Hacking Marketing

17Adapting Processes, Not Just Productions

Agility is the heart of hacking marketing. If you're willing and able to explore and adapt, with the right balance of speed and strategy, you can turn digital dynamics to your advantage.

As we close this section, it's important to recognize that such exploration and adaptation aren't limited just to what we produce in marketing. They apply to how we produce our work as well. Both agile and lean management methodologies encourage continuous improvement of the processes and practices that teams use.

Retrospectives to Continually Improve How

In Scrum-style agile sprints, a sprint retrospective meeting is conducted among the team at the end of every sprint, expressly for evaluating and refining its process.

Official Scrum practice recommends that this meeting be limited only to team members and the Scrum master or process owner. The product owner or marketing owner, as well as other stakeholders, do not participate, so as to create an atmosphere for completely open and candid self-reflection among the team.

Because, in agile marketing, the process owner and marketing owner roles frequently blend into the team's manager—who is often an active contributor in the workflow as well—it's common to have that person join the retrospective too. But in those instances, he or she should take great care not to overshadow the conversation with his or her opinion as the boss. The retrospective is a crucial opportunity for the team to cultivate ownership ...