Four Benefits My Marketing Team Saw When We Started Using a Scrum Mentality

It might not be completely new, and it might not have its roots in digital marketing, but a scrum mentality is vital for all multifunctional marketing teams. An ideal framework for solving complex problems, scrum arranges teams into self-organized units, helping them deliver the highest-value product possible.

Every organization aims for an approach like this, but few achieve the desired outcome. According to the Work Market/KRC Research "2017 Workforce Productivity Report," 31 percent of higher-level managers believe their organization isn't fulfilling its potential to be productive. A lack of productivity is a widespread problem, and no matter what industry you're in, change is probably long overdue for workflows and internal processes.

At Pantheon, after acknowledging we were already using elements of scrum successfully, most members of the marketing team and I attended classes together to obtain ScrumMaster certifications. Now, with an agile perspective to everything we do, we have found countless benefits to embracing a scrum mentality.

In the marketing world, I believe everyone—from college grads to seasoned professionals—has a lot to gain from taking a scrum approach.

What Is Scrum?

While it's applicable to virtually any workplace, scrum began about 20 years ago through the work of a few software engineers. Since then, business leaders from a variety of fields have incorporated the scrum process into their workflows.

Overall, a scrum team consists of a scrum master, a product owner, and a development team. The general process starts with an end goal in mind. Think about a current project on your team's agenda—through scrum, your team members kick it off by developing a list of tasks known as a product backlog. Then, the product owner ranks these tasks based on which have the greatest ROI. For example, a task to improve the conversion rate for lead forms on your website would likely yield more business value than creating an interactive graphic on a low-traffic webpage.

Next, the highest items in your product backlog need to be flushed out with the most details (specs, product requirements, notes from key stakeholders, etc.) in order for team members to complete the tasks. This keeps everyone focused on short-term objectives and avoids unnecessary meetings that don't involve specific team members. At this point, it's OK for low-priority items to serve more as placeholders than project plans.

Overseeing all of this movement is the scrum master, who removes any obstacles to the team-designed outline. Although this strays away from a traditional waterfall approach on many levels, taking an agile-based approach allows projects to have about twice as much success.

Four Benefits of Utilizing a Scrum Mentality

While the marketing team at Pantheon doesn't actually build our product, we are still responsible for promoting it and driving adoption. In doing so, we've used a scrum approach to maximize our marketing team's productivity. Whether you're creating a new campaign from scratch or just fine-tuning existing ideas, see how the following scrum mentality benefits could maximize your team's efforts:

1. Improved team communication and interactions

It's easy to get so lost in organizing your tasks and processes that you forget the most important element to prioritize: communication. Many companies are tethered by their processes and tools. As a result, productive interaction becomes a rarity. Keep in mind that none of your agile methods can be effective if you can't interact properly with your team members.

A scrum mentality fosters strong communication within your team. The product owner or scrum master can keep a project moving forward by pulling concepts from daily stand-ups, time-boxing team members' status updates to avoid lengthy meetings, and identifying roadblocks in order to keep everyone focused. Whatever the case, a scrum approach can help you break through the noise in order to carry out strategic communication faster and better.

2. A flexible testing environment

Part of collaborating with your team is researching new ideas. That said, spending too much time on the research phase without addressing your main project objectives can quickly turn into a huge waste of time. Some marketing teams get bogged down by the requirements of comprehensive documentation when a more flexible scrum-like process allows you to test, evaluate, and move on.

After a certain point, research transforms into procrastination. So if your team believes in an idea, embrace a scrum mentality and test it out. Taking action and moving on to the next step is all part of being agile.

3. Collaborative customer care

Every organization will admit that the customer is its number one priority. But when you've spent hundreds of hours with your team, your relationships with co-workers and your loyalty to a set process can easily lead you to overlook customer care. When you are more invested in achieving internal recognition, customer goals take a hit.

Understanding your customers is one of the most important aspects of a scrum approach. By keeping tabs and executing on the needs of both internal team members and external customers, a scrum mentality centers all of your tasks around a desired audience, allowing for effective collaboration.

4. Better adaptability to change

Each step for any project should be defined by agreed-upon tasks. However, these steps should not be set in stone. During your sprints, the project requirements might shift dramatically, making your initial approach worthless. Keeping your sprints short (one to two weeks) helps your team pivot faster and avoid unnecessary work when the scope of a project changes.

When you first arrange your task list, tapping into a scrum mentality allows you to quickly shift priorities based on changing needs. To keep this need for adaptability more positive than stressful, hold retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint to decide what's working and what could be improved for the next iteration. In fact, a Modis survey revealed that half of all employees value flexibility as their greatest benefit. By using a scrum approach, unpredictability can be quickly managed instead of becoming a pain point.

Adopting a scrum mentality might be jarring at first, especially if you're used to a more traditional approach. The anticipation of crossing over to agile digital marketing is only temporary. However, the effects of not investing in a faster, more productive technique for the future of your business can have a more lasting impact. Looking to reinvigorate your brand or company with a scrum approach but stuck on where to start? Reach out to Pantheon—we can discuss your strategic objectives and help you tap into the benefits of an effective scrum mentality.