10 ways agile can help your drowning marketing team
You know the signs. Everything is urgent. Nothing gets finished. The team is busier than ever, yet somehow the work that actually matters keeps slipping. Your inbox is a sea of ‘quick asks’, and every one of them is apparently top priority.
Your marketing team isn't underperforming. It's drowning. And the worst part? Most of the time, nobody outside the team can see the water level rising.
Agile ways of working can throw marketing teams a lifeline - by changing the way work comes in, gets prioritised and gets done. Here are ten ways it can help.
1. Everyone can finally see how deep the water is
When every request goes into a shared backlog, stakeholders see, sometimes for the first time, the sheer volume of asks your team is juggling. It's remarkable how much more understanding people become when you push back on their request and they can see the twenty-seven others queuing up in front of it.
2. Every ask has to earn its place
Agile prioritisation forces everyone, leadership included, to ask a simple question of every request: what value is this actually driving for the business? And does that value justify the resource it will take to deliver? You’ll be amazed at how quickly some seemingly “essential” asks vanish into the ether, as soon as you ask a stakeholder to attribute a revenue value to them.
3. It's the beginning of the end for the JFDI
The dreaded "Just F***ing Do It" struggles to survive in an agile environment. When requests have to be sized, valued and prioritised in the open, it's much harder for something to jump the queue just because someone senior shouted loudest.
4. Your team takes ownership of the work
In an agile team, the people doing the work get to size each ask and set out how they propose to respond to it. That shift matters. Instead of having work done to them, they're shaping it. It builds trust, ownership and a sense that their expertise is valued - which is rather the point of hiring experts after all.
5. Stakeholders sort out priorities between themselves
When the team can't accommodate everything, agile invites an open conversation between stakeholders about what should come first. Rather than the marketing team being stuck in the middle, playing referee between competing departments, the people making the requests have to agree on what matters most to the business. Funnily enough, that tends to produce better decisions.
6. Your big projects keep moving forwards
Agile scrum teams focus on the major, high-value projects, working in sprints with clear goals. That means the strategic work, the stuff that will actually move the needle, doesn't get endlessly bumped for whatever landed in someone's inbox this morning.
7. The day-to-day still gets done
Of course, the ad hoc requests and BAU tasks don't disappear. This is where Kanban teams come in, handling the smaller, ongoing work in a continuous flow. Combining scrum and Kanban means a set proportion of your team's resource is ring-fenced for the unexpected, so the big-ticket items keep moving and the urgent-but-small stuff still gets picked up.
8. Blockers get unblocked
One of the most overlooked causes of capacity problems is work that's stuck: waiting on a sign-off, an answer or a decision from someone senior. Regular stand-ups give the team precious time with busy senior leaders to escalate those blockers quickly, instead of watching tasks pile up while a diary clears.
9. Honesty becomes the norm
Appointing scrum masters from within the team creates a peer-led structure. People are often far more open with a colleague than with their boss about what's going wrong, so problems surface earlier, when they're still easy to fix.
10. The team learns, and gets to showcase their work
Regular retrospectives give the team space to reflect on what went well and what didn't in the last sprint, and to showcase their work to each other. That second part is easy to underestimate. Seeing colleagues - and senior stakeholders - celebrate your work is a powerful motivator, especially for the people working behind the scenes who don't always get the spotlight.
Time to come up for air
Agile won't magically make the work disappear. But it will make it visible, prioritised and shared fairly, and it gives your team back something every drowning team desperately needs: a sense of control and ownership over its own workload.
Get the disciplines right, and it's one of the most effective ways I know to protect a team's capacity and focus it on the work that really matters. Get them wrong, and you'll just have a very expensive way of holding meetings.
Have you tried agile in a marketing team? What made it sink or swim? I'd love to hear from you. And if your team is struggling to keep its head above water, I'm always happy to have a no-obligation chat.
