Agile is like a gym membership: Signing up to it is just the start
Most of us have done it. Signed up to the gym in January, full of good intentions, then watched the direct debit leave our account every month long after we'd stopped going.
Agile in marketing teams can go the same way. In my last article, I shared ten ways it can help an overloaded marketing team. But signing up is the easy part: buy the workflow tool, book in the stand-ups, maybe run a training session or two. Making it work is another matter. I've seen agile transform marketing teams, and I've also seen it become little more than a very expensive way of holding meetings: stand-ups nobody turns up to, backlogs nobody looks at, and retrospectives quietly cancelled ‘just this once’ for six months running.
Like any fitness regime, the results come from discipline - and not just the team's. Senior leaders, the team itself and the stakeholders sending work its way all have their part to play. Here are the eight disciplines that make the difference.
For senior leaders
1. Protect stand-up time
Stand-ups only work if senior leaders actually turn up. It's tempting to treat them as the easiest thing to move when your diary gets busy, but every time you book a meeting over one, two things happen. The team feels devalued, because their time with you is the first thing to go. And the blockers they needed you to clear stay exactly where they are, quietly eating into capacity and progress.
2. Trust the team to self-organise
Agile and micro-management do not mix. The whole point is that the people doing the work decide how best to deliver it. If you hire experts, then hover over every task and cross-examine every sizing estimate, you'll get all the meetings of agile with none of the benefits. Set the direction, then step back.
3. Make it safe to speak up, and respond when people do
Agile depends on people being honest when something isn't working or isn't progressing. That only happens in an environment where speaking up feels safe. And safety isn't just about saying ‘my door is always open’. It's about what happens when someone walks through it. If issues get raised and nothing changes, people soon stop raising them.
4. Treat retrospectives as sacred
When diaries get tight, retrospectives are often the first thing to go. They should be the last. Retros are where the team reflects on what went well and what didn't, fixes problems before they become habits, and showcases its work to colleagues and stakeholders. Cancel them, and you lose both the learning and one of the best morale boosts agile has to offer.
For the team
5. Choose your scrum masters carefully
Scrum masters drawn from within the team create a peer-led structure that encourages openness and accountability. But it only works if they're the right people: well trained, high-performing and respected by their colleagues. They need to keep stand-ups focused (fifteen minutes means fifteen minutes) and feel comfortable holding peers to account for updates and progress. That's not an easy thing to do with someone you sit next to every day, so invest in their training and back them up when they do it.
6. Get a good workflow tool, and actually use it
Transparency is one of agile's biggest benefits, and it lives or dies by your workflow tool. Everyone should be able to see at a glance who is working on what, and where each task is up to. A tool that's out of date, or only half the team uses, is worse than no tool at all, because people stop trusting it.
For stakeholders
7. Be open to challenge
In an agile team, marketing asks will be questioned. What's it for? Who's it aimed at? What value will it drive? How will we know it's worked? Stakeholders used to the ‘Just F***ing Do It’ approach may find that uncomfortable at first. But challenge isn't obstruction. It's the marketing team doing exactly what they were hired to do: making sure effort goes where it will make the biggest difference.
8. Put a value on every ask
Prioritisation only works if every request comes with a sense of the value it will drive for the business. Stakeholders need the discipline to attribute that value, ideally in revenue terms, before an ask joins the backlog. It's a simple rule, but a powerful one: no value, no priority. You'll be amazed how many ‘essential’ requests quietly disappear once someone has to put a number on them.
Keep turning up
None of these disciplines is complicated. The hard part is sticking to them when the pressure is on, which, in marketing, is roughly always. But that's precisely when they matter most. Skip one session and you'll barely notice the difference. Skip a month, and you're right back where you started.
Get these eight right, and agile becomes far more than a process: it becomes a way of protecting your team's capacity, respecting their expertise and focusing everyone on the work that really matters. Let them slip, and you'll be back to square one, just with more post-it notes. Or, like that January gym membership, paying for something nobody is actually using.
Which of these disciplines have you found hardest to stick to? I'd love to hear from you. And if your team needs a personal trainer to get its agile ways of working back in shape, I'm always happy to have a no-obligation chat.
