Marketing Evolution’s Software Operations group is tasked with bringing to market the technology that allows marketers to make better real-time, granular marketing decisions. To stay ahead of the evolving needs of our customers, we have developed and adopted a handful of tactics to promote “disciplined innovation.” Here are a couple of key tactics that may be beneficial to any marketer trying to advance a complex strategy:
1. Start with Wildly-Important Goals (WIGs). Mark Greatrex, our client and CMO of Cox, suggested the book The Four Disciplines of Execution a few years back, and we’ve found it an excellent playbook for annual and semi-annual planning. The core concept of “4DX” is that you can only accomplish so much at one time – therefore select the “Wildly Important Goal (WIG)”. Write the WIGs down. Put up a weekly scorecard to track progress against it. Have teams take individual responsibility for putting points up on the board to move the WIG metric. We decide on the key innovations that will be most critical to accomplish the WIG, and focus our effort only on those things.
2. Use a Sprint Cycle. A sprint cycle comes from Agile Software Development, but it can apply to any business initiative. The idea is to define a time box from the start and stop of work. Generally the time box is at least a week, and no longer than a month. In practice, Marketing Evolution uses weekly Sprints for highly dynamic areas, like the prototype of our new trade-show booth, and month long sprints for more well understood problems, like creating the latest version of our flighting and decay algorithm. A sprint has a set of prioritized items that need to get done. The team members select which ones they will each take on, thus giving each autonomy and control within the prioritized framework. Once the sprint starts, the team is left alone to finish their tasks without management changing priorities on them. The first opportunity to change priorities is the start of the NEXT sprint. This keeps teams focused on delivering, without any excuses of shifting priorities. Ken Schwaber’s book, Agile Project Management with Scrum is an excellent and quick read to get into the rules of the road for Sprints.
3. Define the User Story. Every initiative at Marketing Evolution must have a user story. Here is a user story example, “As a marketer, I need a way to weed out media that don’t deliver a high enough concentration of my target consumer – even if the media have a really low price to impact ratio that would allow the media to make it into the overall optimization.” Essentially, the user story states the need from the user’s perspective to ensure any work is meeting a user’s need. By breaking the WIG into user stories, it translates the strategic level into consumer centric benefits. This helps the teams translate the biggest priorities into practical deliverables, which are then used in each sprint cycle to guide the work to be completed. These stories may need to be broken down into smaller tasks, such that a single person can take them on in a day. By identifying all of the pieces from the start to accomplish the user story, the team can have a good estimate of the total time required to deliver a user story. The team knows when they have completed the work when they can demonstrate the solution to the user story. In this case, the team demonstrated a “composition slider” that defaults to an index of 50, and can be adjusted by the marketer to weed out media levers that have a low concentration of the target audience. Check out our 3 1/2 minute video demonstrating the solution (View video). As the marketer adjusts the sliders, the media that don’t meet the minimum index level get shadowed out. At the end of each sprint, the team demonstrates the solution to the user story as proof of completion.
4. Use story points and a burn-down chart. The teams take the user stories, and guestimates how big of a job it is to complete the user story. As an Agile best practice, we use the Fibonacci sequence to estimate the time investment it will take to get a user story completed. The Fibonacci sequence grows progressively bigger at each increment by adding the two previous numbers together, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. In practice, if something is taking more than 21 points, we encourage the teams to break it down into smaller pieces. As the teams complete the tasks, they note how many hours it took (which roughly matches to points). We create a burn-down chart that shows how many points we actually completed within a Sprint. This helps us calibrate how many points we can realistically burn-down in the next Sprint cycle. It is a feedback loop that improves the team’s ability to size up how many points they should take on in the next sprint. It gives management a true measure of velocity in getting work done.
5. Scrum with your team. Scrum is another concept borrowed from Agile Software development that shows up in The Four Disciplines of Execution. The basic idea is that key team members working on a project meet daily, in a stand up and very brief meeting to answer two basic questions: (1) What did I accomplish yesterday and (2) What will I accomplish today. The Scrum Master (who guides the meeting) asks one simple question: “Are there any impediments?” If the answer is “Yes,” a very brief explanation may follow, but the team does not try to solve the problem in the meeting – that would waste too many people’s time. Rather, the discussion is taken offline by whoever suggests they can help. The best scrums are only 5 minutes long. It’s a great way to create a daily accountability to the group to make progress. It also is a great way to ensure that if impediments exist, they are addressed promptly, rather than finding out at the end of a deliverable cycle. The biggest benefit is that momentum is sustained day-in, and day-out.
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