The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 24Scaling Agile Marketing to Large Teams

Why fit in when you were born to stand out?

—Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Agile was designed for small teams. In “The Scrum Guide,” Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the creators of Scrum, describe the ideal Agile team as six people, plus or minus three.¹ Small teams are inherently more agile. They spend less time coordinating among their members. They tend to have greater engagement. They can achieve a better balance of autonomy and accountability.

How do you scale Agile to larger teams? How do you coordinate the efforts of a hundred marketers? A thousand?

Let's look at some of the ways that developers have found to scale Agile and whether these techniques might apply to marketing.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) is the most popular approach used by software developers to scale Agile.² We'll take a look at it, not because it has strong applicability to scaling Agile marketing, but because many organizations use SAFe, and marketers need to understand their role in SAFe.

We'll also look at the approach taken by the music-streaming service Spotify, because it has served as a model not only for many technology companies but also companies like ING, the British banking giant. Although technically it is not a framework, it has been very influential, and marketers do well to understand it.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

The Scaled Agile Framework grew out of Dean Leffingwell's book, Agile Software Requirements, and a compendium ...