Epics, User Stories and Tasks
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between Epics, User Stories and Tasks in the practice of Scrum and particularly how those relationships are different for marketers compared to developers. Those differences have led me to conclude that marketers who practice Scrum need a fourth construct, which I call a deliverable.
Is Agile Marketing only useful for managing Content?
One of the easiest ways to get started with Agile Marketing is to use Scrum to manage the production of Content. Agile was designed to help improve the production of software code; it makes sense that it could be useful to manage the production of Content. I see many organizations taking this approach, using Scrum to manage Content.
The question is: can Agile be used in other areas of marketing? I think the answer is YES. Here are a few other areas where the use of Agile techniques can be applied to marketing:
Creating Great Customer Experiences

Last night, at the Seattle Agile Marketing Meetup, Scott Brinker of Chief Marketing Technologist joined us. Scott walked us through his diagram of Agile Marketing (shown at left and described in his blog) – in particular, his explanation of the centrality of creating great customer experiences resonated with me and deepened my understanding of our tasks as Agile Marketers.
As best I can remember, Scott said something like the following:
Agile Marketing and Three Laws of Human Interaction
Agile Marketing takes its inspiration from Agile Development. But why would a set of values, principles and processes developed by software developers for faster, more predictable delivery of computer code help marketers? Aren’t developers and marketers as different as oil and water? Don’t they approach problems with a different mentality, respond to different incentives and perform very different jobs?