Uncategorized

We’ve been using a new tool (new to us at least) for managing our Sprints: KanbanTool. In using it, we’ve found several features very useful, and it has also changed how we do our standups. Just to give you some background, in previous Sprints, I’ve used either whiteboards and large colored index cards or Trello.

I attended the monthly meeting of Social Media Club Seattle last night, where the topic was “Agile Marketing: Adapting and Optimizing in Today’s Break-neck Brand World“. This was my first time attending SMC Seattle, and I was pleasantly surprised. Big turnout (my guess would be 120-150 people or so), two free drinks and an interesting panel discussion – no question I’ll be back.

Todd Shimizu of Ants Eye View did a great job moderating the panel, which consisted of Kevin Scott of Cisco, Jonathon Colman of REI, and Greg Meyer of Salesforce.

I recently came across a concept, described by Dustin Dolginow of Atlas Ventures, called “Product Metabolism“.  Dustin’s insight was that the speed at which startups iterate on their product, their “product metabolism”, should be a key performance indicator (KPI), and startups with a higher product metabolism should realize more success than those with a lower metabolism.  However, he didn’t give any specifics on how to measure metabolism, which got me thinking.

I’ve been thinking about a question posted by Rohn Jay Miller over at the Agile Marketing Facebook group. Rohn Jay asked (and answered) “what does it mean for a business process to be agile?”

This is a great question, and one that I’ve been thinking about and blogging about for some time. I’d describe a business process as Agile when it possesses five characteristics, described by the five phrases below:

I was struck recently by a comment on the Agile Marketing Facebook group: “Is there any other kind of marketing? I guess I missed out because I never went to work for one of the big old slow agencies. I always worked at small agencies and small companies which had startup mentalities.”

He’s right, of course, and a number of people use the term “Agile Marketing” in this sense – marketing that is fast, flexible, adaptable – including David Meerman Scott in his highly recommended book “Real-Time Marketing and PR“.