If your organization is interesting in Agile transformation for technology, then you should also be looking into Agile Marketing.

Think of your organization like a car. Two wheels which represent Technology, and the other two wheels represent Marketing. Even if you get the Technology wheels spinning faster, unless the Marketing wheels can spin just as fast, your car will be going in circles. Product and marketing go hand in hand when it comes to deriving value from your respective markets.

As we all know, one of the major keys in Agile is the tightening of the feedback loop. This is why we want shorter sprint cycles, smaller batch sizes, and strive to continuously learn. When it comes to building products, it's the marketing team's job to test the market, size the market, segment the customers in the market, and just generally derive value from the market. But the problem is, most modern organizations are using waterfall-like operating models to run their marketing teams which hand-cuff talented marketers from surfacing new insights.

Marketing departments are still using waterfall processes because only up until a few years ago, digital marketing was a brand new concept. Large organizations used Print, TV and Radio advertising in their marketing campaigns, which by nature were not trackable. Campaigns were planned well in advance, usually at the start of a new financial year, and themes, content and messaging was approved then too. Because of the lack of trackability, marketing was always considered a cost-centre. Today that has changed.

Marketing is now quickly being understood as a revenue-driver. New tools are allowing us to track digital campaigns like never before imagined, everything and anything can be attributed to even the most minute detail. Because of this marketing focused companies are able to confidently say that for $(x) of marketing budget input, they are getting $(y) of revenue from customers. This is catapulting Marketing teams to the top of the business group food chain.

In this session we will discuss the need for Agile Marketing and why marketing should be the focal point for your organization's business agility transformation (hint: it's because marketer's own the customer journey). More importantly, this session will actually dive into the details of how a marketing team would implement Agile using the four stages of the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC).

Marketing needs lean and agile processes for many reasons, but here is a summary of the top four points we will cover in detail during the session:

1. Transparency: CMOs are feeling the pressure to prove their budgets.

2. Recyclability: How marketing backlogs are actually recyclable, giving you more bang for your transformation buck.

3. People Investment: Mimicking the skills of the "unicorn" growth hacker through a cross-functional team gives you Voltron.

4. Continuous Learning: Because today's digital marketing campaigns are so deeply trackable, the learning we can gather from these campaigns is unprecedented.

How does a marketing group get started with agile?

There is a four step marketing lifecycle that the audience will walk through with the presenter. It's called the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC) and it follows four steps:

1. Goal Orientation: This is where we visualize the marketing team's Funnel Map (similar to a Story Map used by IT teams).

2. Ideation: This is where we develop the backlog of "growth stories".

3. Execution & Deployment: Using the scrum methodology to sprint on work items.

4. Optimize: We look at growth stories that show signs of life, and double-triple down on them in future sprints.

This session was developed and will be delivered by Ahmad Iqbal, an Agile practitioner and coach. Ahmad has lead the development and marketing of over 4 technology products, and trained over 500 practitioners in Agile Software development and Agile Marketing. Ahmad has implemented this framework successfully at two major Canadian organizations, one major insurance company and one crown corporation.

NOTE: This presentation will have an interactive app provided to all participants which will allow them to follow the content on their mobile devices.