The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 8Scrum

Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don't do it. If you think this doesn't apply to you, you're wrong—it does.

—Jeff Sutherland, author and co-creator of Scrum

Scrum is an iterative and lightweight project management methodology, best suited to complex problems with changing requirements. It was developed to manage software projects; you can use it, with a few tweaks, to manage your marketing projects.

Scrum Basics

Figure 8.1 illustrates the Scrum process.

Scrum begins with a backlog—a list of deliverables requested by stakeholders (customers, management, sales) or developed by the marketing team to achieve marketing goals. In standard Scrum, we describe those deliverables in terms of user stories to better understand the audience: Who are they? What do they want to accomplish? Why will doing so matter to them?

Figure 8.1 Scrum process

The Scrum methodology includes someone—a person or a team—responsible for managing the list of deliverables and writing user stories, clarifying them, and prioritizing them; and who represents the voice of the customer and ensures that the team delivers value to the customer and to the business. An individual who fills this role is called the marketing owner. If there is not an individual marketing owner, the team fulfills the role, with everyone responsible ...