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A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Wait…So Following a Plan is Bad?

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The Agile Manifesto is quite clear about how much it values following a plan – not so much. Response to change gets the love instead.

Therein lies the marketer’s dilemma. CMO’s notoriously have a hot nut for project roadmaps – but Agile development teams often don’t welcome detailed plans – ooh, ick, they’re so Waterfally. So how do you assure your sort-of-Agile-not-really leader that you are executing on a marketing project plan that’s not being sequentially followed by the folks who are actually building the software?

Show him or her your backlog items.
It may be hard to get your C-level comfortable with a list of tasks that you have no guarantee will be done by the next sprint. You could add in the kanban, which is more of an operational aide than a executive presentation medium. But at least you can prove that you understand and have presented to the tech foks what needs to be done.

Demo the latest iteration of working software.
Sure – but beware of expectations. Marketing and Technology executives can define “working software” very differently. The apps dev team delivered a screen for the April 16th sprint release that slowly brings up week-old data from the dev server when you click the “submit” button. Server call performance will be addressed in a future sprint. The CTO: sprint mission accomplished. The CMO: my order history doesn’t come up – this thing doesn’t work.

Some advice – if the current iteration isn’t yet optimized for performance, don’t show it to the CMO. Sometime between pressing the “Let’s Get Started” button and the 112 seconds the app takes to complete the server call, you’ll lose trust. If the current iteration works with reasonable speed, but is missing some non-essential functionality, it probably won’t hurt to show the progress being made, with the proper caveats and disclaimers.

Pretend it’s still waterfall.
Show the wireframe of the screen in active development, and say “they’re working on this part now”. Hey, that worked for years.

A Marketer's Guide to Agile Development

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – The Balance of Power Part 3

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In Part 1, we had a marketer seemingly off his meds mistaking the development team for short order cooks.  In Part 2, we had a developer drunk on cowboy code, smugly delivering what marketing would have asked for if only they had his superior vision.

There could have been a third scenario where the hyperactive marketer and the arrogant developer were in the same scene, but that would be too divisive.   Here goes:

Marketer (played by Bette Midler):   Yo, Poindexter – this is not what we talked about.   This landing page looks like my ferret sicked up.  What the hell is this?

Harried Business Analyst (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman):  Okay guys….   Wait – you know what?  This is not going to end well.  Maybe I don’t want to be in this scene.  In fact,  I’m calling in sick from this scene. (exits)

Developer (played by Shia Lebeouf):   Your RHN was a little light on details, so it was necessary to iterate some continuous improvement on that bad boy.  

Marketer:   My RHN?

Developer:  Requirements on Hooter’s Napkin.

Marketer:   That napkin was so freakin’ agile, my friend  – and more documentation than I’ve ever seen come out of your shop.  But this call to action makes it look like we want them to renew their truck registration at the DMV.  THIS ISN’T WHAT I ORDERED – er, I mean wanted.  

Developer:  What you wanted didn’t match my vision of deep cool.   You said they had to be able to submit a webform on the page, and they can.   And preview all the products.  And personalize them with virtual logos they design on the fly. 

Marketer:  Customers don’t want that.  What makes you think my customers want that?

Developer:   Because it’s cool.  Deeply so.   Customers want cool.  It’s not our fault you blow into work every morning 30 minutes after scrum ends.  Non-attendance means acceptance.  No feedback means acceptance.  So does arguing with any code that’s already through QA.

Marketer:   What are you guys, the Borg?

Developer:  Hell, no.  The Borg was too centralized to be Agile.

Marketer:  Screw it, I don’t need you.  I’ll just have the agency build it.

“Us vs. Them” mentality exists in every business.  But maintaining and nurturing the chasm just isn’t – well, Agile.  I love this quote attributed to Alistair Cockburn, an original Agile Manifesto signatory: “Always remember, there is only us.”