Agile marketing teams aren’t just for large corporations. Small-to-medium businesses benefit from agile war rooms too. Agile teams improve not only product development performance, but your marketing mix and your brand by using data and analytics to take your online presence to the next level. Agile is not just for direct marketing issues.
This sets the stage for agile war rooms to use that data and analytics to continuously iterate marketing opportunities and solutions to product issues in real time. Teams meet in rapid bursts of short meetings instead of mulling over marketing issues over the course of months. Keeping clear initiatives on what is to be accomplished is the source and summit of an agile marketing team.
The Marketing Team War Room
What is an agile war room in the marketing context? It is made up of a scrum master who leads the team through days of iterations to resolve issues in weeks instead of months. Your war room will include a core team of analytic and design experts like a user experience specialist and a project manager. Who is chosen for the war room depends on the product or marketing issue faced and what the plans are for undertaking its resolution.
Each agile marketing team must have a plan to attack a product or marketing issue and an idea how to resolve that issue. The war room will first set the team’s expectations and goals for the specific problem. Agile teams do not paint an issue with a wide swath, but with focus to analyze and define the opportunities to as opposed to the threats to the issue’s resolution. Then the team will define the key performance indicators (KPIs).
The Marketing Team Sets Goal Expectations
Everyone needs to be on the same page from marketing leadership to key stakeholders. Your war room will align expectations by method of agile collaboration. Collaboration is the key to an agile war room. Each team member must understand that business-as-usual is moot as the old ground rules no longer apply. New goals, new expectations, and healthy communication drive the war room.
The Marketing Team Analyzes Opportunities
After meeting with leadership and stakeholders, the war room analyzes opportunities through targeted analytics. By understanding an issue’s pain points, the team can work together to figure out how to journey toward a solution to the marketing problem. To this end, not a day goes by without each member of the agile team summing up the day before. This makes each member of the collaborative team accountable for their role in the analysis and the process moving forward.
The Marketing Team Defines KPIs
After analyzing the data, the war room defines key performance indicators. They do this by hypothesizing about how to improve and test those ideas. The team will prioritize what needs to be tested first as well as define how easy it would be to implement those ideas. Each issue gets its own hypothesis, testing method, and KPI roundup.
The war room hones in on ideas and possible solutions with each agile meeting and may need more than one sprint or set of meetings to validate what works toward the resolution of a marketing or product problem. The war room’s agile process determines a solution’s workability. What results are promising? What ideas can be thrown out? What must be moved forward?
This allows for a streamlined, collaborative process that allows team members to focus on testing ideas quickly in iterations that promote scalability and growth. It is a fast-paced command center where your company’s key collaborators engage in digital and marketing strategies that focus on clear communication and better workflows.
Finishing tasks in a compressed time frame in often difficult situations is a hallmark of agile marketing. You can understand why it is called a war room. Contact Grow Team to see how we can put an agile war room to work for your marketing needs.