Agile Marketing Blog – Home of Marketing Agility Podcast

Yvonne worked on creating an agile center of excellence for change agents within a bank.

Highlights:

Links:

Agile Marketing Alliance – https://www.agilemarketingalliance.com/

iTunes Podcast Episodes – https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/marketing-agility-podcast

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 Episode Summary: 

In this episode, we sit down with Steve Davis, Managing Director and Transformation Lead at Accenture. With a rich history in Agile that spans nearly two decades, Steve offers invaluable insights into the evolution of Agile in marketing, including one of the earliest Agile Marketing transformations we’ve heard of; Ancestry.com in 2005!  This conversation sheds light on the importance of agility in today’s dynamic marketing landscape.

Highlights:

Steve Davis recounts his journey with Agile, including an early transformation at Ancestry.com in 2005

Discover how Agile made the leap from technology teams into marketing

Understand the power of an experience Scrum master in helping marketing teams 

Hear why Steve thinks Agile marketing hasn’t been adopted by more marketers

Notable Quotes:

Steve Davis:“I got started in Agile in 2001, which was coincidentally the year that the Agile manifesto was introduced. It was a revolutionary shift that changed everything about how we approach marketing.”

“Agile isn’t just a methodology; it’s a mindset. Over the years, it’s been fascinating to see how adopting this mindset has helped companies become frontrunners in their domains.”

Relevant Links:

Agile Marketing Alliance – https://agilemarketingalliance.com/

Steve Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davisbase/

Closing Thoughts: 

Dive deep into the world of Agile with Steve Davis and understand why flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability are key markers of success in contemporary marketing. Whether you’re a novice marketer or a seasoned professional looking to adopt Agile methodologies, this episode is packed with historical context, personal insights, and forward-thinking strategies that promise to inspire and invigorate your marketing approach.

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This interview will focuses on scaling Agile, OKRs, working with private equity firms, what most organizations get wrong when adopting Agile marketing, and other topics. Our guest is Yuval Yeret, a SAFe fellow, co-contributor with me to IC-Agile’s Agility in Marketing certification.

[03] – Introduction

Jim Ewel welcomes our guest, Yuval Yuret, a Lean Agility and Flow Coach, Safe Fellow, and Professional Scrum Trainer. The episode will focus on the importance of shared goals like OKRs, the difference between OKRs and KPIs, and how Agile methodologies can help teams adapt to change.

[01:01] – Excitement About OKRs

Jim expresses excitement about the growing popularity of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and mentions how they are now considered a “silver bullet” in various industries, thanks to John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters.”

[01:38] – Challenges with OKRs

Yuval discusses the common challenges organizations face with OKRs. Many companies adopt OKRs without sufficient expertise, leading to issues such as mapping everything to OKRs, lack of filtering, turning KPIs into OKRs, and creating OKRs that are tasks rather than strategic objectives.

[04:08] – Prioritizing OKRs

Jim and Yuval discuss the importance of prioritizing OKRs and ensuring they are specific and realistic. They highlight that OKRs should focus on improving product and organizational capabilities, not managing day-to-day operations.

[07:03] – OKRs vs. KPIs

Yuval explains the difference between OKRs and KPIs, emphasizing that OKRs are for growth, change, and improvement, while KPIs are for ongoing operations. They discuss how OKRs can impact KPIs and drive evidence-based decision-making.

[09:16] – Characteristics of Good OKRs

Yuval outlines the characteristics of effective OKRs, including a focus on outcomes, involvement of relevant teams in setting OKRs, cross-functional alignment, and the importance of making OKRs actionable.

[11:32] – Cascading OKRs

The discussion touches on how OKRs should cascade down from senior leadership to teams, with each level providing context and specific objectives related to the higher-level OKRs.

[15:18] – Example of OKRs

Jim and Yuval provide an example of how OKRs can be used to address issues like customer churn, where teams set OKRs based on the context provided by senior leadership.

[17:47] – Cross-Functional Collaboration

Yuval emphasizes the need for cross-functional collaboration when achieving OKRs. He suggests that organizations should set cross-functional OKRs or OKRs aligned with the desired business impact, leading to discussions about effective ways of working.

[21:31] – Organizational Implications

The conversation touches on how achieving OKRs may require changes in organizational design. While some organizations create separate cross-functional teams, others overlay a network of teams to focus on development work while keeping operational teams intact.

[23:52] – Applying Agile in Marketing

Yuval discusses the importance of applying Agile principles to the right areas of the organization, highlighting that while it may not be suitable for operational work like sales, it is highly relevant for areas like sales enablement and marketing.

23:59 – Cross-Functional Nature and Spare Time

Jim Ewel challenges the idea of expecting employees to handle new initiatives, like sales enablement, on top of their day-to-day responsibilities in their spare time. He highlights that this approach can lead to reduced focus and effectiveness.

24:52 – Focus on New Initiatives

Jim emphasizes the importance of allowing individuals to dedicate focused time to new initiatives instead of multitasking and context switching.

25:07 – Trade-off between Expertise and Focus

Yuval discusses the trade-off between utilizing the expertise of those involved in day-to-day operations and their ability to focus on new initiatives without distractions. He emphasizes the need for balancing both aspects effectively.

27:29 – Transparency in Work Processes

Yuval mentions the importance of making work processes, including improvement, development work, and operational work, transparent to leadership. This transparency helps organizations balance their OKRs with daily operations and drives conversations around feasibility.

27:42 – Agile Practices and Adaptation:

Jim and Yuval discuss the need for adapting agile practices to the unique needs of each organization. They emphasize the importance of a tailored approach and the use of agile practices when implementing agile.

29:19 – Empiricism, Inspection, and Adaptation 

Yuval explains how leaders can leverage empiricism, inspection, and adaptation to achieve business agility. He emphasizes the need for leaders to embrace uncertainty, rely on data, and continuously adapt their strategies.

35:19 – Transition in Leadership

Jim and Yuval discuss the transition in leadership required for embracing agility and making data-driven decisions. They highlight the importance of leaders admitting uncertainty and promoting a culture of learning.

37:39 – Agile Mindset and Culture

Yuval emphasizes the significance of having an agile-friendly mindset at the leadership level for maximizing the benefits of OKRs and agility.

38:13.811 – Virtual Cycle of Improvement

Jim and Yuval discuss how Agile and OKRs create a virtual cycle of improvement, where management openness and agility lead to better OKR execution, which, in turn, fosters a more agile mindset.

40:33 – Agile Marketing

Jim asks Yuval about the challenges marketers face when adopting Agile. Yuval highlights differences between marketing and software development, including a preference for Kanban and less interest in formal processes.

44:40 – Language Barriers in Agile Marketing

Yuval discusses the language barriers between Agile practices and marketing, emphasizing the need to bridge this gap to accelerate Agile marketing adoption.

46:40 – Expertise and Experience

Yuval mentions that the pace of Agile marketing adoption is hindered by a lack of expertise in both Agile and marketing. He stresses the importance of aligning the broader Agile community with marketers.

48:57 – Business Agility and Expertise

Yuval anticipates the challenge of achieving business agility as organizations require expertise in both Agile and the business world. He suggests leveraging OKRs as a common framework to bridge the gap.

Closing Remarks: Jim and Yuval conclude the podcast with thoughts on the growing importance of OKRs in business agility and the need for combining Agile principles with business expertise to drive meaningful change.

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We’re speaking with Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva with a deep background in both Agile and marketing. Josh will be sharing his story with us today and talking about managing change in organizations.

Show Notes:

Episode: Managing Change with Agile in Marketing 

Host: Melissa Reeve 

Guest: Josh Bradshaw, Agile Coach at Workiva

Josh was born and raised in Arizona, which is where his wife and 4 kids currently reside. He was introduced to Agile 10 years ago and since then has taken it with him every where he can. He is currently an Agile Marketing Coach at Workiva and loves working with the team to continue to scale and grow as the company does. When he isn’t working or talking about Agile he enjoys playing video games with his boys, mountain biking, spending time with his family, and as you may notice a nice flat brimmed hat!

HIGHLIGHTS: 

Josh Bradshaw’s Background and Introduction to Agile Marketing (00:36 – 03:03)

Implementation of Agile Marketing at Work Kiva (03:03 – 06:56)

Benefits of Agile Marketing and Adapting to Change (06:56 – 15:)

Addressing Team Members Struggling with Change (15:22 – 20:33)

Introducing Change at the Right Cadence (20:33 – 27:23)

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-up (27:23 – 28:00)

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In this episode, Melissa Reeve leads a panel discussion about the past, present, and future of AI in marketing and how it relates to Agile Marketing. This panel includes: Paul Acito, Dr. Sarah Smith-Robbins, and Samantha Daugherty.

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We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Brand and Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services.

Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand, and then moved to the UK, where she joined Colt Technology Services. In her thirteen years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology, and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion & diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. 

Transcript:

Jim Ewel:

We had the pleasure of speaking with Laura Perrott, Global Director of Branded Digital Marketing at Colt Technology Services. Laura got her start at Telecom New Zealand and then moved to the UK where she joined Colt technology services. In her 13 years at Colt, she led a rebrand, launched a performance marketing approach, brought in growth marketing methodology. and designed an integrated global marketing campaign function. She’s equally passionate about analytics, process, and content management. She is also dedicated to inclusion and diversity with a focus on promoting women in technology. Laura, welcome to the podcast.

LAURA:

Thank you, very happy to be here.

Jim Ewel:

Laura, one of the things that interested me about your bio was that you brought growth marketing methodology to your team at Colt. Of course, at the Agile Marketing Alliance, we’re about agile marketing. How do you see growth marketing and agile marketing? Are they the same? Are they related? Are they different? How do you think about those two things?

LAURA:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two and growth marketing as we experience it at Colt really follows a lot of the agile marketing methodology. We’re looking at agile and lean principles, very much an iterative approach and always with that continuous feedback. When we talk about growth marketing, we’re specifically referring to really a partner that we work with, Growth Method. So we’ve been working with them for a couple of years now and we use their experimentation methodology. So we look at having a hypothesis, we do six week experiment cycles, we then fail or pass those and change or scale those experiments. They also provide a platform that they’ve created to help make sure that there’s a repeatable process.

Melissa:

So Laura, you know, one part of hypothesis building and experimentation is being willing to fail. And you wrote an article on LinkedIn called, ÒI Need You to Fail More.Ó Can you explain what you meant by that provocative headline and why you wrote the article?

LAURA:

Yeah, sure. Something that I came up against when implementing growth method at Colt is that fear is really the enemy of innovation. So at the beginning, when I first started looking after digital marketing in particular, we were sort of looking at these six month waterfall type projects. And you’ll know this, that you kind of get to the end of these projects or even to the end of the year, and it’s not always clear if things really worked or even which specific elements of those projects had the most impact. So you’d kind of be getting to the end of the year, you’d be doing it and your reviews and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to say, what worked well, what didn’t work well and what are our learnings. So really, there can also be a focus on delivering stuff in corporates. So often, you look at your list of achievable for the year and it can often be, I did this thing rather than what did we learn from it. 

So really, when we brought in this, focus on growth methodology, you really had to, we really had to change how people felt about trying things. And it’s actually quite a cultural shift because if you’re used to this waterfall, if during that waterfall, anything doesn’t work properly, it breaks a project, it delays it. Whereas with growth methodology and that experimentation framework, you’re allowed to fail and actually you learn from failure. And you’ve got to really try to encourage people to fail and fail fast because then they can take that learning, they can go back and they can iterate. on that project. So really, it fundamentally changes your team’s culture, as I mentioned, and it means that people can be a lot more open to kind of giving things a go.

Melissa:

Yeah, I really love what you said. You know, you’re reframing failure as learning. So we’re just learning. And then you hit upon two things that I’m very passionate about. One is this notion that as marketers, we run these A-B split tests. Oftentimes they’re A-B split tests. And then we get the results and we kind of shrug our shoulders and we’re like, eh? Because a lot of times they’re very, very close in nature. And if you don’t structure those experiments in advance and really outline your hypotheses, how do you really know if you’ve succeeded or failed? So I really loved what you were saying about that. And I think the second thing that I heard in your response was this notion of marketers liking to check the box, right? So what I’m hearing you say is by failing more, we not only… are learning about what’s going on rather than just shrugging our shoulders at the end, but we’re focused on the outcomes. And of course, in agile marketing, that’s one of the big shifts that are out there is this shift from output to outcomes. So I appreciate what you had to share, Jim.

Jim Ewel:

I love it as well. And I particularly like Laura, that you talked about the cultural and the mental shift that marketers need to make as they think about this approach of experimentation and learning and being willing to fail and thinking outside the box. Not trying to do simple experiments that don’t change anything, but really trying to do ones that could potentially make a huge difference. And if they work and they might fail, but if they work, they can make a huge difference. So let me ask you another question. In addition to getting your people to be willing to fail more, what are some of the other challenges that you encountered in implementing growth, marketing growth method at Colt?

LAURA:

Yeah, so I would say definitely the first one is sort of getting that buy-in from management and I’m lucky that I have an amazing management team. My manager, Mizu, has been very, you know, supportive of this process, but I do think it does take a little bit of time for people to understand it. So particularly if you’re in front of them and you’re talking about, hey, we had a great result this month, we had 10 failures, it was fantastic, you know, that can take a little bit of getting used to for people. 

I think you really have to get that a little bit of education early on about how you’re doing things and why you’re doing them. And I think having that database of information and particularly as I mentioned, we have this experiment methodology and so we have this rich database of learnings that we’ve made and being able to show how, you know, that was a failure, but here’s the learning that we got off it. And then in the future, when we do a related experiment that might be successful, it’s because we made these failures in the past. So there’s definitely a piece of education there and helping people to understand how you do things and why you do things. And then always tracking it back to the data. 

And I’ve, as mentioned, been working in marketing for a long time and people, you get accused of being fluffy or there’s all these ideas about playing with colored pencils, et cetera. And I think it’s really important for us to be able to go into meetings and be data-driven and be able to show the results and show the impact. And I would say with what we’ve been doing with growth methodology, really the results speak for themselves. We’ve seen year on year improvements across all our metrics and up to 500% improvement in some of them as well. And I think the other thing too around encountering challenges, I think, is really about influence can be really interesting and… I think other marketers will understand this, that sometimes the things that you think aren’t important, so it might be changing some visuals on your homepage, will somehow get the biggest impact where something that you’ve spent months working really hard on in the background that fundamentally changes how you do experiments or how you do automation gets no buy-in at all. 

So I think it’s also about understanding how sometimes you have to do some activities because they’re going to have an influence and they’re going to have an impact. and also balancing that with the stuff that is in the background and might not be as impressive, but are actually the ones that are really going to make those changes. So balancing that as well in terms of your influence. 

And then the last thing I would say really is about helping sales teams on that digital journey. I do think it’s part of the responsibility of marketing to help sales teams on that journey as well, help them understand the data points and signals and understand how digital or marketing in general can be of benefit to them. And that it’s a, you know, I don’t even say it’s a handshake, it’s an arm around the shoulder. And that’s the relationship that you should have between sales and marketing as well.

Jim Ewel:

You know, that’s really great to hear because so often marketing and sales are at odds, right? You know, the classic is that sales says, those leads you sent me are terrible, and marketing says, well, you didn’t follow up on them, you know, or something like that, right? I mean, there’s the thing. So you’ve been able to create a really good relationship with your sales team and just Tell me a little bit more about that. I really want to hear about that.

LAURA:

Yeah, it’s honestly, it’s incredibly strong, the relationship that we have. And there’s a couple of different elements to it. So one thing that I will say about agile marketing and growth marketing is that collaboration is built into it, right? You need to be engaging with other teams. You need to be getting different opinions and different ways of doing things. So the more people are part of the process, the more buy-in they have to see it succeed. So I think particularly with sales and marketing at Colt is that we bring sales into the process as early on as we can. I also would say that everything that we do has a sales element. So if we’re doing, let’s say campaigns, or if we’re doing events, et cetera, we always have sales packs, we have sales training, we have sales education. But then also, I would say that we got to a point with our marketing experiments that we have a 30% conversion rate on what we hand over. So they trust us, right? They trust us that we’re giving them good stuff. So we’ve built a lot of trust over the years as well.

Melissa:

Yeah, that’s really great to hear. And I really feel like and hope it’s the future of marketing and sales and the finger pointing stops and we become just more responsive to each other.

LAURA:

Yeah, I also particularly as we’ve seen digital marketing change over the years, right, is that it’s no longer linear sale cycle. And they appreciate that and they understand that now. And I think more than ever, they’re seeing the value and watch marketing can bring to the table that you’re not looking. And particularly a company like mine has big deals, right? So you’re looking at a two-year sale cycle sometimes. They want your help. They want you to help nurture. They want you to help engage with those customers. They want to see how they’re tracking. Are they engaging with experiments? Are they engaging with campaigns, et cetera? And all of those data points are super useful to them. And they really help to build up that profile and that customer intimacy as well.

Melissa:

So as you’re experimenting and as you’re building these long-term campaigns and relationships with sales and the customers, how do you avoid getting caught up in just tweaking little things? How do you make sure that you’re achieving your strategic goals?

LAURA:

That’s a great question. And I think it’s an ongoing balancing act, to be completely honest. So at the moment, we kind of split things out. Some things are still project-based. And as mentioned, we try and be more agile with that. And then some things are more experiment-based or lend themselves to experiments more. What we’re also finding is that projects can be a mix, right? So they can have an element of the project that is much more sort of linear, and then they can have elements of the same project that is more, you’re able to create experiments around as well. So a great example is campaigns, where the planning of the campaign might be more linear, but then once you get into the execution, then you can start with the experiments as well. So we’re still understanding which things lend themselves more to experiments and which still need to have kind of project. focus. But I would say, you know, things like Always On, we’ve found is a great way to have an experiment funnel. So creating specific types of activity, as mentioned, like Always On digital marketing activity, we know that that’s going to be really rich for experiments.

Melissa:

Yeah, I really like what you’re saying about the blended approach. And I know that people have combined what they call waterfall with more agile or growth approaches. But it really resonated with me what you said about being able to plan out your campaign, because you do need a plan.

LAURA:

Yeah.

Melissa:

And that’s part of the agile marketing principles. But you also need a plan that bends and changes with your learnings. So it’s a great point.

LAURA:

Thank you.

Jim Ewel:

Laura, you’ve been doing this for some time. What would you say to someone who’s just getting started? How would you help them? What should they do?

LAURA:

Sure, so first of all, I would say as a leader, you have to create an environment where everyone can thrive. So you really need to be getting under the ways of working. So how different team members work, you need to understand what their motivations are, how they calculate that they’re successful, and then really help them on the journey with you. So it’s gonna be different for every person that you work with. You’re gonna have different stakeholders, you’re gonna have different managers. And it’s really trying to get underneath, you know, how they work, how they’re motivated, and aligning it with what you’re doing. And I’ll say, for example, that we, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’ve encountered is that when you get new people joining your team, you kind of have to start from scratch a little bit again. 

When we first were doing this, we forgot about that a little bit. And we’d have new people, we’d be like, Come on, right, we’re off, we’re doing growth. get on board and they’d be like a deer in headlights. They’d be really scared because they’re just not used to being comfortable with failure. So I think there’s a really big thing that you have to do about making sure that all the people who are involved in this are on the journey with you. They understand it and they’re comfortable with it. The second thing, as I mentioned before, is be prepared to fail and get comfortable with it. Sit in that failure while I’m at it, really, really get comfortable with it and understand that it’s learning. and understand that it’s something that you need to do to be able to be successful. I would say get stuck in. I think you kind of have to just start the process in a lot of ways. 

As mentioned, we work with The Growth Method. It’s a company and they have a tool and that’s really, really helped because it’s provided that structure for us. And I guess that would be another, something I would tell people would be to get some expert advice. So, you know. This is a great podcast. You’re gonna get learnings, get out there, get as much information as you can as well to kind of look at different ways of doing things. But also, and this is kind of an interesting one for an agile approach is that you need to be disciplined. You need to stick with it. You kind of can’t just do it for a year and say, well, I gave it a go, I’m not seeing what I wanted to. You kind of have to stick with it for multiple years and really get it working and get it functioning well.

Melissa:

Yeah, I mean, Laura, I’m a gardener. And as much as I would love to have tomatoes in January, it takes some time for those tomatoes to grow and to mature. So you do have to nurture things and water things to reap the rewards.

LAURA:

Exactly.

Melissa:

So you shared a lot of lessons there. You get disciplined with the approach, and make sure you remember to onboard people. If you were to do this again, what are some of the things that you do differently, maybe in a different company, or if you were to do it again with a different team?

LAURA:

I’m not sure that I would do things considerably different. I do think, and this is part of that growth or agile way of thinking, is everything’s a learning, right? So if I was going to do it again, I would be learning in a different way. So I think everything that we did that maybe didn’t work as well from the get-go was a learning and helped us iterate and improve. Some things I think around our metrics, our early metrics, we looked at things like form fills and things like web visits and things like that. Now I would look at those as not being as effective metrics. I think kind of getting understanding about what metrics are good ones is something to do early on. I think I probably would do that slightly differently. But other than that, I do truly believe that it’s all been a positive learning experience.

Jim Ewel:

That’s great, Laura. One of your passions, it seems, from what I’ve read about you, is women in technology. Okay. And in marketing in general, in both the US and the UK, women make up about 60% of marketers. But when you look at CMOs, the ratio is almost exactly the opposite. Only about 40% of CMOs are women. What kinds of things do we need to be doing? to encourage more women in marketing leadership positions.

LAURA:

Yeah, sure. Women’s progression is such an important topic. I mean, we know that companies with female CEOs are more profitable and perform better. But unfortunately, as you mentioned, there is that broken rung issue that the women aren’t going into leadership positions. Even looking at women entering the workforce, looking at something like digital marketing is only about a third woman, only about 26% of those in the tech workforce are women. And, you know, looking at recent studies, it’s not super positive. A recent PWC study showed that only 3% of women say Korean technology is their first choice. And half of young women who go into tech leave their positions by age 35. 

LAURA:

So there are things that, I mean, there are things that we can do, right? So one is around mentoring and sponsorship. So particularly for younger women, having those, giving those opportunities that they can get into mentoring and sponsorship. Sponsorship in particular, if you find women who are incredibly successful, they’ll often tell you that they had a sponsor along the way. So if you are a young woman wanting to succeed, or if you’re a woman as well, who’s wanting to pull up younger woman, is helping them to find some of those mentoring and sponsorship opportunities. That’s super important. Allyship is obviously hugely important. It’s of everyone’s benefit when women succeed. 

As mentioned, it’s positive for the companies and it’s positive for diversity. It’s just generally a good thing to be happening. So allyship’s super important. Role modeling. One of the reasons I agreed to do this podcast was that I think it’s really important for young women to see women who are successful in technology and in technology or STEM roles. And we kind of think it’s maybe part and parcel when we’re doing it. But I do talk to young women and they actually don’t really see it. And there’s a saying, you can’t be what you can’t see. So it’s really important for women to kind of stand up, be heard, make sure that they’re speaking out and joining podcasts and being able to tell their story as well. And then finally, I think really around policies and best practice, there is… policies about women’s life stages, things like menopause or fertility, looking at companies’ policies. So if you’re in a company, have you got fair and transparent policies that help women at every life stage? What are those development opportunities that they have? There’s a whole bunch of things that people can be doing to look out for other women.

Melissa:

Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. I really appreciate and feel a lot of what you said. And the thing that strikes me is it’s not a one-dimensional issue,

LAURA:

No.

Melissa:

We’ve got to do all of these things. Being a role model, we’ve got to help mentor and support people. We’ve got to support people through life stages. And especially that last one, I was thinking to myself, well, if the roles were reversed and we had a long legacy of women you know, leading companies and men were in the position. I wonder if the companies would have just automatically have had childcare and other things in place. 

Melissa:

We’ve really appreciated your sharing your story today. And it’s been a pleasure to meet you and chat with you. So I know one of the questions we get is people are like, I, I loved what Laura had to say. I want to talk to her, I want to connect with her. For those who want to reach out to you, how can they do that?

LAURA:

Sure, LinkedIn, obviously the easiest one to do. So just look up Laura Perrott, double R, double T, and I should be the first person that pops up.

Melissa:

Great, thanks so much for being here with us today and sharing your stories with us.

LAURA:

It was great to be here, thank you so much.

Jim Ewel:

Well, thanks for listening to our show today. Check out the show notes for this episode at AgileMarketingBlog.com or at the Agile Marketing Alliance.

This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (https://agilemarketingalliance.com/). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches.

Transcript

Welcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah.

Hannah Bink 

Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much.

Melissa 

So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale.

Hannah Bink 

I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool.

Melissa 

Tell me more.

Hannah Bink 

So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility.

Hannah Bink 

They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust.

Hannah Bink 

If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market.

Melissa 

So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here?

Hannah Bink 

Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution.

Melissa 

Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis.

Hannah Bink 

Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore.

Melissa (30:27.526)

Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Hannah Bink 

Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information.

Hannah Bink 

What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really.

Melissa 

Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches?

Hannah Bink 

So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise.  And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster.

Melissa 

Well, it reminds me of something we talked about in the first part of our conversation where we were talking about the shift in participatory budgeting being from one where somebody pitches something. You know, you’re in sell mode. You know, I think we should do this initiative and I think it should be funded and this is how we should sell the, or set the budget. And the same thing with these giant presentations, it’s like, you’re in sell mode. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve invested a lot in research. I’ve done pretty slides and I’ll be rejected if you don’t accept my idea. We’re shifting that into a conversation. The conversation goes more like, hey, I have an idea, I have an hypothesis. Here’s what I’m expecting to happen. We could probably have a whole other conversation about leading indicators and guardrails. But the idea here is that we’re in an ongoing conversation around ideas and anything can happen at any time to say, we need to fund this more or less. And I feel like therein lies the power of a lean business case.

Hannah Bink 

Absolutely. And I have to say, I feel like my executive team remembers more and they digest more because it’s iterative, one, so they’re on this journey, they’re part of this conversation as we’re going. But also when we’re talking about at scale, agile at scale, these executives have 400 things bouncing around their heads at all times. So the value of getting to the point, if you’re trying to affect change inside an organization, cannot be understated. And it gives you a tool to do that.

Melissa 

It gives you a tool and it gives you a tool to remain flexible so that it doesn’t feel like careers are on the line. You know, like, oh, my thing, this case that I pitched didn’t work. That’s OK. It allows more room for failure, too.

Hannah Bink 

Absolutely.

Melissa 

So Hannah, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve got one last question for you that’s been burning on my mind, which is this whole notion of lean business cases and participatory budgeting, especially in SAFe, applies to technology portfolios, which I think are very product-centric. And I feel like marketing views things differently. We don’t necessarily have these product portfolios that they do in technology.

Melissa 

So how do you think these practices need to be adapted for use in marketing?

Hannah Bink 

So at the end of the day, it’s back to the principles, right? We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as… We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as we both well know, there’s a lot of technology in marketing that can easily be your first step to using Lean Business Case as you’re trying to adapt it in your organization.

Hannah Bink 

I’ve actually done that recently. I’m trying to get some more investment in our website. I’d like to translate it into seven languages. So I’m working on the lean business case as part of safe lean portfolio management approach, and I’ve found it’s really, really helpful. There’s a, there’s a standard step-by-step process that allows me that exploration time to better understand the business impact. What am I actually proposing here? And the approach of having a portfolio Kanban offers me that visibility into all of the strategic investments my company is making. To understand one, as someone already discussed this, that would be wonderful. Two, what are the other strategic investments our company is making? And as a marketer, how did those investments affect what we do every day? And it just gives me more context to understand when my leadership comes back to me and says, we’re a little overwhelmed on WIP here. I have that level of visibility to understand fully the impact of what I’m bringing to the business. But in marketing, whether it’s technology or maybe we’re investing in a new research area, or maybe we’re investing in a new channel mix or event strategy. There’s a lot of high cost things that we do on a day-to-day basis, or we’re thinking about doing. It just, it gives you that tool once again, where you can explore safely with that visibility and that iterative approach that Agile is truly core to the way Agile operates every day.

Melissa 

So Hannah, I feel like you and I have been talking a little bit, geeking out on lean business cases and participatory budgeting. And I’m thinking about some of our listeners who might be brand new to Agile. And I could see this feeling a little bit overwhelming. So for those of you who are at the end of this show and feeling like, “oh my gosh, I could never do that,” what are a couple of first steps that people could take in this direction without having to jump all the way into the deep end?

Hannah Bink 

Choose something that is key to your leadership, but they’re a little stuck on. Maybe you could introduce one of these activities, maybe both of these activities as a way to start thinking about investment differently. I’ll give you an example. Maybe your CMO is thinking about targeting a new segment.

Hannah Bink 

Well, a new segment targeting strategy takes a lot of investment, right? There might be systems that have to be stood up. There might be education that needs to happen. You might have to hire new sales reps. Who knows? Starting to break down some of those long-term or strategic things that are still a little murky and using this as a pilot could be a really effective way to do that.

Hannah Bink 

Another approach is if you find yourself as a marketing organization truly overwhelmed with all the competing priorities coming your way, not that would ever happen in any company, this might be a tool to help focus the new requests that are coming in, the new investment proposals that are coming in, or the new staffing strategies, or the new product investments that are coming in as a way to either bring the customer closer or get a clearer view of what the proposer is actually pitching you. Just a few ways to pilot it early and learn.

Melissa 

Yeah, I’m hearing you really articulate the Agile principles, right? Which is break things down, experiment, adapt and learn, and apply that to this as well. You know, pick a starting point and continue to iterate. So, you know, Hannah, you’re just a wealth of knowledge around this. If people are interested in connecting with you, how can you be reached?

Hannah Bink 

I am available on the interwebs on LinkedIn under Hannah Howard Bink. They can also reach me through Scaled Agile. I love a good email and I usually do respond.

Melissa 

Sounds great. I appreciate your being here with us today.

We had the pleasure of talking about participatory budgeting with Hannah Bink, Senior Director Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile.

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figure
out how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgeting
process, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency.

Transcript

Melissa

Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile.

Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah.

Hannah Bink

Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you.

Melissa

Great to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Hannah Bink

It was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing.

Melissa

Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time?

Hannah Bink

What I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear.

Melissa

Yeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned?

Hannah Bink

I think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear.

The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually or

in person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about.

Melissa

Yeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting.

And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups.

Hannah Bink

Absolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful.

Melissa

For sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world?

Hannah Bink

So we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives. 

 I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas.

 You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds?

You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fair and a collaborative approach that aligns to your shared goals. It’s a really fascinating way to bring partners or bring customers to the table and closer to the decisions marketers are making.

Melissa

Well, and it’s so powerful because you not only are bringing them into the room, and you and I have certainly seen examples where you’re asking somebody and asking a partner, asking a customer what they might prioritize. But I think it is different. Like you’re saying, if you’re thinking about it in monetary terms and saying, if you were in sitting in our shoes, what would you fund? And having them actually put, literally put money on the table around that because I feel like that forces a mental shift as well.

Hannah Bink

I really, really love the monopoly money concept, to your point, because there’s something interesting about having a physical bill in your hand that you’re now putting on a table and giving to a collective pile to fund something. It’s very different than just looking at a sheet and saying, I support XYZ. But when you’re giving away money, even if it’s fake money, there’s something psychological about that experience.

Melissa

Mm-hmm. All right, so we talked about engaging partners in channel marketing. Talk to us a little bit about how you could use this with ABM.

Hannah Bink

So with ABM, I really like bringing the customer in if you have that really close collaborative strategy. Marketers can adopt this approach to involving that client’s team into that budgeting process. It’s really fantastic at allowing clients to sort of see behind the curtain, especially when your ABM strategy aligns with that client’s goals. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re trying to sell internally or they’re trying to affect some sort of internal change. Bringing them into the fold as part of that account expansion strategy could be really powerful for everyone. Not to mention, you’re going to create a long lasting relationship which should lead to higher retention rates, maybe even account growth just inside the one business segment that you’re working with. Similarly, if you’ve got a SaaS product or if there’s like a physical thing that they can buy, I’ve never met an account that doesn’t want a say in how they’re sold to. Often they’re genuinely appreciative to have a chance to have some sort of say in it or shocked that they’re invited into the conversation. Again, this could be an incredible tool for long-term or customer retention.

Melissa

Yeah, I mean, we’re really shifting the paradigm, not only in participatory budgeting, but also in or with agile techniques. And in my mind, it’s the paradigm is shifting from a tennis match where we’re lobbing a ball over to another person, another group, another outside entity and waiting for the return, to really a team sport and inviting those people that we used to lob the ball to onto the team and saying, no, let’s think this through together. And that’s the shift that we’re trying to create.

Hannah Bink

I’ve always said that the wildest thing about marketing is that we’re asked to sell a product we’ve never used to people we’ve never met working in context we’ve never worked in. And people ask questions like, well, why doesn’t the marketing work? Bringing the customer closer is a great way to bridge that gap.

Melissa

Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made in marketing for sure. So talk to us about a time that you used participatory budgeting. You know, I’d love our listeners love real world examples. So what did you notice that surprised you? Did it change your mindset or your behavior?

Hannah Bink

So I’ve actually used it successfully in staffing strategy. Every department, marketing, sales, anyone is gonna have their own wish list of the skills they think they need, the roles they think they need. And when there’s budget at play, it can get pretty contentious or just frustrating because you’re not quite sure how decisions are being made.

 We took a participatory budgeting approach to the staffing strategy where we sat and came up with our ideas ahead of time, did the research of just how much it costs to acquire or develop those skills. And then in traditional company, each department has their own budget. But especially when things get tight, or if you have a centralized budget where staffing is held in one place, you really need to bring all the voices to bear to understand the impact of these skill-oriented decisions. I’ll give you an example. I can tell you for a fact that my sales department right now wants nothing more than a field marketing department. They want that built. It is a major wish list item.

 But they don’t necessarily understand the full business impact of what field marketing means. If I put a field marketer in every region, that means I also need to empower them with potentially an agency in that region because no one person can do everything in marketing. I probably also need to staff up headquarter support to support all of these regional marketers suddenly.

 And then I probably also need to expand my system investment so that they have some sort of malleable support system that works 24 hours a day and has some sort of approval process, built-in automation. This is a significant investment. It’s not just hiring six people. So by using the sort of feasibility study or cost analysis step that other people are doing, we’re talking about staffing strategy using real dollars. What is the actual impact of field marketing investment versus more data analysts or more electrical engineers? How do you compare these skill sets? We’ve used participatory budgeting at Scaled Agile to get each department to the table and to have a really holistic view of the hiring strategy. And the conversations are hard. I’m not going to lie, they’re really difficult. But that’s kind of the point, is to have the hard conversation because this is real dollars. There are real impacts to the decisions we’re making. I was taken aback by just how willing people were to have those conversations and make those trade-off discussions in real time.

 Melissa

Well, you’ve got the smartest people in the room, right? And you’ve got the people with the most information about how it impacts them and the cost. And what’s different is, again, we’re shifting away from this hierarchical notion that the person at the top knows the most. And they don’t often know the most. And you need real conversations happening in order to make the best decisions and get the most information out on the table. And I think that’s another great benefit of participatory budgeting and this type of approach.

 Hannah Bink

I remember our HR leader was very skeptical, thinking through the example I’m mentioning, very skeptical of all the fighting she thought was going to emerge. And she was genuinely shocked by how collaborative people were. I think there’s power in just having more information that’s digestible. Having the details in front of you. O ranges in many cases, as opposed to apples to helicopters. You don’t know what you’re looking at, but this forces you to bring that information together, bring the right people in the room, and most people just want to do what’s best for the company at the end of the day.

 Melissa

So thank you, Hannah. This is the end of part one of two. Appreciate your sharing your stories with you, so rich, so full of color. And listeners, stay tuned with us for part two of participatory budgeting and lean business cases.

In this episode with talked with Joan Davenport of Natwest bank, who is the Planning and Performance Lead for the Wealth Franchise in their marketing organization. Joan has a deep background in helping technology and finance professionals adopt Agile and Lean ways of working and more recently transitioned to helping marketers understand and adopt Agile. She will share her experience in making this transition.

Joan’s Bio
With deep experience in Lean and Agile transformation, Joan has spent the past 30 years getting hands on experience of identifying and implementing strategic changes to operating models, systems and processes to drive transformation within Financial Services. An experienced qualified Agile Coach, Scrum Master and change professional with a huge passion for people psychology and enabling high performing teams, she has helped deliver change at NatWest in a variety of roles within Finance, Technology and transitioned to an Release Train Lead role in Marketing in late 2022.

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