SprintZero – The Physics of Agile Marketing

June 6, 2012

This is nifty – next Monday I’ll be on a panel with Jim Ewel of Agile Marketing and a few other folks. We’re all trying to introduce Agile practices to marketing organisations, there are still a tonne of unanswered questions that we need to address.

SprintZero aims to “bring together marketers who are passionate about Agile and incorporating into their marketing practices.” This is new territory for me – I’ve been in the Agile space a number of years yet marketing for only a few short months.

I will share my experience on moving from an Agile software development environment to a reactive marketing team. Then I’ll be looking to other panelists and the audience to tackle these questions:

  • How do we market features when we can not see/play/screenshot them until the day before they go live?
  • How do our customers keep up to date with our latest releases? Can they consume all the messages we send them?
  • How can we scale our marketing team without growing the headcount?
  • How do we identify the value of various marketing activities?
  • Are we all data driven now we have the analytics, or is there still room for decisions based on gut feel?

If you haven’t registered already I’m sorry to say you’ll be on the waitlist. Rest assured I’ll update you on the days activities here, so check back next week.

In Agile, Events, Marketing
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Business Model Generation with Canvas

June 3, 2012

While enjoying a drink with Martin and Roberto of Comalatech on Friday night – after Atlassian Summit had wrapped – I learned about their new Confluence plugin Ad hoc canvas. I didn’t really get it until Martin sent me a recent blog on the product – Business Frameworks with Ad hoc Canvas. What struck me as cool was the example of using it for Business Model Generation, a practice that we conduct in the product management team at Atlassian.

Very cool.

Using Ad hoc Canvas by Atlassian Expert Comalatech for a Business Model Generation exercise

References

In Product Management
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Do you need a physical task board to succeed?

May 21, 2012

 

There are many Agile teams today who use an electronic wallboard and are successful – they are delivering quality working software to their customers on a weekly/fortnightly basis. Having a physical task board does not guarantee success. Further, many of the teams I talk to are distributed – it is too hard to find the right people all in the one place – and in this circumstance having a physical task board just doesn’t work.

Finally, I like to think that there are more important tasks for a ScrumMaster to focus on other than simply updating a physical task board and obtaining statistics such as velocity manually. Automate those repetitive tasks and get the ScrumMaster focusing on higher value tasks – implementing retrospective feedback, for instance.

I imagine the objection to electronic task boards is raised most often by Agile Coaches who are bringing existing Waterfall teams over to Agile practices, and in this circumstance I wholeheartedly encourage the use of a physical task board. This is often part of Scrum Shock Therapy, indeed @jameshatherly will be sharing the GreenHopper teams experience with this at Summit next week.

Thanks for the question James, a good one!

 

In Agile
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