Marketing Agility Podcast

In this episode we talk with Thomas McMillan, the Vice President of Marketing at CompuCom. Thomas, who previously worked as a Director of Digital at Lowes, shared his experience with Agile Marketing and how he’s used those learnings to shape the way he’s helped implement Agile at CompuCom. We also discussed challenges that occur when embracing Agile as an organization and different approaches to managing workloads. The post Agile Marketing in a Managed Technology Services Provider with Thomas McMillan of CompuCom appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

We talk with Bill Cushard, the author of The Art of Agile Marketing about his experience implementing agile as the marketing director at ServiceRocket. Bill’s background is in content marketing but he’s gone well beyond that in his current role. He’s one of the few marketers that we’ve spoken with who’s been using Jira to manage his marketing team. In fact, the sub-title of his book is A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence.   He’s articulate, a pragmatist, and someone to follow.  Give the show a listen: The post The Art of Agile Marketing with Bill Cushard of ServiceRocket appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this episode we talk with Ian Lee, the national digital transformation leader for Deloitte Digital, and Derek Derouin who serves as a manager in Deloitte’s digital marketing transformations group. I was fortunate to meet Derek at the RDV_Marketing event in Toronto back in March and have been looking forward to bringing him onto the podcast. For our regular listeners, you’ll know that we’ve had only a handful of guests from the largest consulting companies—though I’ve had more interaction through my work at Oracle and while doing research for my book—so this is episode will bring an under represented perspective to the table. I was impressed with the depth of engagement that Deloitte is driving when it comes to supporting Agile transformation. In short, it’s not just about strategic consulting focused on getting CMO buy-in. They certainly do that but they’re also engaging on the ground level training teams in Agile marketing and driving adoption from the bottom up. They clearly have some valuable experience to share … even if they are leading the pack of large consulting firms, this conversation serves as another validation that broader adoption is coming. Give it a listen! Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Driving Agile Adoption Up and Down the Marketing Function with Deloitte appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

 In this episode we talk with Justin Zimmerman who leads the content team at The RedX a company that develops software to support real-estate professionals. This is Justin’s first foray into adopting Agile—like many marketers he’s educating himself and learning on the job. We’ll hear how he’s approaching adoption, what’s working, and what’s not. We were interested in hearing how he scoped the teams work based on words written per iteration. He also, shared some interesting insights on how he won executive buy-in by representing their previous work in the context of Agile boards. This episode offers inspiration for those content marketers that are getting started. If you like what you hear, check out a recent post by Justin entitled The 2 Metrics For New Agile Content Teams. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Justin Zimmerman: First Time Starting an Agile Content Team appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

 In this episode we interview Jayson Gehri who serves as the marketing director for IBM’s Hybrid Data Management group. This is Jayson’s second tour implementing Agile having previously worked in the Dell marketing group. This time around they’re taking a different, more flexible, approach to rolling out Agile. With full CMO buy-in and support, the organization is about a year into the transformation.  In this session we’ll hear from Jayson about how he came to Agile, what he’s learned along the way, and how they are approaching scale at IBM. We tend to think of companies like Big Blue as committed to well defined processes and “interlock” but our conversation seems to indicate that big changes are afoot—at least in the marketing function at IBM. Give it a listen. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Jayson Gehri: Agile Transformation at IBM appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

This episode features a conversation with Nikki Shaw of Intelligent Demand, a full-service integrated marketing agency. She’s a Scrum certified marketer who spent time at web-design shops and has significant experience working with technical teams. Like many marketers, that was her introduction to Agile. We don’t hear from that many agency leaders so if you’re at an agency or work with them this conversation should be of interest. Intelligent Demand’s clients typically do not have an Agile practice in-house already, so Nikki talks about how to introduce Agile without presenting it as “process change” or outside the scope of the engagement. Some of the other topics we touch on include: How to prevent the theory from getting in the way of practice How her firm mixes elements of Agile and Lean How they transitioned to cross-functional teams as part of their Agile adoption How to balance planned and unplanned work Enjoy the conversation!     n this episode we’re thrilled to b Her personal motto: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”   Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Nicci Shaw Shares Insights from an Agile Agency appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this session we’re thrilled to be joined by Ferdinand Goetzen who serves as the head of growth at Recruitee. Ferdinand is based in the Netherlands but came up working for a number of companies across Europe including The Growth Tribe Academy. In this session, he speaks about how his Agile journey was inspired by The Lean Startup and our good friend Eric Reis. Today his focus is on fueling growth through experiments and testing that are coordinated with both product and marketing teams. Listen in to learn about: How Recruitee has adopted some of the structures from the Spotify Model — and, If that peaks your interest you should check out our previous interview with Jonathan Rasmusson from Spotify. How focusing on growth has allowed Ferdinand to be a bit more prescriptive that more broadly focused marketers might be. How he’s been handling significant growth within his own team. Finally, here are some great resources to check out that Ferdinand shared after our conversation. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Ferdinand Goetzen of Recruitee on Applying Agile to Growth appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this session we’re thrilled to bring on another marketer from CA Technologies, Cameron van Orman is the Sr Vice President of Product Marketing. In this role he oversees product marketing for the entire CA portfolio and reports into the CMO and the Chief Product Officer. In the past, we’ve spoken with people on Cameron’s team so this is an opportunity to up-level the conversation and understand the perspective of a senior executive. In this session, we touch on a range of topics related to the challenges of scaling Agile. Listen in to get a glimpse into: How CA’s transformation was influenced by their acquisition of Rally (now CA Agile Central) The role that the Scaled Agile Framework has played (SAFe) How scaling on-boarded non-collocated teams and what they did about it What drove CA to be a bit less prescriptive over time as the team grew from 30 to over 100 The need to get middle management involved And if you’re looking to dive in even deeper check out CA’s great content series on Agile Management. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Cameron van Orman Shares an Update on Agile at CA Technologies appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

 In this episode we talk with Rachel Krug who leads the marketing function at Right Networks, a firm that helps companies bring their accounting systems to the cloud. Rachel was familiar with Agile from her work as a product manager at Constant Contact but found herself adapting Agile for the marketing function in her current role. She manages a small cross-functional team including a content lead, field marketer, marketing ops lead, and a partnerships leader. Plus, like most marketers at smaller firms, she relies on outside contractors and service providers. When Rachel arrived the team was operating in a reactive fashion without a rigorous operations or planning practice. In this session, she talks about introducing Agile with a handful of rituals and how those have made a huge impact on how the team functions and the results they produce. Listen in to learn about why she focused measurement and tracking out of the gate and how Agile later influenced a major product launch. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Rachel Krug on Taking Agile from Product Management to Marketing at Right Networks appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

 In this episode we welcome back an early guest from the show, Kirsten Falk who serves as the managing director of brand innovation and social at Charles Schwab. When we originally spoke with Kirsten she was leading the marketing function at Red Brick Media. In this episode Kirsten speaks about why she did not introduce Agile right away, in favor of deeply understanding the endemic culture at Schwab. In fact, it took a full year before she started introducing the approach. Four years later they are still at the beginning of the Agile journey but she’s seen significant mindset change. Where there was resistance previously, she sees more awareness and significant demand for Agile.  In fact, Agile training is now available to all marketing employees.     Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Four Years Later, Catching up with Kirstin Falk appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

 In this episode we talk with Mathew Sweezy an author and speaker who serves as a marketing insights leader at Salesforce. Matthew joined Salesforce via their acquisition of Pardot, a marketing automation service, where he was introduced to Agile through a close working relationship with the development team there. In this session, he talks about how Agile is becoming the default operating system for marketing—though he acknowledges that many marketers are still not yet aware of an Agile Marketing movement. In fact, he shares that his own experience with Agile started before his team called it Agile. Mathew is a content marketing expert to follow—he educates internal teams, clients and prospects about Agile marketing and marketing modernization. Enjoy! Also, in this sessions, Matthew mentions a film called Art&Copy that’s worth watching.   Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Salesforce’s Matthew Sweezy: Agile Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

For this episode we reached out to Claire Drumond who is a content strategist and product marketer at Atlassian.  In this episode we touch on: How Claire settled into a blended method between Kanban and Scrum (Scrumban) The degree to which she iterates on content How she uses Hip Chat (messaging) in concern with task management (Jira) and how she views her content as a product Fair disclosure, we’ve been Atlassian users over the years so bring that as context to our conversation. We look forward to bringing Claire back in 6 months or so after Atlassian has done more to integrate Trello into their portfolio. At present on the most common things that we hear from marketers is that Jira is built for technical users rather than business users. Presumably Trello will help address this but that discussion was a bit premature for this episode. Search for: Get Episodes via Email First Name Last Name Email Address Subscribe Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Agile Marketing  The post Claire Drumond on Agile Content at Atlassian appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this episode we talk with Bryan Semple who serves as the GM and CMO at SmartBear (just acquired by Francisco Partners)—Bryan has a lot to say about scaling Agile at a mid-market company that’s completed many acquisitions. Actually, the fact that they’ve done some many acquisitions led to his insights around why he sees cross-functional teams as imperative. In this episode you’ll hear about: How Bryan transitioned from functional silo (shared services) to distributed resourcing (x-functional teams) Some key differences between engineering and marketing teams that impact Agile method How SmartBear connects Agile planning to strategic planning Bonus, check out a couple of blog posts on Agile Marketing from Bryan. The post The Cross-Functional Team Imperative with Bryan Semple appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this episode we’re expanding our horizons a bit by interviewing Marina Simonova about her work bringing the Agile approach to marketing and sales teams. Marina is a Moscow-based Agile Coach with Agile Space and has worked with more Agile sales teams than anyone else we’ve met. She’s a certified coach and Scrum Master who has found techniques for bridging the marketing / divide with Agile practices. Marina’s recent article 10 Steps of Agile transformation of sales is a great primer on why Agile is a good fit for sales, how to get started, and what some of the most common challenges area. It fascinating to hear from a practitioner who is coming to Agile from the sales side first. In this conversation we discuss: Why sales may be a more natural fit for Agile than marketing because of it’s focus on time-boxed iterations. How Agile practice can help align marketing and sales How combined sales and marketing teams are able to outperform traditional teams Note, while Marina speaks English she chose to work with her colleague Julia Tegel who served as a translator for this episode. The post Marina Simonova and the Agile Sales Team appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

In this episode we talk with Mark Verone about his work adapting Agile to marketing and operations at Gogo. I initially got to know Mark through a six-part Forbes series on the topic of Agile Marketing—if you have not come across this content it’s worth a read. In this conversation we really delve into operational aspects of Agile—Mark has a proper enterprise context that means integrating many systems that support his practice. Thus the conversation covers both marketing practices but also some of the platforms that support the practices. Mark’s team relies heavily on Jira which is interesting because many marketing teams initially struggle with more robust solutions like Jira and prefer lighter-weight applications like Asana or LeanKit. There’s some fascinating bits in here about how he’s customized workflows to support his team practice. We also touch on why Mark’s team gravitated to Scrumban and how they’ve organized themselves with respect to aspects of the supply chain he manages. Give it a listen—as always we want your feedback! Let us know how we’re doing, what questions we should be asking, and where to take the show next. The post Mark Verone on Agile Marketing Operations at Gogo appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

This episode features Jonathan Rasmusson whose website Agile in a Nutshell and book The Agile Samurai inspired me to start writing The Agile Marketer. He’s been working with Spotify for a couple of years but has also worked at a range of larger enterprises mostly in the product management and engineering functions. What’s unique about Jonathan is his commitment to sharing what he’s learned with the broader community … including those outside of product management. In this conversation we hear from Jonathan about: how Spotify leverages Agile and how their practice continues to evolve where the current state of Agile adoption is in context of the larger adoption/maturity cycle why Agile transformation is so hard—especially for established companies how Agile is truly an empowerment model During our conversation I brought up the Cynefin framework—here’s a great overview of this decision making framework. The post Spotify’s Jonathan Rasmusson Talk Agile Transformation appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

We talk with David Lesue who runs the creative group at WorkFront about how he uses WorkFront’s solution to support his team’s Agile practice. This is a continuation of our conversations with Agile software vendors—it’s a bit different than our past conversations, however, because David is more focused on using the solution than on developing or selling it. David has worked as a graphic designer, UX designer, art director and creative director for over 17 years. At Workfront, he leads the creative services team (web, print, and video) as the Creative Director. Prior to Workfront, Dave held leadership roles at Omniture, RiSER Media, Brigham Young University, and Adobe. David’s background is focused on design so this conversation will be particularly relevant for marketers running creative teams or who are within the agency context. David touches on a range of topics including: how Agile has helped his team more effectively manage the stream of incoming work requests the importance of work estimation why he’s chosen to focus on Scrum how WorkFront integrates traditional workflows with Agile Follow David’s latest on Twitter at @davidlesue and visit WorkFront for a set Agile resources.    The post David Lesue on Using WorkFront’s Agile Software to Manage Their Creative Group appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

We’re particularly excited to share this week’s conversation with Denise Grey who is the CMO at LeanKit—this continues our conversations about technology and tooling services that support a marketer’s Agile practice. Besides bringing a wealth of experience with both Scrum and Kanban to the conversation, Denise has a strong point of view about why Kanban is the way forward for marketers. In past episodes, I’ve spoken about why I recommend that marketers start with Kanban but I think Denise makes some great points about why it’s not just a starting point. In this conversation, we discuss: How Kanban and Scrum differ Why marketers struggle with Scrum What the advantages of a continuous deployment model are It’s a fun conversation and one that we’ll likely have to continue in another session with Denise. In the meantime, check out two content pieces that will help you take your practice to the next level:  LeanKit’s Lean Business Report and their Kanban Roadmap. The post Why Kanban is the Future with Denise Grey appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

For this episode we welcome Steve Demchuk of CA Technologies who serves as the vice president of product management for Agile Central (formerly Rally). With a big company background, Steve offers unique insights into what it takes to scale Agile not just in product management but across to marketing as well. He’s seen enterprise teams try to make the transition from projects to products—in the marketing world we’ve referred to this as the transition from campaigns to programs—and he’s working on a platform to help enterprises be successful with Agile. In this session we touch on some familiar themes such as how to keep a large number of implementation teams in sync and what it takes to keep these same teams in alignment with executive led goals. Towards the middle of the conversation we zero in on a discussion about how product management and marketing can use Agile as a platform for alignment and collaboration. And Steve shares his thoughts on the differences he’s seen ramping up product/engineering teams with Agile vs marketing teams. The post Steve Demchuk from Agile Central Talks Product vs Marketing in the Enterprise appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.

This episode we’re joined by Meghan Wilkinson a senior manager, strategy, program design and project effectiveness at Level3 Communications. There’s a lot going on with that title so let me break it down… Meghan found a passion for helping teams improve their performance during her tenure working on events, with sales, and in a customer success role. Like many marketers she discovered that Agile is a useful approach to addressing team performance and collaboration. Beyond that, she talks at length about how Agile has helped drive an enterprise transformation. This conversation includes a case study on the work that Meghan has done bringing Agile to a large enterprise that has had as many as 17 Agile teams working in parallel in the marketing function. Listen in to learn about: Why Agile leaders must have “fortitude” to drive transformation How outside consultants have played a critical role in adoption What makes for a successful pilot Why she pulled back from 17 smaller Agile teams to 5 larger teams If you find this conversation useful please let us know on Twitter @rsmartly and @tangyslice. And, we want to hear your stories so reach out to us about those as well!     The post Evolving the Agile Enterprise with Meghan Wilkinson appeared first on Marketing Agility Podcast.