David Doss was kind enough to share his notes from War Stories on Real World Agile Marketing by Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.
Organizations – CEOs make 3 commitments:
- Accountability
- Finances
- Innovation
Key Points:
- How organizations work
- What Agile is
- Toolkit
Richard Foster – S&P 500
- Successful organizations, with successful thought patterns
- Most successful companies that get on SP500 have stayed on SP500 for 72 years
- Looking for a pattern of success from sales
- 5 years from now, ¾ of companies on the S&P 500 today won’t be … future predictions are closer to 17 years that companies will stay on S&P 500
What is Agile? – How are product teams working?
- Processes
- Reading Recommendation: Peacetime CEO Wartime CEO by Ben Horowitz
- Peace Time:
- Waterfall process:
- Customer = marketing
- Were taught that there was only one way to build software
- (Only one process to build software for customer)
- Waterfall stopped working
- War Time
- Agile Development Manifesto
- Customer = channel
- Popularizations of social networks
- Customer revolt
- technological change
- cultural change
The Agile Toolbox – in peacetime vs. wartime
- Storytelling is math
- Best storytellers – best ability to change perspectives – had high marks in math
- Access to data about the customer experience
- Being influential vs. telling people what has to happen:
- Peacetime: use math as influence tool
- Wartime: math sets the priorities
- You can still use systems even when you are being directed
- Words are seeds – character and plot
- Using literary techniques to better influence
- Peacetime: well-written user story is FOR the user
- Wartime: the user BECOMES the business
- Hypothesis Testing
- Peacetime: hypothesis creation creates a infinite set of options. Improve the user experience, change behavior, etc.
- Wartime: hypothesis creation must be linked directly to revenue
- Feedback
- Marketing is very bad at:
- Communication between people
- Time management
- Agile built on solid feedback
- Feedback is suggestive feedback
- Negative feedback comes in circumstances that are meant to provide positive feedback
- The backlog needs to be prioritized
- Peacetime: the backlog is organizd by the durable teams and prioritized by the product owners
- Wartime: the backlog is organized by the drable teams and prioritized by the BUSINESS owners
Key Takeaways
- Agile systems are well equipped to support change and management in Peace AND War Time
- Good communication is at the center of the Agile System but War Time necessitates a balance of top-down and bottom-up decision-making
- The widest purview MUST set the priorities in War Time
- Better environment for communication that spans outside of the office and lasts longer in the professional sphere beyond a specific job
Q & A
- Planning cycle happens TOGETHER as an organization
- 3 meetings introduced into the group:
- Acceptance meeting
- Spike week – intermediate week – non-local communication
- Share day – walk through the user stories (context) of what has and hasn’t worked …
- Agile developed in engineering world and went across into marketing world
- Difference between sales and marketing? The following are helpful across all the organizations:
- Standup and backlog help communicate priorities
- Share day
- What kind of tools recommended for small organizations to apply Agile:
- Trello – backlog organization
- MyManager (MindManager? MineManager) – reinforcing user stories
- How to deal with inertia in organization:
- Everyone in organization is there to do something for a personal reason
- Specific people don’t want to change a process that has already shown success for them and for a company
- Best way to promote a change is to demonstrate that it has a high probability of success
- Examples of how to make customer experience more agile?
- Need to shorten onboarding process
- Fewer clicks
- What if invite were a registration permission?
Filmed January 15, 2015 at Zendesk