Hacking Marketing

7Adapting Ideas from Software to Marketing

We've explored some of the remarkable connections between software and marketing—and the parallel revolutions shaping both of these digital professions in surprisingly similar ways.

At this point, the notion of borrowing management concepts that emerged in the software development profession and adapting them to marketing shouldn't seem like a strange concept. Instead, it should sound like a natural source of inspiration.

With that orientation, we've reached the end of the first part of this book—and the real beginning of our journey. The next four parts of this book will look at four major facets of modern marketing management—agility, innovation, scalability, and talent—and describe a collection of software-inspired ideas to help us better harness digital dynamics in each of them.

In the part on agility, we'll adapt ideas from both agile and lean software development methodologies. These approaches to agile marketing were some of the first examples of cross-pollination of management concepts between the two professions, so you may have already heard of some of them. We'll dive into the principles and mechanics of transparent prioritization, rapid iterations, visualizing workflow, adaptive processes, agile team structures, and balancing a strategic vision with operational flexibility and emergent opportunities. We'll see that the heart of such agility is embracing change through optionality and evolutionary experimentation.

In the ...