Hacking Marketing

15Agile Teams and Agile Teamwork

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: That very first value in the original Agile Manifesto goes right to the heart of agile management. In creative and intellectual pursuits, such as marketing and software development, that digital dynamics amplify, individual contributions and small-team collaborations can have an outsized impact on your business.

The hours that digital creators invest in their work are not commoditized units of time. When creators are catalyzed and inspired, encouraged to take risks, and freed from unnecessary constraints, they can produce remarkable outcomes. Agile principles and practices were founded on that belief. Empower individuals and foster productive interactions among them.

The two core principles of agile teams that drive this are ownership and transparency.

Ownership means that the team takes responsibility for what it produces—and how. The team commits to the deliverables it's going to complete each sprint by pulling them from the backlog. Team members are granted considerable latitude in how they work together to accomplish those commitments—­often to the extent of being self-organizing. Some processes and tools may be necessarily dictated by requirements beyond the team's control, but as much as possible, the team is encouraged to develop its own approaches that it finds most effective. Retrospectives build in a recurring opportunity every sprint to reflect on that development and shape it. ...