Agile Marketing Blog – Home of Marketing Agility Podcast

Frank Days, Jim Ewel, and Melissa Reeve
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Discussing all things related to Agile Marketing

  1. 10/18/2023

    Creating Lasting Change in Banking with Yvonne Delaney

    In this episode, Yvonne Delaney discusses the importance of making organizational change stick when transforming an marketing organization to Agile. Yvonne worked on creating an agile center of excellence for change agents within a bank. She participated in a coaching program and paired with them to ensure the success of the change initiatives. Yvonne collaborated with leaders in the organization to create success stories in marketing during an 18 to 24-month agility journey. The goal was to institutionalize agility in different areas of the bank and allow each team to tell their own success stories. “Success vignettes” were created to help expand agile ways of working to other parts of the bank. Highlights: Creating an agile center of excellence for change agents, including marketing Collaborating with leaders to create success stories during an 18-24 month agility journey. Institutionalizing agility across different areas of the bank, including marketing Empowering marketing teams to tell their own success stories. Links: Agile Marketing Alliance – https://www.agilemarketingalliance.com/ iTunes Podcast Episodes – https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/marketing-agility-podcast

  2. 10/05/2023

    Embracing Agile Marketing Approaches: A Conversation with Steve Davis

    Episode Summary:  In this episode, we sit down with Steve Davis, Managing Director and Transformation Lead at Accenture. With a rich history in Agile that spans nearly two decades, Steve offers invaluable insights into the evolution of Agile in marketing, including one of the earliest Agile Marketing transformations we’ve heard of; Ancestry.com in 2005!  This conversation sheds light on the importance of agility in today’s dynamic marketing landscape. Highlights: Steve Davis recounts his journey with Agile, including an early transformation at Ancestry.com in 2005 Discover how Agile made the leap from technology teams into marketing Understand the power of an experience Scrum master in helping marketing teams  Hear why Steve thinks Agile marketing hasn’t been adopted by more marketers Notable Quotes: Steve Davis:“I got started in Agile in 2001, which was coincidentally the year that the Agile manifesto was introduced. It was a revolutionary shift that changed everything about how we approach marketing.”   “Agile isn’t just a methodology; it’s a mindset. Over the years, it’s been fascinating to see how adopting this mindset has helped companies become frontrunners in their domains.” Relevant Links: Agile Marketing Alliance – https://agilemarketingalliance.com/ Steve Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davisbase/ Closing Thoughts:  Dive deep into the world of Agile with Steve Davis and understand why flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability are key markers of success in contemporary marketing. Whether you’re a novice marketer or a seasoned professional looking to adopt Agile methodologies, this episode is packed with historical context, personal insights, and forward-thinking strategies that promise to inspire and invigorate your marketing approach.

  3. 09/12/2023

    Talking Agile Marketing and OKRs with Yuval Yeret

    This interview will focuses on scaling Agile, OKRs, working with private equity firms, what most organizations get wrong when adopting Agile marketing, and other topics. Our guest is Yuval Yeret, a SAFe fellow, co-contributor with me to IC-Agile’s Agility in Marketing certification. [03] – Introduction Jim Ewel welcomes our guest, Yuval Yuret, a Lean Agility and Flow Coach, Safe Fellow, and Professional Scrum Trainer. The episode will focus on the importance of shared goals like OKRs, the difference between OKRs and KPIs, and how Agile methodologies can help teams adapt to change. [01:01] – Excitement About OKRs Jim expresses excitement about the growing popularity of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and mentions how they are now considered a “silver bullet” in various industries, thanks to John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters.” [01:38] – Challenges with OKRs Yuval discusses the common challenges organizations face with OKRs. Many companies adopt OKRs without sufficient expertise, leading to issues such as mapping everything to OKRs, lack of filtering, turning KPIs into OKRs, and creating OKRs that are tasks rather than strategic objectives. [04:08] – Prioritizing OKRs Jim and Yuval discuss the importance of prioritizing OKRs and ensuring they are specific and realistic. They highlight that OKRs should focus on improving product and organizational capabilities, not managing day-to-day operations. [07:03] – OKRs vs. KPIs Yuval explains the difference between OKRs and KPIs, emphasizing that OKRs are for growth, change, and improvement, while KPIs are for ongoing operations. They discuss how OKRs can impact KPIs and drive evidence-based decision-making. [09:16] – Characteristics of Good OKRs Yuval outlines the characteristics of effective OKRs, including a focus on outcomes, involvement of relevant teams in setting OKRs, cross-functional alignment, and the importance of making OKRs actionable. [11:32] – Cascading OKRs The discussion touches on how OKRs should cascade down from senior leadership to teams, with each level providing context and specific objectives related to the higher-level OKRs. [15:18] – Example of OKRs Jim and Yuval provide an example of how OKRs can be used to address issues like customer churn, where teams set OKRs based on the context provided by senior leadership. [17:47] – Cross-Functional Collaboration Yuval emphasizes the need for cross-functional collaboration when achieving OKRs. He suggests that organizations should set cross-functional OKRs or OKRs aligned with the desired business impact, leading to discussions about effective ways of working. [21:31] – Organizational Implications The conversation touches on how achieving OKRs may require changes in organizational design. While some organizations create separate cross-functional teams, others overlay a network of teams to focus on development work while keeping operational teams intact. [23:52] – Applying Agile in Marketing Yuval discusses the importance of applying Agile principles to the right areas of the organization, highlighting that while it may not be suitable for operational work like sales, it is highly relevant for areas like sales enablement and marketing. 23:59 – Cross-Functional Nature and Spare Time Jim Ewel challenges the idea of expecting employees to handle new initiatives, like sales enablement, on top of their day-to-day responsibilities in their spare time. He highlights that this approach can lead to reduced focus and effectiveness. 24:52 – Focus on New Initiatives Jim emphasizes the importance of allowing individuals to dedicate focused time to new initiatives instead of multitasking and context switching. 25:07 – Trade-off between Expertise and Focus Yuval discusses the trade-off between utilizing the expertise of those involved in day-to-day operations and their ability to focus on new initiatives without distractions. He emphasizes the need for balancing both aspects effectively. 27:29 – Transparency in Work Processes Yuval mentions the importance of making work processes, including improvement, development work, and operational work, transparent to leadership. This transparency helps organizations balance their OKRs with daily operations and drives conversations around feasibility. 27:42 – Agile Practices and Adaptation: Jim and Yuval discuss the need for adapting agile practices to the unique needs of each organization. They emphasize the importance of a tailored approach and the use of agile practices when implementing agile. 29:19 – Empiricism, Inspection, and Adaptation  Yuval explains how leaders can leverage empiricism, inspection, and adaptation to achieve business agility. He emphasizes the need for leaders to embrace uncertainty, rely on data, and continuously adapt their strategies. 35:19 – Transition in Leadership Jim and Yuval discuss the transition in leadership required for embracing agility and making data-driven decisions. They highlight the importance of leaders admitting uncertainty and promoting a culture of learning. 37:39 – Agile Mindset and Culture Yuval emphasizes the significance of having an agile-friendly mindset at the leadership level for maximizing the benefits of OKRs and agility. 38:13.811 – Virtual Cycle of Improvement Jim and Yuval discuss how Agile and OKRs create a virtual cycle of improvement, where management openness and agility lead to better OKR execution, which, in turn, fosters a more agile mindset. 40:33 – Agile Marketing Jim asks Yuval about the challenges marketers face when adopting Agile. Yuval highlights differences between marketing and software development, including a preference for Kanban and less interest in formal processes. 44:40 – Language Barriers in Agile Marketing Yuval discusses the language barriers between Agile practices and marketing, emphasizing the need to bridge this gap to accelerate Agile marketing adoption. 46:40 – Expertise and Experience Yuval mentions that the pace of Agile marketing adoption is hindered by a lack of expertise in both Agile and marketing. He stresses the importance of aligning the broader Agile community with marketers. 48:57 – Business Agility and Expertise Yuval anticipates the challenge of achieving business agility as organizations require expertise in both Agile and the business world. He suggests leveraging OKRs as a common framework to bridge the gap. Closing Remarks: Jim and Yuval conclude the podcast with thoughts on the growing importance of OKRs in business agility and the need for combining Agile principles with business expertise to drive meaningful change.

  4. 08/29/2023

    Managing Change and Agile Marketing Josh Bradshaw

    We’re speaking with Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva with a deep background in both Agile and marketing. Josh will be sharing his story with us today and talking about managing change in organizations. Show Notes: Episode: Managing Change with Agile in Marketing  Host: Melissa Reeve  Guest: Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva Josh was born and raised in Arizona, which is where his wife and 4 kids currently reside. He was introduced to Agile 10 years ago and since then has taken it with him every where he can. He is currently an Agile Marketing Coach at Workiva and loves working with the team to continue to scale and grow as the company does. When he isn’t working or talking about Agile he enjoys playing video games with his boys, mountain biking, spending time with his family, and as you may notice a nice flat brimmed hat! HIGHLIGHTS:  Josh Bradshaw’s Background and Introduction to Agile Marketing (00:36 – 03:03) Josh introduces himself and his journey into agile marketing. Discussion about Josh’s background in project management at a software company. Transitioning from traditional project management to agile methodologies. Implementation of Agile Marketing at Work Kiva (03:03 – 06:56) Josh talks about his implementation of agile marketing at Work Kiva. Evolution of agile practices within the organization. Shifting from campaign-focused teams to customer persona-focused teams. Current structure of customer persona “pods” and self-contained teams. Continuous improvement and adjusting to achieve more self-organization and autonomy. Benefits of Agile Marketing and Adapting to Change (06:56 – 15:) Discussion on how agile helps manage and embrace change. Highlighting the retrospective as a key event for addressing and implementing change. Introducing the Agile Marketing Manifesto and its focus on responding to change. Importance of data-driven decisions and communicating change effectively. Addressing Team Members Struggling with Change (15:22 – 20:33) Strategies for helping team members who are resistant to change. Emphasizing empathy and understanding individual perspectives. Importance of addressing behavior alongside process to drive successful change. Introducing Change at the Right Cadence (20:33 – 27:23) Discussion on introducing change at an appropriate cadence. Finding the balance between change fatigue and business needs. The value of trimester planning as a balanced approach between quarters and halves. Closing Thoughts and Wrap-up (27:23 – 28:00) Recap of key takeaways from the conversation. Gratitude for the interview and sharing insights.

  5. 08/16/2023

    Panel Discussion: Agile Marketing and AI

    In this episode, Melissa Reeve leads a panel discussion about the past, present, and future of AI in marketing and how it relates to Agile Marketing. This panel includes: Paul Acito, Dr. Sarah Smith-Robbins, and Samantha Daugherty.

  6. 08/01/2023

    The Intersection of Growth Marketing and Agile with Laura Perrott

    We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Brand and Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services. Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand, and then moved to the UK, where she joined Colt Technology Services. In her thirteen years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology, and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion & diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology.  Transcript: Jim Ewel: We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Branded Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services. Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand and then moved to the UK where she joined Colt technology services. In her 13 years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology. and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process, and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion and diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. Laura, welcome to the podcast.   LAURA: Thank you, very happy to be here.   Jim Ewel: Laura, one of the things that interested me about your bio was that you brought growth marketing methodology to your team at Colt. Of course, at the Agile Marketing Alliance, we’re about agile marketing. How do you see growth marketing and agile marketing? Are they the same? Are they related? Are they different? How do you think about those two things?   LAURA: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two and growth marketing as we experience it at Colt really follows a lot of the agile marketing methodology. We’re looking at agile and lean principles, very much an iterative approach and always with that continuous feedback. When we talk about growth marketing, we’re specifically referring to really a partner that we work with, Growth Method. So we’ve been working with them for a couple of years now and we use their experimentation methodology. So we look at having a hypothesis, we do six week experiment cycles, we then fail or pass those and change or scale those experiments. They also provide a platform that they’ve created to help make sure that there’s a repeatable process.   Melissa: So Laura, you know, one part of hypothesis building and experimentation is being willing to fail. And you wrote an article on LinkedIn called, ÒI Need You to Fail More.Ó Can you explain what you meant by that provocative headline and why you wrote the article?   LAURA: Yeah, sure. Something that I came up against when implementing growth method at Colt is that fear is really the enemy of innovation. So at the beginning, when I first started looking after digital marketing in particular, we were sort of looking at these six month waterfall type projects. And you’ll know this, that you kind of get to the end of these projects or even to the end of the year, and it’s not always clear if things really worked or even which specific elements of those projects had the most impact. So you’d kind of be getting to the end of the year, you’d be doing it and your reviews and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to say, what worked well, what didn’t work well and what are our learnings. So really, there can also be a focus on delivering stuff in corporates. So often, you look at your list of achievable for the year and it can often be, I did this thing rather than what did we learn from it.    So really, when we brought in this, focus on growth methodology, you really had to, we really had to change how people felt about trying things. And it’s actually quite a cultural shift because if you’re used to this waterfall, if during that waterfall, anything doesn’t work properly, it breaks a project, it delays it. Whereas with growth methodology and that experimentation framework, you’re allowed to fail and actually you learn from failure. And you’ve got to really try to encourage people to fail and fail fast because then they can take that learning, they can go back and they can iterate. on that project. So really, it fundamentally changes your team’s culture, as I mentioned, and it means that people can be a lot more open to kind of giving things a go.   Melissa: Yeah, I really love what you said. You know, you’re reframing failure as learning. So we’re just learning. And then you hit upon two things that I’m very passionate about. One is this notion that as marketers, we run these A-B split tests. Oftentimes they’re A-B split tests. And then we get the results and we kind of shrug our shoulders and we’re like, eh? Because a lot of times they’re very, very close in nature. And if you don’t structure those experiments in advance and really outline your hypotheses, how do you really know if you’ve succeeded or failed? So I really loved what you were saying about that. And I think the second thing that I heard in your response was this notion of marketers liking to check the box, right? So what I’m hearing you say is by failing more, we not only… are learning about what’s going on rather than just shrugging our shoulders at the end, but we’re focused on the outcomes. And of course, in agile marketing, that’s one of the big shifts that are out there is this shift from output to outcomes. So I appreciate what you had to share, Jim.   Jim Ewel: I love it as well. And I particularly like Laura, that you talked about the cultural and the mental shift that marketers need to make as they think about this approach of experimentation and learning and being willing to fail and thinking outside the box. Not trying to do simple experiments that don’t change anything, but really trying to do ones that could potentially make a huge difference. And if they work and they might fail, but if they work, they can make a huge difference. So let me ask you another question. In addition to getting your people to be willing to fail more, what are some of the other challenges that you encountered in implementing growth, marketing growth method at Colt?   LAURA: Yeah, so I would say definitely the first one is sort of getting that buy-in from management and I’m lucky that I have an amazing management team. My manager, Mizu, has been very, you know, supportive of this process, but I do think it does take a little bit of time for people to understand it. So particularly if you’re in front of them and you’re talking about, hey, we had a great result this month, we had 10 failures, it was fantastic, you know, that can take a little bit of getting used to for people.    I think you really have to get that a little bit of education early on about how you’re doing things and why you’re doing them. And I think having that database of information and particularly as I mentioned, we have this experiment methodology and so we have this rich database of learnings that we’ve made and being able to show how, you know, that was a failure, but here’s the learning that we got off it. And then in the future, when we do a related experiment that might be successful, it’s because we made these failures in the past. So there’s definitely a piece of education there and helping people to understand how you do things and why you do things. And then always tracking it back to the data.    And I’ve, as mentioned, been working in marketing for a long time and people, you get accused of being fluffy or there’s all these ideas about playing with colored pencils, et cetera. And I think it’s really important for us to be able to go into meetings and be data-driven and be able to show the results and show the impact. And I would say with what we’ve been doing with growth methodology, really the results speak for themselves. We’ve seen year on year improvements across all our metrics and up to 500% improvement in some of them as well. And I think the other thing too around encountering challenges, I think, is really about influence can be really interesting and… I think other marketers will understand this, that sometimes the things that you think aren’t important, so it might be changing some visuals on your homepage, will somehow get the biggest impact where something that you’ve spent months working really hard on in the background that fundamentally changes how you do experiments or how you do automation gets no buy-in at all.    So I think it’s also about understanding how sometimes you have to do some activities because they’re going to have an influence and they’re going to have an impact. and also balancing that with the stuff that is in the background and might not be as impressive, but are actually the ones that are really going to make those changes. So balancing that as well in terms of your influence.    And then the last thing I would say really is about helping sales teams on that digital journey. I do think it’s part of the responsibility of marketing to help sales teams on that journey as well, help them understand the data points and signals and understand how digital or marketing in general can be of benefit to them. And that it’s a, you know, I don’t even say it’s a handshake, it’s an arm around the shoulder. And that’s the relationship that you should have between sales and marketing as well.   Jim Ewel: You know, that’s really great to hear because so often marketing and sales are at odds, right? You know, the classic is that sales says, those leads you sent me are terrible, and marketing says, well, you didn’t follow up on them, you know, or something like that, right? I mean, there’s the thing. So you’ve been able to create a really good relationship with your sales team and just Tell

  7. 07/18/2023

    Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile Discusses Participatory Budgeting (Part 2)

    This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (https://agilemarketingalliance.com/). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches.     Transcript Welcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah.   Hannah Bink  Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much.   Melissa  So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale.   Hannah Bink  I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool.   Melissa  Tell me more.   Hannah Bink  So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility.   Hannah Bink  They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust.   Hannah Bink  If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market.   Melissa  So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here?   Hannah Bink  Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution.   Melissa  Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis.   Hannah Bink  Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore.   Melissa (30:27.526) Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that?   Hannah Bink  Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information.   Hannah Bink  What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really.   Melissa  Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches?   Hannah Bink  So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise.  And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster.   Melissa  Well

  8. 06/27/2023

    Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile Discusses Participatory Budgeting

    We had the pleasure of talking about participatory budgeting with Hannah Bink, Senior Director Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile. Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figureout how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgetingprocess, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency.     Transcript Melissa Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah. Hannah Bink Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you. Melissa Great to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey. Hannah Bink It was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing. Melissa Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time? Hannah Bink What I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear. Melissa Yeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned? Hannah Bink I think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear. The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually or in person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about. Melissa Yeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting. And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups. Hannah Bink Absolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful. Melissa For sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world? Hannah Bink So we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives.   I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas.  You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds? You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fai

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