Discover how Agile revolutionized MJV Marketing

“Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid to stand in the same place until next year.”

The above quote is just one of the numerous motivational phrases scattered in frames here at MJV Marketing. It was written by Michael Hyatt and transmits the spirit of our team very well. Around here, we are champions in promoting changes and taking ideas off the drawing board… but it wasn’t always like that.

Our marketing team has grown a lot over the years. Even so, it encountered many difficulties in dealing with the challenges that arose on a daily basis.  By dealing with requests from several sectors of the company, acting as an internal agency and executing the entire marketing strategy, the prioritization of demands was always complicated.

How did we solve this problem? You will find the answer throughout this post with our story!

MJV Marketing: A World of Challenges

Before Agile, MJV’s marketing team encountered many difficulties in dealing with its routine challenges. Some of our biggest problems at that time are highlighted below:

• Lack of prioritization
• Difficulties in dealing with obstacles
• Little task flow tracking
• Results below-expectations

Our team is highly requested for demands from other sectors of the company, especially designers and content producers. Besides, the department itself has ambitious goals to achieve better results for the company.

The need for change was clear, so we decided to rethink the way we did things. Did we get insecure about it? Of course we did! Every change generates discomfort. But the whole team knew that going down this path was necessary so that we could become even better.

An Agile Coach for Agile Marketing

Agile methodologies  have always been part of the MJV framework in its external projects. Besides working well with the solutions from Design Thinking, we know that Agile is the best way to perform tasks, mainly because of the ability to easily adapt to any kind of team.

This made things much easier, of course: MJV has made an Agile Coach available to our team. With that, we did a week of immersion  to map out what were the macro, micro and routine challenges of our sector. Among other things, we define the business value and the impact of each marketing story in order to prioritize them. 

The Agile Coach’s presence was a hand on the steering wheel for our marketing department. In addition to passing on the fundamentals of the agile mindset to the team, he helped us rethink our priorities and brought a very important external perspective.

The new rites of Marketing

We identified that one of the biggest problems in marketing was the lack of results visibility, processes and the execution of tasks. That’s why we decided to use Kanban to list the activities.

Besides that, we adopted the SCRUM framework and introduced ceremonies such as Daily, Planning and Retrospective into our routine:

• The Daily is a very quick daily meeting, so that stakeholders have the opportunity to talk about what they will do throughout the day.
• Planning usually happens weekly here in MJV marketing. It aims to prioritize the tasks of the  sprint.
• Finally, we have the retrospective, a meeting to raise points of improvement and highlight the team’s hits. It was very important at the beginning of the process because it allowed constant adjustments during implementation. Over time, it has become less necessary and today we carry it out on a monthly basis.

All these changes enabled MJV marketing to perform tasks more efficiently. More importantly: with SCRUM, we finally managed to follow and prioritize our activities focusing on results.

The conflict between internal and external demands was no longer a problem, because the tasks entered the sprint and received the appropriate treatment by our team.

New marketing at MJV

Thanks to the implementation of the Agile mindset in Marketing at MJV, we have undergone a real restructuring in the team. Today, we have a SCRUM Master and a Product Owner, who lead the team with excellence.

Our P.O. is responsible for maximizing product value, as well as prioritizing the course of sprint. On the other hand, the Scrum Master promotes an agile mindset, removing impediments, ensuring goals are reached and facilitating all the rites and ceremonies we’ve seen before, such as Daily and Planning.

The development team, composed by more than 15 people, has become very agile and can quickly adapt to the new challenges presented. As we improve prioritization with the P.O. and follow-up is done daily, we reduce rework.

The greatest achievement of our marketing with agile was the fact that today we are able to generate our own income with projects for external customers. Yes, a new business division has emerged in the company, generating another source of revenue. 

This is proof that agile is not only able to transform people, but businesses as well.

Our perception on the benefits of Agile

Reading our text today, you may have already realized a number of advantages brought by Agile for our marketing team, right? Just below, we decided to highlight some of the main benefits of the agile frameworks, from our own perspective. Who knows, Maybe this can be an incentive for you to do this in your company as well?

• Improves measurement of results 
• Increases the capability of teams to adapt 
• Helps prioritize tasks
• Strengthens communication among the team
• Motivates employees
• Improves consumer satisfaction
• Increases team productivity
• Ensures competitiveness

Perhaps, one of the biggest benefits of agile for MJV was the fact that the whole team connected very well with the methodologies. We were able to adapt  quickly to the rites and ceremonies and today we have dealt with the new processes in a much more natural way. It’s kind of hard to think about doing it the way it was done before.

Agile beyond IT

Agile methodologies are no longer exclusive to IT departments. Today, this methodology is applied on a large scale in companies, also very common in marketing, sales teams  and even  HR.  Agile Frameworks  have come to ensure greater productivity for all these teams.

From personal experience, we can say that the method blends perfectly with the demands and marketing routines. By the way, today we reached a new level of maturity, being able to even serve customers directly. We are sure that without the agile mindset to help us, we would not have that level of delivery.

Did you like our post today? So how about downloading our e-book on Agile Marketing and finding out everything you need to know about it?