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Epics vs Themes
There seems to be some confusion in the Agile world about the difference between Epics and Themes. At the Agile101 blog, Tara Hamilton-Whitaker, a certified scrum master, admits "People often (myself included!) get confused about the difference between Agile Themes, Epics and User Stories." She then goes on to define them, and a healthy discussion ensues, with someone pointing out that ...
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User Stories in Agile Marketing Part 2
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled "User Stories in Agile Marketing". I intended to write a follow on post the next week, but travel and work and a few other blog posts came in between. Here is the long promised follow on, which covers how development user stories and agile marketing user stories differ, and how to ...
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Coca Cola’s Liquid and Linked Content
Why has Coke, one of the leaders in adopting new marketing techniques and technologies, embraced content marketing as their primary approach to engaging their audience? The always insightful Neil Perkin of Only Dead Fish recently called my attention to two videos (part 1 and part 2), where Coke explains their new marketing strategy, which they describe as "Content Excellence". The ...
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The Four C’s
I have a confession to make. Although I've been working in marketing for almost 30 years and I've taught college level marketing courses, I've never, ever taken a single course in marketing. I'm a learn on the job, self-taught kind of guy. I remember very clearly one of the first things I learned on the job that I would have ...
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How to Run an Agile Marketing Sprint Planning Session
Agile Marketing teams that are using Scrum begin the Sprint process with an Agile Marketing Sprint Planning session. Sprint Planning, one of the four key "ceremonies" of Scrum (the others are the Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and the daily Scrum), establishes the baseline assumptions of the company's approach to the market, the goals of the Sprint, and the list of ...
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How to Write Agile Marketing User Stories
I often get asked about writing Agile Marketing user stories and how they differ from developer user stories. I've written about it before in a two-part post on User Stories here and here. But I don't think I've provided enough detail or examples, and I'd like to fix that. I'm going to use Microsoft SQL Server as an example of ...
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Story Points or Hours?
Most Agile Marketing teams use either Scrum or Kanban methods to manage their work. If you use Scrum, you'll need to use either story points or hours to limit how much work you take on in any given sprint. Which is best for Agile Marketing? For Agile Developers, story points versus hours has been a long running debate. Feelings seem to ...
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Are You a Fox or a Hedgehog?
I've been reading Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise. Nate Silver, in case you haven't seen him on one of the 20 or so talk shows he's been on to publicize his book, is the statistician who correctly predicted the winner of the electoral vote in all fifty states in 2012 (49 out of 50 in 2008). He ...
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The Agile Marketing Scrum Master
What are the duties of a Scrum Master? How do you choose someone who will make a successful scrum master, what personality traits and skills do you look for? And are there differences between the role, duties and skillset necessary to become a successful scrum master for Agile Marketing, as compared to Agile Development? I've been asking myself these questions ...
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Creating a World Class Marketing Team
How do you create a marketing function within your organization that is world class? There are some interesting clues in a brilliant article by eConsultancy's Ashley Friedlein. I want to concentrate on the last row of their marketing capability maturity model, shown above. The model has three columns: emergent, intermediate and advanced. Emergent - Rigid structure, waterfall project management, infrequent ...
