of Waste in Marketing and How to Eliminate Them With AI

Twelve banner variations “just in case.” Reports nobody reads. Senior marketers chasing briefs instead of shaping strategy.

Waste can look a lot like ordinary marketing work, and quietly consume the capacity your team desperately needs.

Andrea breaks down five common forms: overproduction, handoffs, delays, rework, and underutilized talent. She explores how Agile practices help address their causes, where AI can take on repetitive work or support reviews, and how to free people up for the creative and strategic contributions you hired them to make.

Episode 8: AI Won’t Save You If Your Process Is Broken

Generating content faster won't help if everything is still waiting for approval. You may just end up with a bigger queue.

Andrea introduces the Theory of Constraints to explain why improving the wrong part of your workflow can make the whole system worse. She walks through how to find your biggest bottleneck, relieve pressure on it, and decide when additional resources or AI might help.

Before you automate another task, this episode offers a way to work out whether speeding it up will actually make a difference.

Episode 7: Riding the Waves of Change: How Agile Marketers Stay Afloat

What story does your team tell itself about change: another threat to survive, or a chance to discover something better?

That story shapes how people respond when plans unravel, experiments disappoint, or new technology arrives. Andrea explores how beliefs about change translate into everyday behavior, and how to pair a more curious mindset with processes that make adaptation manageable.

From shorter planning cycles to a shared definition of done, she outlines five practices that help teams adjust with purpose instead of constantly scrambling to catch up.

Episode 6: How to Stay Customer-Centric in Marketing

Sales needs a landing page. An executive needs a deck. Product wants a launch campaign. Somewhere in that queue, the actual customer has gone missing.

Andrea explores how marketing gets pulled into serving internal demands at the expense of the people it needs to reach. She shares ways to make those trade-offs visible, use a prioritized backlog to protect customer-focused work, and say “not right now” without shutting stakeholders out.

Because staying customer-centric takes more than knowing your audience. It takes protecting the time to create something that matters to them.

Episode 5: Why Standups Fail (and How to Fix Them)

“No blockers.” Everyone says it. Then the sprint ends and hardly anything is finished.

A standup can look perfectly orderly while missing the problems it's supposed to uncover. Andrea diagnoses the habits that turn a quick team check-in into a drawn-out status report, from one person dominating the conversation to a board that no longer reflects reality.

She shares practical fixes for keeping discussions focused, making it easier to ask for help, and adapting the format for distributed teams, so the meeting actually helps work move forward.

Episode 4: Why Small Teams Win in the Age of AI

How many people does it take to launch a campaign? At some point, adding another person means adding another meeting.

As AI expands what individual marketers can do, Andrea makes the case for smaller teams, and fewer handoffs, review cycles, and calendars to coordinate. She explores the “two-pizza team” principle and why collaboration can consume the very time it’s supposed to make more productive.

You’ll also hear how to test smaller working groups inside a larger department, using Agile practices to keep work visible and teams connected without waiting for a reorganization.

Episode 3: Should You Be Sprinting? 

Your sprint has barely started, and an urgent request has already upended the plan. Is your team struggling with Agile, or working in a rhythm that doesn’t fit?

Andrea and Monica Georgieff explore when sprints give marketing teams useful focus, and when they make it harder to respond. Drawing on website launches, creative teams, and shared services, they compare Scrum, Kanban, and hybrid approaches.

If you’re constantly carrying unfinished work into the next sprint, this conversation will help you question the setup and find a better fit for how your team actually works.

Episode 2: Building Your Agile Marketing Engine

“Put it in the backlog” shouldn’t mean “forget it ever existed.” Done well, a backlog helps your team decide what deserves attention next, and gives you a way to explain what has to wait.

Andrea walks through building and maintaining this essential part of Agile marketing, from bringing scattered requests into one prioritized view to clearing out ideas that no longer matter.

She also tackles the practical questions: who owns prioritization, how much detail each item needs, and when estimating effort can help you push back on unrealistic expectations.

Episode 1: Why 2025 Demands Agile Marketing

Smaller budgets. Bigger expectations. AI pressure from every direction. Marketers are being asked to change almost everything, often while keeping the same overwhelmed way of working.

In the opening episode of The Agile Marketing Edge, Andrea makes the case for reclaiming Agile marketing and expanding it beyond sprints and standups. Drawing on research into marketers’ biggest challenges, she explores how the work you choose, the teams you build, and the way you deliver all fit together.

It’s a starting point for anyone who wants better marketing results and a working day that doesn’t revolve around the next fire drill.