Marketing the Agile Way

Kirsten Knipp, Director of Product Marketing

@kirstenpetra

Applying Scrum Outside of Development

The next 45 minutes …

• What is Scrum / Agile?

• Why & how does HubSpot apply Agile

in marketing?

• Workshop it for your organization!

• Waterfall … big project .. .issues …

• Not flexible

• Scope creep

• Cannot shift to market

• Black box

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Long Lead Times

Black Box

Inflexible

• RUGBY IMAGE

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• Question mark

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What is scrum?

Anyone using it?

What does Wikipedia say?

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Scrum is an iterative, incremental methodology for project management often seen

in agile software development, a type of software engineering.

Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it

can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program

management approach.

Your Scrum Glossary …adapted for marketing …

Roles • Scrum Team: Product Owner, ScrumMaster & Team

• Product Owner (PO): Responsible for maintaining the

Backlog by representing the interests of the stakeholders.

• Scrum Master: The person responsible for the Scrum

process & implementing properly.

• Team: A cross-functional group of people responsible for

managing itself to develop the product.

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Scrum Glossary cont’d …adapted for marketing …

Activities & Artifacts • Team Backlog: A prioritized list of high level requirements.

• Sprint: A time period (typically 2–4 weeks) in which work occurs on a set of

backlog items that the Team has committed.

• Sprint Backlog: A prioritized list of tasks to be completed during the sprint.

• Epic: A large effort split up into multiple related user stories.

• User Story: A detailed description of a task with the stakeholders in mind.

• Sprint Burn Down: Daily progress chart for a Sprint over the sprint’s

length.

• Impediment/Blocker: Anything that prevents a team member from

performing work as efficiently as possible.

• Planning Poker: The team estimates effort for the stories in the backlog.

The PO uses estimates to prioritize & forecast stories based on velocity.

• Point Scale: Point system, used to describe task difficulty, without assigning

actual hours. HubSpot uses the Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8…).

• Success Criteria: The exit-criteria to determine if a task is complete.

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Agile Marketing @HubSpot

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Marketing Leadership

Macro Goals: Lead Gen, Conversion & Brand

TOFU

Top of the Funnel

MOFU

Middle of the Funnel

Services Marketplace

Biweekly / Monthly Sprints – Sync’d with Dev & Sales

Why?

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Transparency

Prioritization

Predictability

Sample Team Home & Backlog: MOFU

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Sample Monthly Sprint Backlog: MOFU

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54

Stories

How we poker …

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Anatomy of a User Story

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Prio User Story Success

Criteria Owner

Points

& Status

1 As a HubSpot Sales Person, I need a way

to prioritize my active trials so that I can

connect with prospects most likely to buy.

• Define ‘active trial’

• Create HubSpot + SFDC Report

• Publish to Sales-Viewable Dashboard

• Create Automated Weekly Email

Prototype

trial alert

launched,

Sales

feedback

for S32

Kirsten 5

A specific description of a task – from the

stakeholder perspective. Should start with

“As a _____ (stakeholder), I want to _____

(task), so that _____ (desired result).

List specific activities, if story becomes too

large, consider ways you could break it up.

Ensure dependencies are noted.

Measureable results.

What defines ‘done’?

How difficult is this

task? Velocity &

points get refined

over time.

How we standup …

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15 Minutes Daily • Yesterday

• Today

• Blockers

• Cross Pollination

How we report out …

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Monthly Science Fair

Sprint Review

Sprint Commit

Check it out!

MOFU: S30

Stories Points

Planned 190

Deferred 9

Incomplete 10

Bonus 10

Completed 181

MOFU Webinars

•5 Mary Group Demos

•Managed Ollie Group Demos

•Launched 1st Group Trial Call

Lead Nurturing to Drive Trials

Countdown to 2011 Campaign

3000+ Free Trials! Engaging with more

content

Content Creation! 10 Blogs, 2 Case Studies & More

10 MOFU Blog Posts with 11,000+ Page Views! 2011 Revenue Goals: How Much Traffic Do You Need to Succeed? Final Prize! Play to Win an iPod Touch with Marketing Surprises

3 Metrics to Prove to Your Boss That Social Media Marketing is Working

Win Marketing Prizes in @HubSpot's Countdown to 2011

4 Metrics to Measure Your Best Leads

3 Reasons Landing Pages Should be Free

What is a 301 Redirect and Why Should You Care?

4 Ways to Segment Your Best Leads

6 Key Pieces of Lead Intelligence

5 Marketing Graphs to Send Your CMO Every Month

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Home Page Testing Continues!

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Local HUGs Alpha Site + 2011 Venue Narrowed

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#1 for HubSpot

Late September Mid August

What do we get …

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Transparency

Prioritization

Predictability

How could you apply agile?

• Audit a dev scrum team at your company …

• Pick one project to define, poker & execute using scrum

• Draft a team to go agile for a few months

• Get the whole organization using agile

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Workshop It! Cheatsheat provided … • Groups of 3-5

• Pick a project or team

• Define a user story & success criteria

• Discuss how you’d start evaluating points

• How would you execute?

• What cultural barriers might you encounter?

• Could this increase transparency?

• Could this help you prioritize?

• Could this improve predictability?

• Rugby shot

• Twitter handle

• Question mark …

• Interacting …

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Questions?

@kirstenpetra