This is the first episode of season 2 of this podcast—our theme is scaling agile marketing. Following this, we felt it was appropriate to kick off the season with Melissa Reeve and Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile because their firm is the author of one of the most robust and well known scaling frameworks. 

In this conversation we set the stage by talking about the role of frameworks, how they complement and extend agile methods, and how they put their own framework to use at Scaled Agile. If you like what you hear you can hear more from Melissa on the SAFe Business Agility Podcast.

Inspired by today’s trend towards seasonal releases and endless binge watching, we have decided to share the next wave of Marketing Agility podcasts as a “series”. Over the next month and a half we will be releasing weekly episodes exploring strategies for “Scaling Agile in Marketing”.

This season’s guests include:

We also created a short teaser with highlights from the coming season.

We hope you enjoy and please stay agile!

– Roland and Frank

ps. Let us know what you think of the new logo and theme music:-)

In this episode we talk with Thomas McMillan, the Vice President of Marketing at CompuCom. Thomas, who previously worked as a Director of Digital at Lowes, shared his experience with Agile Marketing and how he’s used those learnings to shape the way he’s helped implement Agile at CompuCom. We also discussed challenges that occur when embracing Agile as an organization and different approaches to managing workloads.

We talk with Bill Cushard, the author of The Art of Agile Marketing about his experience implementing agile as the marketing director at ServiceRocket. Bill’s background is in content marketing but he’s gone well beyond that in his current role. He’s one of the few marketers that we’ve spoken with who’s been using Jira to manage his marketing team. In fact, the sub-title of his book is A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence.  

He’s articulate, a pragmatist, and someone to follow.  Give the show a listen:

In this episode we talk with Ian Lee, the national digital transformation leader for Deloitte Digital, and Derek Derouin who serves as a manager in Deloitte’s digital marketing transformations group. I was fortunate to meet Derek at the RDV_Marketing event in Montreal back in March and have been looking forward to bringing him onto the podcast.

For our regular listeners, you’ll know that we’ve had only a handful of guests from the largest consulting companies—though I’ve had more interaction through my work at Oracle and while doing research for my book—so this is episode will bring an under represented perspective to the table.

I was impressed with the depth of engagement that Deloitte is driving when it comes to supporting Agile transformation. In short, it’s not just about strategic consulting focused on getting CMO buy-in. They certainly do that but they’re also engaging on the ground level training teams in Agile marketing and driving adoption from the bottom up. They clearly have some valuable experience to share … even if they are leading the pack of large consulting firms, this conversation serves as another validation that broader adoption is coming. Give it a listen!

Learn more about Agile Marketing 

 In this episode we talk with Justin Zimmerman who leads the content team at The RedX a company that develops software to support real-estate professionals. This is Justin’s first foray into adopting Agile—like many marketers he’s educating himself and learning on the job. We’ll hear how he’s approaching adoption, what’s working, and what’s not.

We were interested in hearing how he scoped the teams work based on words written per iteration. He also, shared some interesting insights on how he won executive buy-in by representing their previous work in the context of Agile boards. This episode offers inspiration for those content marketers that are getting started. If you like what you hear, check out a recent post by Justin entitled The 2 Metrics For New Agile Content Teams.

Learn more about Agile Marketing 

Learn more about Agile Marketing 

This episode features a conversation with Nicci Shaw of Intelligent Demand, a full-service integrated marketing agency. She’s a Scrum certified marketer who spent time at web-design shops and has significant experience working with technical teams. Like many marketers, that was her introduction to Agile. We don’t hear from that many agency leaders so if you’re at an agency or work with them this conversation should be of interest.

Intelligent Demand’s clients typically do not have an Agile practice in-house already, so Nicci talks about how to introduce Agile without presenting it as “process change” or outside the scope of the engagement. Some of the other topics we touch on include:

Enjoy the conversation!

Learn more about Agile Marketing 

In this session we’re thrilled to be joined by Ferdinand Goetzen who serves as the head of growth at Recruitee. Ferdinand is based in the Netherlands but came up working for a number of companies across Europe including The Growth Tribe Academy. In this session, he speaks about how his Agile journey was inspired by The Lean Startup and our good friend Eric Reis. Today his focus is on fueling growth through experiments and testing that are coordinated with both product and marketing teams. Listen in to learn about:

Finally, here are some great resources to check out that Ferdinand shared after our conversation.

Learn more about Agile Marketing 

In this session we’re thrilled to bring on another marketer from CA Technologies, Cameron van Orman is the Sr Vice President of Product Marketing. In this role he oversees product marketing for the entire CA portfolio and reports into the CMO and the Chief Product Officer. In the past, we’ve spoken with people on Cameron’s team so this is an opportunity to up-level the conversation and understand the perspective of a senior executive.

In this session, we touch on a range of topics related to the challenges of scaling Agile. Listen in to get a glimpse into:

And if you’re looking to dive in even deeper check out CA’s great content series on Agile Management.

Learn more about Agile Marketing