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Transcript

Hi all, thanks for joining. We’ll be getting started in the next couple of minutes. Today’s session will be focused on cultivating an agile marketing organization led by JB Croissant. We’re going to wait just a couple of minutes for attendees to filter in and then we’ll get started. So while we wait, we can comment on the chat, where are people located, their company and what we’re hoping to get out of the session.

So while we wait for the attendees to filter in, I wanted to let you know that we have several other sessions coming up this quarter that are open for you to attend as well. For those who are interested, I will put the links in the session or in the chat. So here they are. The first one is Gen Studio for PEM operating model and governance strategy. The second which is on February 5th, AEM Workfront Integration using Native Connector, which is on February 6th. Impactful insights crafting strategies for effective measurement, which is on February 12th. And lastly, enhancing personalization integrations essential for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target with CJA and AEM, which is happening on February 13th. And with that said, again, I wanted to say thank you for joining for today’s session, focus on cultivating an agile marketing organization My name is Camila Chica and I work for the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ customer success organization as a customer success manager where I focus on helping customers get as much value as possible for their ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ solution. I’m going to go ahead and kick off the session today. First and foremost, again, thank you for joining and attending today. Just to let you know that the session is being recorded and a link to the recording will be sent out for everyone who registered. This live webinar is a listen only format but is very much intended to be interacted in as we go through the content in today’s session. Feel free to share any questions into the chat and QA pod. Our team will answer all the answers as possible there. And in addition, we will have reserved time to discuss questions that are surface at the end of the session. And note that if there are any questions that we don’t get during the session, the team will take note and follow up. With that said, I will hand it over to JB. Thank you Camila. Okay, so my name is JB, I’m a principal architect for Ultimax’s success. And today we’re talking about the cultivating an agile marketing organization. So the agenda for today, so we’ll go through what is agile marketing, some definitions, concepts. We’ll talk about what it means to have agile marketing for personalization at scale. Then we’ll go into the agile practice, and we’ll end up with a few notes on the work front with agile, and whether it’s time for you to change your process. Okay, so now, well basically for on this you might be familiar with this because that’s these challenges affect probably all of you. The request for more and more campaigns doesn’t stop. Customers as well ask more from brands.

It’s difficult to get alignment between the different teams. We have data also on burnout and issues in managing just the workload, the demands that actually are put on the marketing teams. And on top of that, you need to work more, but also get everything compliant with with more and more regulations. And you need to do that across all multi across more and more channels. Okay, so what is agile marketing in that environment? Basically, it’s an approach that applies principles from agile software development to the actual marketing to the marketing process. So it’s something really, it’s a market trend. So I pulled some stats from 23, but you know just to see that 71% of US companies are using agile, but also the fact that companies using agile experience higher return of investment, higher success rates in the campaign that they are doing. So this is where based on this success and shortcomings of activities based on the on a waterfall approach, that’s why it’s really a hot topic. And everybody is trying to learn from the agile principles. And so that’s what we’re going to to see. So the approach of agile marketing. So first, it’s on iterative developments.

So this is where you actually work on marketing campaigns in short, shorter cycles with that we call sprints, instead of working on really long sequences that actually take way longer because actually you’re shifting from one team to another to complete a full process. So the idea being that actually you get the ability to listen to more feedback and make more adjustments.

So that’s why I’m talking about being able to pivot a strategy based on not only customer feedback, but also changes in the market. So that’s where if you have just, if you’re operating within a yearly plan, and basically within three or six months you have changes, that’s very difficult to adjust. Cross functional teams. So this one’s interesting as well because in order to get faster, that means that you’re getting more people from different backgrounds within the marketing department. So you think in particular, you think about technical resources that helps with the implementation. It can be also more people in charge of managing content or creating content. It could be assets in AEM. And so this is where you get more collaboration because you’re not handing over just your product to the next team, but you’re working as a team on this. Okay, so the customer centricity comes from the fact that there is always that feedback loop that happens because you’re going through iterations of shorter cycles. And all the time you’re listening, not only you’re listening to looking at the results of the campaigns that you’re getting, but you do that at a faster pace. And so this is where you get a lot more findings, and this is where you improve the work that you’re doing.

The transparency. So that’s critical because as you work as a team, obviously everybody should be aware of who’s doing what. So this is really helping to get to have faster work because, for instance, if you’re not aware that your IT is actually focusing on deploying a new app and they don’t have any resource for you, well, basically you don’t know that you cannot count on them to help you to launch a new campaign, for instance. So having this level of transparency is key because that helps you to get faster and anticipate blockers. Data-driven decisions. So I would say it’s pretty common for everybody. That being said, it’s key to be working with your measurement strategy and actually validate your hypothesis, measure results, and really scale, for instance, if you were talking about your analytics implementation, having an implementation that scales to more and more campaigns, that’s critical for you.

Continuous improvement. No, sorry. Prioritization. So a lot of emphasis is done on the prioritization of tasks. So this is where also as you work together as a team, this is where you get better at this because you are able to understand the level of effort, usually provided by the people either from the IT or the people developing the marketing campaigns. And so this is where you can work on a backlog of activities and actually always be adjusting how you prioritize items, simply because you get better at that. You have better communications with the team members of the team and each team member also understand as it gets through the iterations of the different cycles, they get a better understanding of how fast they can deliver and the potential impact and the value level of effort of the tasks. So after each sprint, you have what we call a retrospective. So this is where you discuss with your team what’s been happening. And so that’s a great opportunity for you to actually understand what works and what doesn’t work. So it’s like, okay, what do you want to do more and what do you want to do less? And it’s really also tied to the transparency and the communication that you need to have within the team so that you can make progress because everything that you do as a team can also become a task and ideas can be shared and improvements can happen. Scalability. So that one is important because that means that you can really pace scale up or down based on not just based on the… you don’t need to completely redo your strategy. But as you go through the different iterations, this is where you understand how improvements can be made. And so that means that you’re more in line with what’s happening in the market, what is the impact of your activities. And this is where you understand if you need to speed up some areas and slow down on some others.

Okay, so in summary, dry marketing helps in creating a more responsive, efficient, and effective marketing strategy in a fast-paced business environment. Okay, so why is it that we’re talking about that? So we talk about that because with the waterfall approach, these are the typical issues that we encounter when we when we discuss with you. So first, the lack of flexibility. So in particular, not having a product charter that can really create issues within the organization, like some feedback like okay, leaderships come to us with a new offer right in the middle cycle. So that means that all the jobs that they have been doing had to be scrapped and that to start all over again. Also, difficulty in pivoting. So it’s true that if you’re using the waterfall approach, you really go through that whole process. And basically, as you go through each phase, so once you’re done, it’s actually difficult to get back if you realize that there are errors. So it’s really typical also of you do an analytics implementation, and then you realize actually the way it was designed was not exactly getting you the metrics or dimensions that you needed. And so you need to go back. And so that’s really creating friction on the way you’re working. So that’s also what happened with the sequential phases that’s causing delays. So that means that interrupting all the work interruptions, transitioning from one phase, one team to another, so that’s creating friction. Nobody’s necessarily sure when the next step is going to be able to pick up the work and so on. So a lot of inefficiencies because of that. Resource management. So because of poor planning, that means that you will have teams that are completely overworked. So that’s where you get feedback from teams saying like we are being asked to do more with less.

And that’s the reality of the world we are in particular as we are talking with the AI, which can really help with a lot of automations. So there’s a lot of opportunities, but at the same time you still have some basic work that cannot be completely automated. And so it requires to assign and have really an understanding of how the resources are being used. Communication and integration. So typically we disconnect between the departments like marketing and IT, silos between organizations. So this is where you when you have misaligned goals, this is where you will get issues or feedback that’s too late. So once again I mentioned that the emphasis for general marketing for collaboration.

So usually it’s more difficult to get this in place effectively when you have the waterfall approach. And then finally risk management and quality control. So it’s really just that it’s always at the very end of the process once everything is done that you can actually really see issues and problems or defects that actually you did not anticipate. And because you don’t have remedies like regular standups and feedback and review, so this is where it’s difficult to address all these quality issues and risks that are happening across the waterfall process.

Okay that being said Agile doesn’t come without any changes. So first, most important I would probably say is the cultural shift. Because if you have in particular siloed teams with limited communications with the different culture between different departments of the organization, making everybody work together doesn’t happen just over time.

Just like that in a snap. So you need to be able to work on that and make work on the appropriate change management strategy to make this happen. So in particular the waterfall is easy to understand, it’s predictable and it’s the basic way you manage products. Whereas Agile is more fluid, it’s less predictable.

And so if you want to be efficient, well with Agile you will need to really have discipline. And it’s not just a laissez faire, no you have really a lot of specific activities with documentation planning.

And so if you don’t do that, well basically you will get this organization.

Scalability, so if you have a really large organization, so moving to work with the smaller teams, that can be a problem, an issue. So it’s just that when you’re talking about scale, let’s keep in mind that just from a human point of view, you cannot have teams that are too big because you just get a lot of inefficiencies and they actually don’t really work together. So this is where you need to find your sweet spot on this. So obviously if you’re not a large organization, you don’t need to face these issues. But if you are in a large organization, obviously you know what I’m talking about. Okay, documentation. So if you have requirements because of your industry and you have really a lot of emphasis on documentation, you can be in a situation where your documentation is really very comprehensive because you have to. Whereas Agile is already focusing on delivering campaigns. So this is where that can create some changes and make teams uncomfortable.

Inconsistent quality, so really that’s why I mentioned before, but if you don’t have the discipline and leveraging the Agile principles, if you just think that it’s just fair, that’s not going to work because you will get just inconsistent quality. And then finally the resource allocation. So that means that if you plan to move to Agile, you will require upfront investment because really that’s a change in approach. So earlier on the cultural shift, I talked about change management.

So just that you’ll have change management activities, you will have trainings, tools to adapt and configure. So obviously that will be a barrier to move to Agile marketing.

All right, so moving to the Agile marketing for personalization at scale. So you know that’s one of our key areas of focus within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. That’s what we want to do via our solutions.

So maybe you’ve seen the North Star that we have for this and the capabilities and practices that we recommend for doing personalization at scale. So there is this the area of the org and operating model. So this is where I want to call out that in order to achieve the personalization at scale, obviously you will need to have your org ready to do this because if you don’t, that will simply not happen because of the all the frictions and issues that I mentioned earlier. So really this is where you know this is the opportunity to okay if you have issues scaling and personalization at scale also is your goal, this is where you need to look at. Okay so we have these two concepts of the center of excellence and Agile marketing squad. So the center of excellence is really here to drive to drive strategy so that everybody working on the team is aware of this. So I would say probably that’s for smaller organization, I mean you know unless you’re already a very large organization but for I would say most organization that’s where you start with the center of excellence. And really the most advanced teams really work with the Agile marketing squads, pods that are focused on some specific areas. So you can see the difference in approach. So this is where you know you want to have a mix of business and IT and having C-level sponsorship just so that everybody is aware of the goals of the organizations and how they can be delivered through collaboration. So then you have some specific roles and roles and responsibilities. And so this is where you know if you move to Agile marketing squads, so this is where you get to have pods that are actually dedicated to specific customer segments, products, or a phase in the customer life cycle. So instead of you know just being a one one center of excellence for every everything, you have actually teams that are working on specific areas where they work on specific ideas, tactics, they work on the the capabilities that they need, maybe they want to focus on for instance on target or AGO and so they really do through iterations, they do a lot of tests and measure success.

Okay so a more detailed Agile marketing squad august structure. So this is where you see that on the left you also keep a steering committee that’s important so that you still keep similar to what you have in the center of excellence, but this is where you have the people in charge of the strategy and they are in communication with the the squads, the Agile marketing squads to ensure that the alignment is in place. And then you can have some shared functions, so that’s on the right because you know you cannot have, let’s say that if you have five if you have five squads, well obviously you cannot you cannot have really have five data engineers for each squad. So some needs to be shared and possibly assigned for each marketing squad or pod as you prefer to call it. So you know in that example you’re focusing on specific segments, each pod has a specific goals and targets and so they have a mix of talent and function so that they can work end to end to deliver campaigns, to deliver their marketing campaigns.

Okay so now a giant practice, so I will go already through a very basic example. So sorry if that’s really obvious for a lot of you, but you know this is how it works with the for instance the spring planning, execution, daily standups, review and retrospective. But I still think it’s interesting to see how it can work in the sense that you don’t have to do very complex things to do work more efficiently. Okay so the spring planning is very important because it’s about getting objectives for the next two weeks. So you’re already focusing on something specific that is measurable. So if you have an analytics practitioner, so this is where you know they will come back to you with not only a set of data points to support hypothesis but also make sure that the measurement strategy is in place so that they can work on some hypothesis.

So execution, so you decide to have for instance a small campaigns or AB test so you’re based on the data that’s been shared. So you identify some some content type or specific channels that you want to improve.

As you go through this process you have daily standard. So I put daily standard but you know based on your organization and culture and where you are, I mean you know daily is not mandatory. If you’re meeting three times a week or twice a week maybe that’s enough for you. It’s just that at the end of the day the daily stand-ups are made really to provide information to the team on blockers and progress so that everybody is aware of where you are in your work and if if help is needed for anybody within the team.

So you know if there is nothing to if the status is everything okay your daily stand-up can actually be pretty pretty fast so that’s why if you have it daily it’s something that can be definitely sustainable. So it’s not meant to be a one hour meeting so you know it’s here to be efficient and to share blockers and provide details on where you are in completing your task. Review so at the end of each sprint so this is where you’re back probably with your analytics team and probably if you’re using target also your business target practitioner to look at the data on for instance conversion rate lift and if we have enough data to call it to call a winner for instance and also you can have a deeper dive into the data and then finally the retrospective so this is where you get to get back together on what you’ve learned as a team during this cycle. The goal being that you always want to improve and that’s what you do each time you do a cycle. You learn things, you solve problems, you identify friction and anything can be added as part of a backlog of of ideas or a suggestion on how to do things better. So this is where also you via communication that’s how you foster innovation from everybody from the team.

Okay so I think I was interrupted a bit so I was talking about the the marketing activities that are called also ceremonies just to provide details on what they are. So backlog refinement, planning, execution, review and retrospective. So the backlog is probably the most important because that’s where you prioritize the work that needs to be done and so this is where obviously at the top of the list becomes what becomes ready to work. Okay the planning on what and how to be delivered and what is work done that’s important because that allows you to know exactly you know exact have a specific criteria on what you are going to deliver.

On the execution so you have the daily standups and then you have other other outcomes like incremental changes and so on. The review so the review is really a collaboration between the different team members and finally the and I talked about that for instance with the analytics and target target review of for instance an A-B test and finally the retrospective is ready to reflect on learning and decide as a team on how to improve.

Okay so now the task backlog so I think it’s really strategic to have this in place. So that means that it really helps you to make sure that you are in alignment with business goals and that helps also to foster a culture of collaboration and transparency throughout the organization. So I’m sharing I will be sharing with you an example of an example of a task backlog that is really just specific to target.

But I want to call out the reason why it’s important so the prioritization so that helps you to prioritize tasks and to work on the tasks that are most important. But also that means that you always have a list of things to be done so that’s where you’re never left with nothing to do. And so that’s key because also sometimes you’re especially it’s probably known to target an optimization team but you know you have a very active time periods and some other times where you can actually when you have more opportunities to test ideas that are less sure. So that’s this is where having this is a great way to be able to to go through all the tasks that can be done. Visibility and transparency so having this means that everybody knows and can provide feedback on the different activities on what’s possible level of effort and so that helps with the communication.

The flexibility that means that if you actually see if you have a market response that you did not anticipate that actually that’s actually for you the ability to move up some activities some tasks that you did not think would be as impactful so you can actually adjust your backlog. Resource management so obviously as you look at these different activities some activities will require for instance more technical resources. So this is where for instance you can you can actually work with your IT to make sure that they have the ability to provide you with the support that you need.

And also the continuous improvement so as you go through cycles you understand which tasks are actually useful and which one are not and so that you that means that simply you’re getting better and better at prioritizing work.

Okay so this is an optimization roadmap example so it’s really dedicated to to a team using target but as you’re able to share a roadmap like this with the whole team this is where you get to understand whether there will be need for for instance technical resources, graphic resources to create images or working with the AEM team to work on the variations via experience fragments for instance. So being able to share this with your team actually will go a long way in making you faster because you will prioritize the work with the appropriate level of effort and the expected results.

Okay so Agile Marketing Roles so this is where you will need to have an executive sponsor to actually oversee everything that goes with the change management and make sure that it’s getting deployed and you have the participation from the all the teams involved in it. The steering committee so they are responsible for all the planning and monitoring and working with the Agile teams to make sure that they are working in the right directions and that they’re executing against the priorities that have been defined by the steering committee and then you will have dedicated scrum team where you’ll have team lead scrum master and activation activation team and so each team member has different responsibilities so it’s important to get these are the typical roles that you will need to have and so this is where as you consider moving to Agile so this is where you will need to have the executive sponsorship but you will have also to get people with a specific Agile responsibility and understanding of what needs to be done so if you are a project manager obviously you will know or you’ll be familiar with these with these roles and what needs to be done so usually this would be the the kind of person that takes over this new Agile roles but obviously this is where you may have to go through training for a part of the team or also acquire new resources within your organization.

Okay so a quick talk about Workfront and Agile. We actually identified that there’s a lot of pressure on the marketing team and so in particular for instance that you have to burn out 83% of the marketers report burnout and 85% of marketers say they’re under pressure to create assets and deliver campaigns more quickly and so that’s why we responded with with Workfront where we support collaborative work management so to centralize work in one solution to digitize and automate the work process, support the collaboration and compliance and also deliver the quality output and measurable impact so that that’s done because throughout the process collaboration and providing, looking at assets, working, commenting, approving and doing all the steps of the the process can be done via that tool and integrations with other existing systems that you have can also happen and then reporting can be made to understand if progress are being made and you’re reaching the state where you are so the output rate you can get information on and data on how fast you are actually delivering.

So that’s why I talked about the collaborative work management within Workfront and also the boards that are available for Agile if you want to work on Kanban or your onboard system which can be used for many things including retrospectives.

Okay so now is it time to change your process? So these are the typical reasons why you would see you need to change it so if you can keep up with the pace of delivery, if you have issues aligning between your scope and resources, so this is where you need to that means that you’re not able to understand if you have the right resources for the work that needs to be done, inability to push back so basically you’re always getting asked to do something right in the middle of an activity so obviously that will create a lot of of inefficiency and so that means that the way you’re working, it’s a lot of inefficiency. Reactivity issues, so basically getting feedback on the work that you’ve done too late so that means that you’re not able to pivot and then the all or nothing so it’s typically like okay that’s when you think you already think you should make a change but you believe it should be an all or nothing approach so it’s like okay so it’s destroying everything or or not so these are the typical signs where it’s a good time to think about what needs to be changed.

Okay so already a recap really needs to be done for to move to agile marketing so executive sponsorship so required to get everybody on board align the different groups and drive the strategy and communication then as I mentioned agile enablement so with product managers often a critical initial resource for this and also I would say you know just don’t you can really be flexible because most teams actually use a hybrid model so you know you have the ability to experiment and also address some of the challenges that I described if you have better planning documentation and so on. Finally dedicated agile roles so these are new roles and responsibilities so this is where you will need probably to remove silos so which is always it’s part of change management that’s not easy to do but you can experiment and use test groups to actually do that. Okay and thank you very much for your attention that’s all I wanted to share with you and I hope this was you found this session useful.

So I believe that now we will ask for some feedback.

So yeah if you don’t mind that’s the two simple questions on this session. And I’m also checking the chat to see if there are any questions left or if there’s anything we will be sharing the recording and the slides later as well and we’ll just give one more minute and just make sure you answer the survey and we can all go. Well thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today for this webinar on agile marketing. With that said I will give you some time back on your day if you have any other questions thank you so much again. Yes thank you very much.