Chief Marketing Technologist

Why this CMO loathes marketing plans (interview)

One of my favorite marketers in the Boston area is Frank Days. He's super smart, speaks his mind, and is a great champion of innovation in the marketing department. He was one of the early pioneers of agile marketing, implementing it at Novell several years ago and sharing his experience with others.

So I was excited to finally catch up with him for an interview on some of his current thinking about agile marketing. You can also read more of his thoughts on agile marketing at the Agile Marketing Blog, on his own blog tangyslice, and on his Twitter stream.

Start by telling us a little bit about your background and your current work. What are you passionate about in marketing?

I started my marketing career in the mid 90's as a product manager in the medical diagnostics industry. It was very much a marketing 1.0 world at the time, with a traditional mix of trade shows, print advertising and direct mail.

I then got my MBA at the MIT Sloan school in the late 90's, just as the Internet exploded. After graduation, I spent a number of years as a marketing VP for a series of private and venture funded software companies. This allowed me to combine my passion for marketing with my strong interest in information technology.

Around 2007, I had a panic attack that I had missed the social media revolution and immersed myself in everything I could do: blogging, podcasting, and content curation. My passion in marketing is finding new, more cost effective ways to use online programs to spread the word in narrow B2B markets. There is no shortage of B2C marketing pundits and punditry, but much less on the B2B side of things.

You were one of the very first champions of agile marketing. What inspired you to bring agile methods to a marketing team?

First off, I loathe marketing plans. In fast moving start-up environments where I have worked, marketing plans were approaching useless given their short shelf lives. I didn't know what agile was, but I often found myself using agile approaches.

"In fast moving start-up environments where I have worked, marketing plans were approaching useless given their short shelf lives."

For example, in one company we were behind in our recruiting, which was putting a damper on our growth. The CEO would have daily sit-downs with everyone at 8am to review our recent tasks and plans for the day.

I started a modified version of this in marketing, where we would do three short meetings a week. It wasn't until I talked with a developer fiend that I learned about agile and shared what we were doing. In a pure sense, we were not using much of the agile methodology, but the spirit of the approach made us more flexible, responsive and results driven.

At a recent agile marketing meet-up, you boldly declared that "the marketing plan is dead." That's a conversation starter. Can you elaborate?

I haven't written a traditional marketing plan in over 10 years. That doesn't mean we don't do planning. We have monthly sprint planning meetings, as well as reviews of our monthly sprints.

Thoughtful reflection and prioritization are essential. What I think is a waste is a 20-page Word doc or a 200-cell spreadsheet with everything you hope to do for the next 6 or 12 months.

"Thoughtful reflection and prioritization are essential. What I think is a waste is a 20-page Word doc or a 200-cell spreadsheet."

Last time I saw a statistic, the average CMO has a tenure of around 20 months. Time-to-results is what matters. A well-crafted story of how you get there makes people feel better in the short term, but nothing speaks louder than getting things done on-time and delivering results.

How much of agile marketing is process and how much of it is culture?

I am not a certified scrum master, and most agile people on the software side of things would be shocked with what most marketers call Agile. We do one-month sprints (blocks of work) around 3 core themes. We scrum three times a week since daily seems too frequent. I play product owner and scrum master. We don't use burndown charts of planning poker. Our capacity is reflected by an average number of tasks per sprint, and we leave about 30% spare capacity for ad hoc tasks.

A big part of it is culture. We are constantly evaluating the value of each task against others. This also avoids the "I've been asking for this for 6 months" syndrome that often comes from sales. If sales asks for something more than once, then we discuss, decide, and communicate expecatation to the business rather that it getting lost in the ether.

Are there aspects of marketing that don't lend themselves to agile management? What do you do with those pieces?

Things like media buying and trade shows are less agile. We discuss them in our sprint planning meetings and try to work them into the scrum process, but in the end of the day they often have separate workback schedules.

If you could share 30 seconds of advice with fellow CMOs everywhere, what would you tell them?

Think like a scientist. Generate new hypotheses and find rapid, low cost ways to test new ideas. This is where the breakthroughs come from.

"Think like a scientist."

Thank you, Frank!

Agile marketing in 20 slides and 5 minutes (video)

"What the heck is this agile marketing thing people keep talking about?!"

If that question is on your mind — and you aren't familiar with agile software development, from which its ideas sprang — this 5 minute video will give you the quick lowdown. It was recorded at the ASAE's technology conference earlier this month in an "ignite talk" format — 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide auto-advancing, 5 minutes total. (I'm not sure who was more tired at the end — me or the cameraman.)

For those of you who prefer reading to watching — or if you're a search engine crawler — here's an essay version of the talk. Not quite a transcript, but close enough:

In the next 5 minutes, I will share with you the basics of what agile marketing is and why it's become such a hot topic.

Now "agile" isn't just an adjective — meaning fast, nimble. Everybody's agile today, right? But Agile is actually a well-defined management methodology, which got started in software development circles about 15 years ago.

See, software development used to be managed by something called "the waterfall method." It was called that because projects would be run as a fixed sequence of well-defined stages. You'd start with requirements gathering, then move to design, then implement, test, and deploy.

The diagram looks like a waterfall. And like a waterfall, once you slipped from one step to another, there was no going back. Or let's just say that swimming back upstream was arduous and full of peril. But the problem is that often people do want to go back.

On paper, the waterfall is neat and organized. But in the real world, things change. Priorities shift. Markets evolve. With software, people often don't know exactly what they want until they see it.

So a bunch of software developers got together at the turn of the century and forged a better vision for how to run software projects: the manifesto for agile software development. You can read it online. The gist was to take that big, rigid waterfall process and make it more iterative and responsive to change.

There are different variants of agile methodologies. One popular one is known as Scrum. It revolves around small, cross-functional teams of typically no more than eight people — what Jeff Bezos calls a "two pizza team."

Scrum teams operate on project intervals of 1-4 weeks known as sprints. Bigger projects get broken down into sprint-sized chunks — and each sprint has a functional deliverable. You build something people can use, get feedback on it, and then iteratively improve it in subsequent sprints.

A Scrum team works with a set of user stories — things people want — and a set of tasks to implement those stories. The tasks get prioritized on a backlog on task board. Team members take tasks off the backlog, move them into work-in-progress column, and then move them to done when complete. Everyone can always see the current state of the project just by looking at the task board.

You can use post-it notes for your task board, or you can use software. What matters is that tasks are clear, bite-sized pieces of work, stacked in priority. And an individual always owns a task when it's in progress.

Another key aspect of Scrum is the daily stand-up. Everyone on the team gets together once a day for a 15-minute huddle. It's done standing up to remind people keep this meeting strictly to 15 minutes.

At the stand-up, you go around and everyone on the team answers three questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. Are there any impediments in my way?

It's all about continuous progress and transparency.

At the end of a sprint, there are longer sit-down meetings where people review what was accomplished — the sprint review — and reflect on process improvements, in what's called a sprint retrospective. There's then a planning meeting for arranging the priorities for the next sprint.

This cycle then repeats. Every sprint, further incremental improvements are delivered — smoothly adapting to feedback and change.

If you haven't read the book The Lean Start-Up yet, I'd highly recommend it. It argues than any organization — not just start-ups — can harness these build-measure-learn feedback loops. Because here's the thing: agile isn't limited it software development. It can also be a great way to run key functions of marketing.

Marketing plans used to look a lot like the waterfall process as well. But as anyone in marketing will tell you, today's environment requires much greater adaptability and responsiveness. Social media alone is a terrific example of this, where problems and opportunities arise in a matter of hours.

Many of the projects that marketers work on today actually share similarities with software development. For instance, building web sites and landing pages, or producing and distributing content marketing. Marketing campaigns are a kind of project.

Agile marketing can make you more effective in the modern world. It's a management approach for our time. It puts measurable customer experiences at the center of its vision, and it thrives on the ability to respond to change.

I hope this has given you enough of a taste for agile marketing that you'll take a closer look. Here are several resources you can follow when you get a copy of this deck. Or just Google "agile marketing" and you'll be on your way.

Agile Marketing in 5 Minutes from Scott Brinker

What agile marketers can learn from the U.S. CTO

Think your organization is too large or too political to adopt agile marketing? You might take inspiration from the U.S. CTO Todd Park, who has ignited a number of agile projects in the U.S. federal government and — isn't there a law against this? — is actually getting stuff done.

Park, who has a successful background as a tech-savvy entrepreneur (he co-founded Athenahealth in the 90's), was the CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services from 2009 until earlier this year, when he was named Chief Technology Officer of the United States.

So what exactly does the U.S. CTO do? I attended a session with Park earlier today where he explained.

"I run an incubator," he said. "It doesn't birth companies. It births projects that get executed in an agile and Scrum fashion." These projects sometimes happen entirely inside government organizations, but more frequently have been in collaboration with the private sector.

He described two such projects:

The first, the Open Data Initiative — check out data.gov — has the mission of "liberating data" from its dark silos in the bowels of the federal government. Data that the public has paid for and data that could be really useful to entrepreneurs in health, energy, education, public safety, etc.

Park recalls an image from the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark as the boxed up ark is being wheeled into a gigantor warehouse with endless rows and stacks of other boxes gathering dust. That's an apt metaphor for the piles of data in the government today. And while a lot of it may be of limited value, there are likely many gems waiting to be unearthed and put to productive use.

Weather data and GPS are earlier examples of the impact government data can have when it's made available to public and private entrepreneurs and innovators.

Park emphasizes that to make most of this data available and accessible, "No legislation is required. No regulation is required." Skip the gridlock and get on with actually doing stuff.

But it's not just about making the data accessible — although that's a good start. It's also about making entrepreneurs aware of the data that's available. To promote discovery and innovation with the data, Park has run hackathons, datapaloozas, meet-ups, data jams, and more. Earlier this week, there was a story on TechCrunch about one such project, a design challenge for health care records.

The other project Park has championed is the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, bringing "top innovators from outside government for focused 'tours of duty' with our best federal innovators on game-changing projects." These tours of duty are only 6 months long, and they're run in a lean start-up, agile fashion, with rapid iterations that deliver value in a matter of weeks.

One such mission is RFP-EZ, which aims to provide an online service that will let small businesses easily sell tech services to the government. You can follow the project on Twitter at @ProjectRFPEZ. You can even follow the project on GitHub, getting full access to the software being written for this. (Apparently a number of city governments are starting to adopt this software for streamlining their own RFP efforts as well.)

It's pretty inspiring.

So what are the takeaways for agile — or wanting-to-be-agile — marketers? I'd give three:

1. Get started with small agile projects — you don't need to convert the whole behemoth organization overnight. Take a small group of innovators and set them loose.
2. Seriously examine the potential of data as a new marketing channel. This will be the strategic ground of the next wave of digital innovation.
3. Involve a broader community. Open innovation can be a powerful agent for change and a way to harness the energy and creativity of your best customers and partners.

"The most entrepreneurial time I've ever had has been serving in the U.S. government," remarked Park with infectious enthusiasm. "How can that be? Sounds really strange?"

Yes, it sounds a little strange. But mighty cool. And if people can make this happen in the Byzantine quagmire of the federal government, what excuse do the rest of us have?

Google brings agile to agencies with "Agile Creativity" vision

Hackathons. Prototyping. Beta testing.

Sounds like a typical day in Silicon Valley software, right? Not this time. This is the language of Madison Avenue in the 21st century. Or at least it will be, if Google's new Agile Creativity initiative takes root.

In collaboration with a number of agency visionaries, Google has produced a compelling half-manifesto/half-tipsheet with recommendations for how agencies can reinvent themselves as "agile" businesses.

It merges the DNA of Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue into some fascinating hybrid concepts. Instead of a "minimal viable product", there's a "minimum viable brief." Instead of "hackathons," there are "idea-thons." Beta testing becomes a way of implementing pilot projects with clients to pioneer new processes. Prototyping is now done in the context of campaigns — quickly launch new creatives into the market in a more experimental and iterative fashion.

At the heart of agile creativity, they place a strong emphasis on individual interactions and suggest ways that agencies can harness what they call "Collaboration 2.0." Physically (or virtually) co-locate team members for the duration of a project, in agile pods or "war rooms" that would seem at home on the set of The Social Network. Add technologists to the creative team (I couldn't agree more). Develop "T-shaped" talent — highly skilled in one area, while interested in and ready to collaborate on many other areas.

From a slight different angle, Google is championing agile marketing.

It's an inspiring read, interspersed with many great video interviews of agency thought leaders pursuing this concept. Here's the introductory video:

…which kicks off with great quotes such as:

MIles Nadal, Founder, Chairman and CEO, MDC Partners:
You need to be constantly reinventing. You need to challenge things. You need to try different ideas, different technologies, different creative approaches. Because the world is changing.

Greg Andersen, CEO, BBH New York:
We are entering an age where agile creativity is going to be a competitive advantage.

Matt Howell, Global Chief Digital Officer, Arnold:
That means learning from process models that relate to what advertising is becoming, which is an industry that is much more about technology.

Winston Binch, Partner and Chief Digital Officer, Deutsch LA:
We want to get our culture, our agencies, and everyone thinking more like agile developers. … The greatest successes for me have always come about from having small, small teams being free to move forward quickly.

Rei Inamoto, Chief Creative Officer, AKQA:
Instead of art and copy, it's art and code. When you combine these two mindsets that's when you get an idea that's relevant in the 21st century.

Click to view their site — great stuff.

10 key principles of agile marketing management

You've probably been hearing more about agile marketing lately. Over the past 6 months, there has been a blossoming Renaissance of discussions, writings, and events on the subject — a number of which I summed up in a recent Search England Land column, Have You Adopted Agile Marketing Yet?

In a nutshell, agile marketing adapts management methodologies from agile software development (and agile project management) and applies them to marketing teams. It's also influenced by related movements such as The Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries.

These techniques are gaining momentum in marketing circles because, in many ways, modern marketing increasingly has parallels with software development, IT projects, and entrepreneurial ventures — in many cases, some of the most important marketing projects these days are software development, IT projects, and entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) initiatives.

Yet at the same time, marketing has its own dynamics that make it different than those disciplines. So while marketing can borrow a lot from existing agile and lean methodologies, there's also a need to modify and extend those approaches into something uniquely suited to the modern marketing mission. A new age of marketing demands a new kind of marketing management.

The above sketch is my perspective on 10 key principles of agile marketing management to consider in the adoption of such an approach in your organization:

Agile Marketing Foundations

Two foundational principles upon which agile marketing is built.

1. Remarkable Experiences. Agile software development puts "working software" as its primary objective — everything else about the principles of agile development is pursued with that purpose in mind.

In marketing, the primary objective is remarkable customer experiences. Are the expectations of prospects, customers, and partners being met (or exceeded!) in the interactions we deliver online, in person, on the phone, over mobile devices, and directly through our products and services? This applies from early awareness building and demand generation efforts through to lifecycle customer service. Because in an age where all prospects and customers are connected through digital networks, everything is marketing.

This focus on customer experience touchpoints is one of the key reasons that marketing is becoming more strategic. Forrester calls it The Age of the Customer. Seth Godin calls it The Purple Cow.

The whole raison d'être of agile marketing is to better enable the delivery remarkable experiences to customers. All of the other principles below stem from this purpose. How can we change the way we manage marketing to be better at this?

2. Responding to Change. Agile management overall is based on the simple fact that projects, marketing, business, life, etc., are dynamic, not static. You make plans, but things change.

The best teams and organizations are able to respond quickly to such change and capitalize on it. It might be deftly handling a social media crisis, leveraging an unexpected opportunity in current events, or simply learning something about your customers or market that was different than you expected (or different than how it was yesterday).

You should still be driven by an overarching vision, mission, and strategy — which provides clarity in how you react to change — but your tactics are adaptive and responsive. It's the balanced blend of intended strategy and emergent strategy.

Agile Marketing Pillars

Four agile marketing principles that change the game of marketing management.

3. Individuals & Interactions. One of the original values of agile development is the belief that individuals and interactions are more important to success than processes and tools. Of course, processes and tools are valuable — but the contributions and interactions of people are where the real magic happens. Process and tools should enable and facilitate great interactions, not hinder them.

In the context of agile marketing, this has three interpretations:

1. Internal marketing operations should be managed in a way that facilitates better interactions between team members, giving them the ability to act and react with greater speed and creativity.
2. Collaboration between different marketing and business groups — e.g., corporate marketing, geo marketing, product managers, agencies, sales teams, IT, etc. — should be more open and fluid. Organizational structure can't be an excuse for failing to deliver remarkable experiences.
3. Interactions with individual customers matter. A lot. Thanks to social media, any customer can be a champion or a holy terror. Again, process and technology should enhance — not detract — from individual interactions. This is a huge change in the dynamics of business and marketing, and this new value needs to be deeply absorbed into the DNA of modern marketing.

Getting the balance right between process/technology and individuals/interactions is particularly important with the flood of marketing technologies multiplying in marketing's ecosystem.

4. Testing & Data. Data is the "star stuff" of modern marketing. It is the digital body language of our audience. We use it to analyze performance (analytics), to uncover new opportunities (data mining), and to dynamically tailor customer experiences (personalization). It's both the input and output to marketing processes.

Testing has become the quintessential data-driven marketing process: running controlled experiments to determine what resonates best with prospects and customers. A/B testing and multivariate testing are now frequently applied in advertising, email marketing, landing pages, web applications, pricing and bundling, etc. Marketing's new operational mantra is test, test, test.

Agile marketing uses data for the objective metrics by which to measure the efficacy of marketing activities. It uses testing to engage in continuous improvement. What's important to us and how do we know if we're doing better or worse? It makes testing and data an integral part of marketing's culture.

IMPORTANT: Marketing as a science does not mean marketing is suddenly all left-brain. Real science is a creative endeavor! Data exploration inspires creativity through the discovery of interesting customer patterns. Testing gives us the confidence to try more bold and creative ideas, quickly and with low risk.

5. Numerous Small Experiments. In old school marketing, companies were often forced to make a small number of big bets because the vehicles for reaching customers were primarily "mass media" in nature and had long lead times and high costs to produce. The new digital environment is largely free from those constraints though — it's feasible to execute very targeted marketing very quickly.

Leveraging the value of testing and data, agile marketing therefore seeks to run numerous small experiments — trying many more ideas at a much higher velocity. As Linus Pauling famously said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." In 2009, Google ran approximately 12,000 experiments, with only about 10 percent of them leading to business changes. But 1,200 proven-to-be-good improvements is impressive. By quickly trying lots of ideas, in a small and controlled fashion, scaling the ones that succeed and jettisoning the ones that don't, marketing can greatly increase the number of brilliant ideas it "discovers" and deploys.

There is still opportunity for big bets — but now they can be informed by a lot more empirical evidence from pilot experiments that provide "proof of concept."

6. Customer Collaboration. In agile software development, it's considered far better to collaborate directly with customers in building a product — iteratively working through designs, prototypes, implementations together — than to get too hung up on specs and contract negotiation at the very start of a project.

The agile marketing interpretation of customer collaboration retains the spirit of working with customers, not merely trying to sell something to them from an abstract market plan. Agile marketing collaborates with customer by:

• Tuning into the voice of the customer, both implicitly from data and testing and explicitly by listening to what they say through feedback channels and social media.
• Engaging with, supporting, and amplifying our best customers who become our champions, advocates, and influencers in the social media sphere.
• Bringing customers into the loop of product/service development — tapping into user-generated innovation — to shape market offerings higher upstream in the organization.

Agile Marketing Essentials

Four essential elements that make agile marketing actually work.

7. Transparency. Agile management methodologies of all flavors — agile marketing included — emphasize a culture of transparency. The individual tasks that people are working on are out in the open, as is their daily progress, and ultimately the metrics by which those investments of time and energy are measured. This openness helps remove impediments, reduce bureaucratic drag, and promote direct collaboration across the team. However, this is probably the single biggest cultural challenge for organizations to address. But it's what makes everything else in agile marketing possible.

8. Rapid Iterations. In software development, the agile mantra is: "ship early, ship often." The marketing equivalent is similar. To take advantage of data, testing, and numerous small experiments, it's important to produce marketing concepts quickly — and where possible, get them out into the real world. You can then iteratively improve them based upon feedback. A popular agile mechanism is the sprint, 1-4 weeks during which the team produces work and then pauses to evaluate and dynamically re-prioritize the next set of iterations. Short sprints rev up the cycle speed of marketing.

9. Feedback Loops. Agile marketing isn't just about producing a lot of things quickly. It's about listening to direct and indirect sources of feedback to learn how tests and initiatives are performing, and then using rapid iterations to adjust and improve accordingly.

Every project that marketing engages in should have some sort of feedback metric — quantitative or qualitative — to provide a benchmark by which the team can evaluate iterative improvements. The tighter these feedback loops are, the better.

10. Break Out of Silos! Over the years, marketing organizations have fractured into many different silos to deal with the explosion of customer touchpoints, audience segments, and new marketing tactics. In digital marketing alone, there are often separate teams for search marketing, social media marketing, the web site, email marketing, display advertising, etc. However, customer experiences naturally span these boundaries — and to make them remarkable, these previously independent teams need to coordinate and collaborate at a whole new level. Agile marketing methodologies encourage cross-silo teams to come together on projects quickly and easily and to dynamically reconfigure as needed from cycle to cycle.

For many organizations, adopting these principles will mean adjustments in culture as much as the implementation of specific management techniques. However, in our rapidly changing marketing environment, it's not hard to see that the single most valuable marketing capability today is agility.

A new age of marketing demands a new kind of marketing management.

Interested in agile marketing? Read this interview

The agile marketing movement is underway, and right in the front lines of the charge is an agile champion named Jim Ewel.

Jim publishes the Agile Marketing.Net blog. He helped organize SprintZero, the first public gathering of agile marketers. He coaches companies on how to implement agile marketing through his consulting practice, Peel the Layers. He's organized the Seattle Agile Marketing meet-up. And I'm just scratching the surface.

He's on a mission "to evangelize agile marketing and to help marketers become better practitioners of agile marketing." And given all the great content produced and community building he's engaged in, the mission seems to be going splendidly.

I had the chance to ask Jim six questions about his views on agile marketing. Whether you're new to agile marketing or one of the pioneers of it yourself, I think you'll find his answers enlightening and insightful.

You've become one of the leading advocates for agile marketing. How did you find this calling?

I more or less wandered into it based on a number of experiences in my career. I started out on the technology side, as a developer in the early 80's. I wrote systems on mainframes, and I saw firsthand the limitations of the waterfall method. I remember one project in particular. We followed all of the then "best practices": creating thick systems analysis, system design and coding specifications documents, as well as final documentation. From start to finish, it took almost 2.5 years, and by the time we finished, the business had changed dramatically.

Later, when I came across Agile Development methodologies, they made sense to me, and even later, when I saw articles from people like you (Ideas for an agile marketing manifesto) and Neil Perkins of Only Dead Fish talking about applying Agile methods to marketing, it just clicked.

It's interesting that you started your career in software development and then moved into marketing. We're seeing more of those transitions these days. How do you think that influenced your thinking and approach to marketing?

I think one of the most important things I learned in high school and college was a deep understanding of the scientific method. Later, when I transitioned to marketing, it was natural to apply some of the same rigor to my marketing approach, particularly after the Internet made it much easier to measure the impact of even small changes to a landing page, an email template, or some other marketing vehicle.

I'm also a big fan of Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, and his Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. That's influenced my approach to marketing, and my thinking about Agile Marketing.

Earlier this year you helped organized SprintZero, the first real event to bring agile marketers together. What was one of the most interesting aspects of that gathering to you?

I found two aspects of the gathering tremendously interesting. One was the diversity of the audience. In terms of geography, we had people from all over the United States, West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, South. In terms of experience, we had attendees ranging from complete neophytes, who had heard the term Agile Marketing and wanted to learn more, to Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, who has been practicing Agile Marketing for 6-7 years across three different organizations. And in terms of work background, we had people from agencies, traditional in-house marketing departments and e-commerce marketers. Each of these brought a different perspective to the day.

The second aspect I found interesting was the immediate acceptance of the need for Agile Marketing — perhaps this won't be true of the wider audience, but not a single person questioned the need for something dramatically different in the way we do marketing.

Agile marketing is borrowing heavily from agile software development methods such as Scrum and Kanban. How much do you think those methodologies need to be modified — if at all — to thrive in the context of marketing?

Scott, it's a great question, and I think the full answer will come in time as we apply these methods to marketing. But here are some initial thoughts.

Agile has a very specific format for user stories (As a [role], I want to [task], so that I can [goal or benefit] with acceptance criteria). Marketing can to some extent adopt this format, but marketing user stories are different. They are generally at a higher level, they focus on outcomes rather than functionality, and they don't have acceptance criteria, but perhaps success criteria. I wrote a couple blog posts about these differences.

Second, I think the role of the product owner will either not exist (because we'll ask real customers) or it will be dramatically modified.

Third, I think Agile Marketing will focus more on optimizing the whole, the entire value stream delivered to the customer, whereas much of Agile Development decomposes a problem into it's constituent parts. I'm not quite sure how, but the methodologies may need to be modified to recognize this difference.

If a CMO reads about agile marketing, thinks it sounds great, and wants to implement it in his or her organization, what would be your advice for getting started?

Start small, with a group of 4-7 marketers, and make sure that everyone understands agile marketing and is excited about trying out agile as a methodology. Also make sure that everyone is trained in the basics, and comfortable using the tools.

Get a success under your belt, and then build on it. Have realistic expectations. Some people hear agile, and they think speed — that magically, in the first iteration, marketers are going to get twice as much done in a given period of time. That's unlikely to happen your first time out — whenever you learn something new, it can be awkward at first. I'd focus on the quality of the results, and the learnings, more than the speed.

Again, I've written about Getting Started with Agile Marketing, and I also coach organizations through the process.

What do you think the greatest resistance to adopting agile marketing will be? How can organizations overcome it?

Companies will say: "that's not for us. We're too big or we're too small. That's for tech companies, and we're not tech. That's for agencies and we're in-house, or vice versa. That will be the initial resistance, and it's simply not true. Unless you're living in a world where nothing ever changes, and there has been no impact to your business from the Internet, mobile, social media, or globalization, you can benefit from Agile Marketing.

Second, companies will implement small pieces of Agile Marketing, not see the benefits, and write it off. For example, a company will implement 15-minute standup meetings three times a week for a few weeks, and when that alone doesn't transform their marketing, they'll write off Agile Marketing. That doesn't work for us. Well, there's a lot more to Agile Marketing than the daily Scrum. If you're not taking an iterative approach, engaging in validated learning, focusing on the customer and responding to change, you'll probably not see the results.

Organizations can overcome the "it's not for us" issue by trying out a skunkworks project. Start small, build on success, and let it spread in a grassroots fashion, organically, rather than top-down. And of course, organizations can avoid the second problem by taking a holistic approach to Agile Marketing, and implementing all the pieces.

Everything is marketing, everyone must be agile

Momentarily, I'll be delivering the closing keynote at Agile Day hosted by Valtech in Paris, talking about customer experience, agile marketing, and marketing technology — and how they're all entwined into the new competitive landscape of business. (Agile. Marketing technology. And Paris. I may have found paradise.)

Here is the slide deck from my presentation:

Everything Is Marketing, Everyone Must Be Agile

And here's an essay version of my talk:

Agile Day 2012 Closing Keynote

Gartner recently predicted that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. As you might imagine, the reaction from many people in IT to that claim is, "What?!" Funny enough, the reaction from many people in marketing is the same: "What?!" It sounds like a prediction that the world we know will be completely turned upside down in 5 years. Can we believe that?

But the truth is, we're seeing this happen already. At the Forrester CIO-CMO summit last year, I was in session where one CMO burst out in frustration, "I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms — I'm up to my eyeballs in technology."

Now, you might be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with agile?"

This convergence of marketing and technology is not a phenomenon of its own, so much as it is a symptom of our always-on, globally interconnected digital world. This new digital world didn't happen overnight. It's been the progress of the evolving Internet for the past 20 years. But it's reached a tipping point where "online" no longer fits into a discrete box separate from our lives and our businesses. It's now infused into the very bedrock of our lives and our businesses.

I believe this leads to two transformational mandates that every organization must face:

1. Everything is marketing.
2. Everyone must be agile.

These two mandates are intertwined. One begets the other in our interconnected world.

Let me clarify that by "agile," I do mean little-a agile. Organizations and individuals must act and react with ever greater speed. We must be more prepared to adapt more quickly than ever before. That's what I mean by everyone must be agile. But Big-A Agile methodologies help us achieve such agility, and to effectively scale agility, there must be method to the madness.

(Of course, we may need to adjust formal agile methodologies to work in new and different contexts. But we'll get to that shortly.)

First, I want to convince you that essentially everything an organization does today impacts their marketing. And by "marketing," I do mean little-m marketing. I'm not just talking about the Big-M Marketing Department.

I mean marketing the way that Peter Drucker meant it, when he famously said, "Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." Because the purpose of business is to create something of value — that's innovation — and then to share it with the world and inspire customers to buy it — that's marketing.

But let's step back for a moment and look at how marketing has been conducted. Procter & Gamble, which is arguably one of the world's best marketing companies, described a model of marketing that worked like this. Consumers became aware of a brand through some sort of stimulus, typically advertising. Hopefully multiple times, i.e., frequency. After absorbing these crafted stimuli for some time, consumers eventually found themselves at the store where they faced a choice: out of all the different brands on the shelf for a particular type of product, which one would they choose?

Procter & Gamble's CEO A.G. Lafley called this "the first moment of truth" (FMOT). Does the consumer choose you, or a competitor? That's when you find out just how effective your advertising was.

But that's only the battle for the first purchase. When the customer gets the product home and actually uses it, that's the second moment of truth (SMOT): do they like it? The first moment of truth wins or loses first-time buyers; the second moment of truth wins or loses repeat customers. However, it's interesting to note that in this model that different consumers were largely isolated from each other, except for immediate word-of-mouth of friends and family or business colleagues.

There's also something else we can observe about this approach to marketing. It's highly structured. Major advertising campaigns, as well as other kinds of marketing initiatives, followed a staged process. First, campaigns would be researched and planned. Then a creative team would produce the ads. Then the media buyers would place them. Then after all that, ratings, surveys, and correlated sales could be used to measure — albeit, often in a fuzzy fashion — how effective the whole thing was. This cycle would typically take months from beginning to end.

To practitioners of agile management though, this shape looks quite familiar: it's the waterfall. And as with software and other projects following a waterfall management pattern, it suffers from inflexibility and a lack of good mechanisms for adapting to mid-stream feedback.

But what possible mid-stream feedback could there be in marketing?

Welcome to the new model of marketing, which is dominated by something Google has coined the zero moment of truth (ZMOT). The zero moment of truth has inserted itself before the first moment of truth. Now, when a consumer is exposed to a stimulus that piques their interest, they go online and check it out. They visit your web site, they read reviews, they check out your competitors, they Google, they check in with social networks on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. A prospective customer can pretty much get all the information about you, good and bad, anytime they want.

There are some pretty amazing — or, as some might say, terrifying — things happening here:

• The customer is in control of their ZMOT experience
• You won't even know all of the different sources they use
• They can jump from one source to another at the speed of a click
• The far majority of content in the ZMOT is not produced by you
• Often the majority of ZMOT content comes from other customers
• The ZMOT can clinch or sabotage the FMOT before the prospect ever enters the store
• The environment of the ZMOT is constantly in flux, changing every minute

And if a prospect makes it through the ZMOT and the FMOT and actually becomes a customer, then you've got a lot more riding on their second moment of truth than just their repeat business now. Because they can instantly contribute to other prospective customers' ZMOTs. (Respect well the mommy blogger!)

Forrester has visualized this new state of marketing as iterative circles of cross-touchpoint customer experiences. Prospects discover your product or category, they search, research, compare. They may do this on your web site, the open web, using mobile devices, stopping in at a physical store, calling your call center, tapping social networks — or any combination of those channels. Upon purchase, they then use the product, seek help, share their experience with others — again intermingling among these different channels. As they become loyal, repeat customers, they may even start to evangelize and promote your brand for you.

To an agile practitioner, if you squint your eyes, this highly interactive and iterative process almost looks a little like something we know: the iterative loops of agile sprints, building momentum one step at a time in an open and collaborative fashion.

I want to interject: although the above examples are drawn from consumer marketing, these same phenomena are happening in B2B marketing as well. As Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP, recently said at a conference, "Big, large, glass buildings do not buy software. People do." Every business buyer and influencer can tap into the ZMOT too. (See Godin's hierarchy of business-to-business needs.)

In short, our customers are now agile. Little-a agile, but nimble and adaptive in the digital world. And that's a problem for a lot of organizations because the traditional model of marketing is not.

This collision of fast-moving customers and slow-moving marketing management has been the subject of many popular books over the past couple of years, advocating for change. One of my favorites is Real-Time Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott. At least at a tactical level, it's starting to sink in. We're seeing more and more companies proactively embrace social media as a two-way conduit with their customers, such as with Dell's Social Media Listening Command Center.

But rather than focus on social media tactics, I'd like to look at this transformation through a different lens. When you think about the ZMOT, the iterative circles of cross-channel customer experiences, and the emerging concepts of social business, we can characterize its essence this way:

• Individuals and interactions — every touchpoint is an opportunity to shine or to fumble
• Responding to change — our marketing tactics must adapt to real-time feedback and opportunities
• Customer collaboration — our best customers can be our evangelists and partners in development
• Working "experiences" — consistently meeting customer expectations matters more than ever

This overlays almost perfectly with the pillars of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. This is surprising — until you think about it and realize that many of the same dynamics that inspired that manifesto in software are now present in the new world of marketing.

This new kind of marketing is about more than advertising, PR, communications, etc. It's about end-to-end customer experiences in an agile world. It's more strategic than tactical. And it's why everything that impacts that end-to-end customer experience is now a part of little-m marketing.

As Seth Godin says — and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard before him: "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department."

In fact, to achieve this agility with customer experiences, we need to embrace agile principles more broadly throughout the entire organization. The dynamics of interconnectivity in the digital domain have the power to transform management practices inside a company as well, as Charlene Li's groundbreaking book on Open Leadership describes. This is why consumerization of IT is thriving. Employees are harnessing their devices, their social networks, their software tools of choice to achieve success.

While this certainly presents challenges for the IT department, the potential benefits are immense. Digitally empowered employees are more connected to their organizations, more involved, and better able to contribute and collaborate. This new kind of engaged enterprise inspires:

• More participation
• More responsiveness
• More independence
• More transparency

All powerful values in our new world — and by no small coincidence, the very spirit of agile methodologies.

Let's examine the enabling technology behind this more closely. In this new environment, technology is more than infrastructure — it is business capabilities.

For example, let's consider the technologies that are changing the marketing department. There's kind of a perfect storm of factors inspiring new marketing technology today. The shift of billions of dollars in marketing spend. Cloud computing and open source platforms making software development easier and cheaper. The trackable nature of digital marketing to justify ROI. The greenfield opportunity that disruptive innovation presents.

All of these factors have combined to inspire an explosion in marketing technology products — hundreds, thousands of solutions across dozens of categories, from start-ups and giant enterprises alike. Social media management. Search engine optimization. Bid management. Web analytics. Landing page optimization. Marketing automation. Email marketing.

We're basking in a Golden Age of Marketing Software.

Marketers never had so much technological power laid before their feet. But it's important to realize that this software is more than just a collection of tools. To a very real degree, software is marketing's eyes, ears, and hands in the digital world:

• Our choice of analytics software will shape our perceptions of our customers
• Our choice of automation software will guide the digital processes we define
• Our choice of optimization software will teach us different marketing tactics
• Our choice of CRM software will structure our view of customer relationships

Most of all, software will determine the kinds of customer experiences we are able to provide.

Interestingly, if you look at the configuration of marketing software used to deliver these customer experiences, it looks a lot like programming. If the customer does this, then do that, unless this is a repeat customer, in which case do this other thing. It's programming marketing.

This brings us to agile from the other direction, because programming projects are where agile was born and raised.

We can now step back and recognize three waves of agile transformation in marketing. The first wave, the foundation, was the proliferation of the digital channels that are inherently agile. The second wave is this blossoming of new marketing technology that has the potential to scale agile marketing execution in that environment. But the third wave, on which this all hinges, is the ability for organizations to manage this new marketing agilely.

And, remember this isn't just the marketing department. This disruptive innovation spans sales, operations, customer service, HR. And ultimately all of these departments, directly or indirectly, contribute to the customer experience. This is why everyone in the organization must become agile.

How might agile practices evolve in these new contexts?

Well, looking at the original manifesto for agile software development, it's clear that we need to adapt a few things — hey, that's what agile is all about. For instance, "working software" isn't necessarily the primary goal in other enterprise functions.

So to conclude this Agile Day, I'd like to stir your imagination with what an agile marketing manifesto might look like. A couple of the values from the original manifesto clearly port into marketing verbatim:

• Individuals and actions over processes and tools.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

As they say, there is value in the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more. Building on those two pillars, I'd propose three more values specifically for agile marketing:

• Remarkable customer experiences over rigid customer management.

Although there is value for optimizing customer management processes for efficiency — policies and procedures for handling common customer situations — there is more value in delivering remarkable customer experiences. (And I mean remarkably good, not remarkably bad!) Agile marketing is concerned with the experience of individual customers and is ready to dynamically adapt the rules accordingly. Policies are not excuses in the eyes of the customer.

The iterative loops of cross-touchpoint customer experiences — which leverage and contribute to the crucial ZMOT — are modern marketing's most important responsibility. So let's raise it as a core value. If something is hindering, not helping, achieve remarkable customer experiences, let's be fearless in fixing it — for that customer and for others.

• Testing and data over opinions and conventions.

Marketing has a colorful legacy of being driven by strong gut-level opinions and belief systems that harden into institutional conventions. There is some value in that legacy, of visionary insights and organizational traditions, but marketing technology has given us a far better option for many marketing initiatives.

We can test — A/B testing and multivariate testing — and we can measure. For instance, instead of debating whether a male or female model will work best on a landing page, we can try both in an A/B test, and see which works best. Tests can be as tiny as such a choice of imagery on a web page or as big as pricing models and messaging around your core value proposition.

Using data to drive customer insights and test hypotheses for customer experiences is what web analytics 2.0 is all about. It's not about reports or pretty charts. It's about using data as the voice of the customer. I highly recommend Avinash Kaushik's book — if for no other reason, it will teach you how to handle the dangerous HiPPO (the highest paid person's opinion) in a productive fashion.

• Numerous small experiments over a few large bets.

In the old world of marketing, we were often forced to make big bets on those gut instincts. Commit millions of dollars to an advertising campaign before it airs even once. While there is still value in some big bets, a much more valuable marketing capability is the ability to engage in many small experiments, rapidly and iteratively. Testing and data enables this, but we must develop a propensity for experimentation in order to scale that value.

As the Nobel prize-winning scientist Linus Pauling once quipped, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." Try lots of small experiments, quickly throw out the ones that fail, quickly scale up the ones that succeed. And when you have an incredibly successful outlier, scale that as a big bet.

From these core values, we can — and should — certainly extrapolate a broader set of agile marketing principles, along the lines of the Declaration of Interdependence from Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith for agile project management. For now, we'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Of course, given those values and principles, we still must forge the methodologies for implementing agile marketing in our organizations — the actual real work of making this happen. As with agile software development, there will no doubt be more than one agile methodology that works. We can take inspiration from Scrum and Lean. The right one for you will depend a lot on your company, your culture, and your customers.

But one place to start is to check out Valtech's new white paper on Agile Marketing.

In closing, I'd like to leave you with one more quote from Jonathan Becher. "The first thing you should do is think about culture — because culture eats strategy for lunch (and breakfast, and dinner).

Agile is, more than anything, a cultural shift. We've seen the incredible impact it's had on modern software development over the past 10 years. Now it's time to take that revolution to the broader enterprise. Agile needs champions to bring these values, principles, and methodologies beyond the project and into the fundamental fabric of the business. Will you be that champion?

Because now everything is marketing, and everyone must be agile.

The single most valuable marketing capability today

The following is a foreword I wrote for a new Agile Marketing white paper produced by Valtech.

We're privileged to live in the most exciting time in the history of marketing.

While every profession has been impacted by the explosion of ubiquitous computing and connectivity in the digital age, the impact on marketing has undoubtedly been the most profound. As the world has moved online, the distance between companies and customers has collapsed to zero. Google calls it the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), and it changes everything.

Previously, high costs and slow lead times were the price marketers paid to cross the physical chasm to their audience — and that bridge only went in one direction. Marketing management and infrastructure were built around those constraints.

But today, information and interactions freely flow both ways. Costs and lead times for many marketing activities, at least as dictated by external constraints, have shrunk. A large advertising budget is no longer the centerpiece of marketing. Instead, customer intimacy has become the new crown jewel. It encompasses the entire firm, and it's elevated marketing to the vanguard of business leadership.

I propose to you that, in this new era, the most valuable marketing capability is agility.

Consider three waves of agile transformation in marketing:

The first wave was driven by the proliferation of digital channels themselves. How long does it take for your prospects to open an email, query a search engine, jump to a web site, or engage with social media? As fast as they can click. And they can effortlessly move across the breadth of the global Internet as interest and inspiration strikes. They're fluidly agile in the digital space.

Symmetrically, how long does it take you to update your web site, send an email, launch a keyword ad on Google, or share new content on Facebook or Twitter? The actual moment of publishing — and its delivery to your audience — is also done at the speed of a click. We've come to take this for granted, but it is an amazing shift in the nature of communication.

But the very fluidity of digital channels quickly became marketing's bane as well as its boon. As the number of vehicles and individually addressable audience segments multiplied, the sheer magnitude of deploying all these digital messages — and servicing the resulting interactions with prospects and partners — outstripped the ability for marketers to implement them all by hand.

Thankfully, the second wave of agile transformation is now arriving: a massive new generation of marketing technology platforms that provide software-based levers to manage this load at scale. Marketing analytics, marketing automation, marketing optimization — these tools thrive on the dynamics of the digital domain. They empower marketers to target and personalize thousands of micro-marketing interactions across all these channels.

Or, it might be more accurate to say that they technically enable such Long Tail marketing.

For many marketers, something else is becoming the gating factor in their performance. It's this bottleneck that is the focus of the third wave of agile transformation: making the marketing organization itself truly agile.

Up to this point, digital was largely squeezed into marketing management and governance structures that predated it by decades. But now we're reaching an inflection point where digital is our new foundation, not our window dressing. To harness the agility of digital channels and technologies, we must now adapt our organizations to operate at this new speed.

Agile marketing methodologies — by no coincidence, adapted from agile development methodologies that revolutionized modern software — promote a better way of managing marketing in this dynamic environment. They let us act and react at the speed of digital. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," to appropriate Muhammad Ali's famous words. It's an approach that can make even the largest marketing departments nimble.

This paper by Valtech connects the dots between these three waves of agile transformation. It illuminates the possibilities and sketches a roadmap for moving forward. I hope it inspires you — for there has truly never been a better time to be an inspired marketing leader.

Click here to download the complete white paper (free registration required).

Engineers are becoming a lot like marketers too

I spend a lot of time thinking about how engineering culture and capabilities are seeping into marketing's ecosystem. Marketers are becoming more tech-savvy by the day, which is a fascinating transformation to behold.

But it struck me recently how much the inverse is happening too: many of the signature characteristics of marketing have now become a part of engineering culture. Engineers are becoming quite marketing-savvy in their trade. This isn't about engineers working in marketing (although that's what marketing technologists do). It's about engineers natively applying marketing principles in their own endeavors.

No offense is intended to engineers by this remark! I know the old-school clichés — engineers considered most marketing to be fluff and spin. In days past, that was sometimes a fair indictment too.

But new-school marketing is different. Content marketing, social media marketing, and customer experience marketing are intently focused on delivering real value to prospects and customers. New-school marketers probably have as much derision for fluff and spin as any cynical system administrator caricature ever did.

New-school engineering is different than its predecessor too. The old-school clichés of engineers as poor communicators, sequestered in back rooms, disconnected from the business and customers, are now laughable. Some might argue that we're suffering from the polar opposite of that archetype — CNN just ran an article bemoaning the rise of "brogrammer" culture. But even without that extreme, it's not hard to see that software engineering has shifted to a highly collaborative, customer-centric profession that has become quite adept at outward communications, promotion, and business strategy.

I believe that three forces have driven this transformation:

1. Open source software communities
2. Agile software development
3. Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur

There are a lot of lessons that marketers can learn from these dynamics, so let's look at each.

Open source software communities as marketing organizations

Open source software has been tremendously successful: Linux as an operating system, MySQL as a database, Apache as a web server, and thousands and thousands of other great products and platforms. This success is certainly built on technical accomplishments — an extremely discerning kind of peer-reviewed ecosystem.

But open source success is also due to engineer-driven marketing. Open source projects exist in the marketplace of ideas, competing with each other for the precious commodities that marketers have always competed for — attention and adoption — and, even more ambitiously, participating contributors. The classic book The Cathedral & The Bazaar describes a number of the technical and marketing aspects of that competition from several early successful open source projects.

But since that book was written more than 10 years ago, the "marketing" aspects of open source seem to have only grown in popularity and sophistication — making them an integral part of engineering culture. Consider the following:

• Web sites for open source projects are increasingly well-designed and rich in content. Often this content includes social proof of well-known brands that have adopted the software and case studies of their implementations. They feature screencasts, presentations, and ebooks — deep, genuine materials that any content marketer would rightly envy.
• Great engineers and open source project advocates also use blogs prolifically to share ideas, persuade others to their point of view, and disseminate learning and knowledge related to their projects. The writing on many of these blogs is passionate and compelling, and in a very real sense helps build the brands of those individuals and their respective open source communities.
• Engineers engage in a highly effective kind of social media marketing through sites such as Stack Overflow, a Q&A site focused on technical topics. Projects and people earn credibility through the quality and quantity of answers to questions. A popular "tag" in Stack Overflow is a good sign of a thriving open source project. This is promotion through helping real customers with real solutions — fluff and spin are not tolerated — and it's impressively responsive.
• Personality has become a significant force in the promotion of many open source projects, where humor and wit combine with well-defined platform philosophies and "opinionated" software architecture. Exhibit A: the Ruby on Rails community and it's colorful founder David Heinemeier Hansson. These are brands that thrive on more than just their technical merits.
• Such open engagement in winning an audience is not restricted to online forums — engineers speak regularly at conferences, unconferences, meet-ups, workshops, hack-a-thons, and more. They invented many of these new event formats! From a marketing perspective, such events have been incredibly successful at building momentum for open source projects and communities. The quality of the presentations are often superb too, featured on SlideShare, and would make Garr Reynolds proud.
• Open source projects nurture loose and formal co-marketing relationships with each other. There are ecosystems of smaller developments that orbit larger open source platforms, such as the gems and plugins for Rails. There are also alliances of larger platforms that work well together, such as the popular LAMP stack bundle for web applications. Open source projects are often masterful at using APIs and data as a new kind of marketing to drive adoption.

There are more examples, but you get the point: open source software initiatives have become thriving ventures championed by engineer-led marketing. And for most engineers, since such marketing is genuine — developing meaningful connections with their audience — it's valued and respected. Say so long to the stereotypes of the last century.

Agile software development as a driver of engineering-marketing culture

Software development in the old days — like marketing in the old days — operated on long schedules of months or years, with the planning stage often separated from the implementation and delivery stages by huge gulfs of time. The process often isolated engineers from customer and market feedback along the way. And it all too frequently resulted in outcomes that made everyone unhappy. ("This isn't what I want!" "It's what you said you wanted 18 months ago!")

Seeking a better way, a group of pioneering engineers got together and penned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The first principle: our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery.

Agile software development methodologies put the customer at the center of the development process, emphasize continuous interaction between engineers and customers (or their internal proxies), and take a more iterative approach to implementing large projects to have faster feedback loops and quick adaptation to change.

Agile has been widely embraced over the past decade, and its adoption has fostered principles of customer-centricity deep in engineering culture:

• Understanding what the customer truly wants and values is given top priority in the development process. Developers and customers (or product owners on their behalf) meet daily to evolve the product vision together. The iterative design and implementation process lets the best solution emerge organically from showing, discussing, and revising features.
• Faster speed to market and quicker responses to opportunities/threats are enabled by the rapid iteration of agile development. The capability to react quickly — and through that be more competitive in the market — is a badge of honor for agile practitioners. "Release early and release often."
• Usability and user experience (UX) design are now a core part of development. The customer-centric design process has caused engineers to appreciate and value good UX and strive to incorporate that into products from conception — not merely sprinkled on at the end. Non-designers eagerly seek the participation of designers or find other ways to leverage their contributions (see Twitter Bootstrap as an example of an open source design framework).
• A commitment to consistent quality as a key feature through continuous integration and test-driven development tactics. These "baked in" approaches to quality provide the flexibility to release software more quickly and fulfill customer expectations more reliably.
• Metrics are used to quantitatively measure improvement. Data on how customers use products is treasured, both to uncover new opportunities for improvement and to gauge the success of new changes released. This is often business data as much as it is technical data, under a mantra of "you optimize what you measure." A/B testing is now commonly applied in many web software applications, encouraging agile teams to achieve the best user experiences through real-world experiments.

When it comes to product management in an agile organization, the perspectives of engineering and marketing blend together harmoniously into a hybrid engineering-marketing culture. What's considered great engineering is also what's considered great marketing. That's an amazing achievement when you think about it.

Frankly, many marketing teams could actually improve their own customer-centricity in other aspects of their work by modeling themselves on the success of agile engineering teams — in fact, that's exactly what agile marketing is all about.

Celebration of the engineer-entrepreneur

Computer scientist Alan Kay famously remarked, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

While there have long been famous examples of engineers who became entrepreneurs — Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard and Bill Gates of Microsoft leap to mind — the correlation of those two callings has grown substantially in the Internet age. Consider some of the hottest Internet companies, all founded by software engineers:

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin who created Google
• Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook
• Jack Dorsey who created Twitter and then Square

There are literally thousands of examples of engineer-entrepreneurs from the past ten years. Most recently in the news, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger who created Instagram, which Facebook just purchased for $1 billion. But even on a more modest scale, consider the hundreds of thousands of offerings in Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPad.

Part of the explosion of engineer-entrepreneurs is due to the structural changes in the software industry. It has never been easier or cheaper to build great software products — leveraging open source foundations and scalable cloud computing infrastructure — to launch a new idea. And, thanks to the reach and network dynamics of digital marketing, it's never been easier or cheaper to promote and distribute those products worldwide.

These have enabled the explosion of engineering-driven entrepreneurship, but there's something else that's helped motivate it.

Over the past 10 years, it has become cool in engineering circles to be an entrepreneur. Building something technically impressive still earns respect. But building something that is commercially successful also earns respect — even if its technical merits are minimal. It's not just about the money either. It's about the pride of making something that other people want and architecting ways to grow and sustain a business around them.

Engineer-entrepreneurs are celebrated among their peers and by the world at large, and it's fundamentally changed engineering culture.

Even engineers who aren't full-time entrepreneurs increasingly have small ventures on the side: a Web.20 application, an iPhone or iPad app, a project on Kickstarter, etc. This instinct to tinker with new ideas to open up business opportunities has become so powerful within engineering culture that even large companies are seeking to tap into it for intrapreneurship, such as Google's 20% time.

The result: engineers increasingly think about the marketing and business dynamics at play with their products, entwining those facets of a successful product with their technical design and implementation. The concept of growth hackers arises from this interplay of marketing and technology.

If you consider all the above factors together, it's easy to see that new-school engineers have both tech savvy and marketing savvy.

And that blurs the line with new-school marketers — who are increasingly adding tech savviness to their marketing skills.

The new school is a convergence of marketing and engineering. And that's pretty cool.

Champions of agile marketing

If I could pick one word to define the future of marketing, it would be agility.

All the shifts in technology, media, channels, connections, and culture we're experiencing have combined to accelerate the clockspeed of marketing.

How rapidly can new ideas be tested? How quickly can successes be scaled? How swiftly can failures be caught and re-imagined? How close to instantaneous can reaction time be when opportunities or threats arise in the viral, global fabric of social media? How deftly can a campaign, a program, a product, or an entire company pivot?

These are the questions that every marketer must ask. The answers measure agility.

While technology can help, achieving agility ultimately requires adjustments in the "operating system" of marketing management to better encourage, enable, and harness networked speed. Organizations must adapt their structures, processes, and incentives to execute at this new operational tempo.

To make this transition, marketers should look beyond lowercase-a agile — an admirable adjective — to uppercase-a Agile, a noun that defines a management methodology. Based on the agile software development, an Agile Marketing Methodology is emerging to give marketers a systematic way of running at high-speed without chaos. (Back in March, I posted some ideas for an Agile Marketing Manifesto to capture the spirit of this movement.)

Of course, as a new methodology, there's precious few examples of Agile Marketing in the wild. IDC's CMO Advisory Service produced an Agile Marketing Principles and Practices report earlier this year that did a great job of introducing the concept (along with a great accompanying blog post by one of the authors). Their report also included three vignettes of early adopters of Agile Marketing at Novell, HubSpot, and Webtrends.

One of those early adopters was Frank Days, Director of New and Social Media at Novell, who also runs the Marketing Agility blog with some terrific reflections on his experience in championing the blossoming discipline of Agile Marketing.

Now, in collaboration with John Cass of Pace Communications (and author of the excellent PR Communications blog), Frank has launched a new Marketing Agility podcast series. The first four episodes have been posted. The first two are John and Frank introducing themselves and the concepts of agile marketing. The third includes an interview with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, who was the VP of marketing leading Agile adoption at Webtrends in the IDC report mentioned above.

The fourth episode is an interview with yours truly, covering topics such as the impact of agile marketing in conversion optimization and the importance of having embedded marketing technologists in the loop.

The Marketing Agility podcast is off to a great start, and it promises to be a good source of real-world discussions around the adoption and evolution of Agile Marketing. If you're one of those marketers asking questions that begin with "how quickly can we...?", then this podcast is for you.