Coaching for Agile Marketing Teams

No matter how good your map, you need real-time guidance on your Agile marketing journey. AgileSherpas’ extended coaching and consulting options keep a Sherpa by your side as you navigate the first 6-18 months of your ascent towards marketing agility.

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Embrace the 70-20-10 Learning Model

Only 10% of adult learning takes place during a formal classroom setting. The remaining 90% happens while applying those lessons, and coaches help make sure that application happens consistently and continually.

10% Structured Learning

Courses, webinars, and workshops provide the foundation for changing mindsets and methods. These can be taught live or viewed online.

Explore Learning Options

20% Learning From Others

Coaching and mentoring helps put new concepts into practice, while also facilitating peer-to-peer learning among colleagues and communities of practice.

70% Learning from Experience

Coaches model effective behavior and create situational learning opportunities so marketers – and their leadership – can get hands-on experience with new ideas.

Choose the coaching approach that matches your agile journey stage

Pilot team coaching

When the first team or two is changing how they work, they need strong support from an experienced guide.

Leadership coaching

Leaders need to model shifts in mindset and behavior; coaches help make sure it happens.

Systems coaching

As the marketing function evolves over time, a systems coach monitors its health and plans its future.

Agile team coaching

No matter how experienced an agile team gets, they can benefit from an outsider’s perspective on their ways of working.

Understanding the Agile Coaching Fundamentals

Getting the most from Agile coaching begins with understanding what it is and how to fit it into a broader Agile training strategy.

: Because there are so many ways to be Agile, it’s essential to figure out how to adapt Agile ways of working to the unique needs of your organization. Agile coaches function as experienced guides to that complex process.

An Agile coach will combine in-depth knowledge of Agile principles and values with experience putting them into practice. They can help you troubleshoot when issues arise, foster an Agile mindset amongst your teams, and just build enthusiasm for Agile in general. This work might focus on the C-suite, middle management, or team members.

However, while the role of an Agile coach can encompass many different activities, you can maximize their impact by focusing their efforts. For example, structured learning from things like courses or certification programs is usually a good way to begin teaching Agile fundamentals. Once that’s done, you can bring in an Agile coach to help fill gaps in knowledge and assist in putting those fundamentals into practice.

When looking for an Agile coach, you want someone with deep Agile knowledge and experience, ideally putting it into practice in organizations like yours. For example, implementing Agile marketing in a small ecommerce business is going to be very different than doing so in a major pharmaceutical company.

Another important aspect of a successful Agile coach is that they are an outsider. While internal resources can play an important role in Agile transformation or adoption, Agile coaches perform better when they can be unbiased. Part of their role is helping you find new ways of working, so being steeped in the old ways can make that more difficult.

Why You Need an Agile Coach
: Understanding the role of Agile consultants begins with appreciating the key differences between them and Agile coaches. One is when they typically get involved. While Agile coaches are often brought in after some basic level of Agile training and education has happened, Agile consultants may come at any point in the process.

For example, an Agile consultant may come to help build a strategy for transformation or adoption. The coach, by contrast, would likely be brought in once those processes were underway to help turn strategy into reality.

Then there’s the goals coaches and consultants typically have. Agile coaches are often brought in to use their outside perspective and expertise to help teams overcome a specific challenge. For example, if a team has begun using Agile ways of working but is finding themselves unable to finish the work assigned for their sprints. For that reason, coaches may come in for a short time, or stay for longer-term support.

By contrast, Agile consultants usually take more time to identify the problem before building an action plan to solve it. They will integrate less within existing teams, instead focusing on using their outside perspective and expertise to provide such plans. In this process, consultants are generally more focused on the specific problem at hand and less on understanding perspectives within the team and organization.

You can think about Agile consultants as the generals planning a big operation. Agile coaches by contrast, are in the trenches with you, responding to shifting circumstances and helping you in the moment. This is why both coaches and consultants have important roles to play. The trick is understanding which best suits your needs at what time.

Compare Coaching and Consulting Options
: For all the value it can provide, making Agile coaching impactful requires a broader Agile training strategy. That begins with balancing the type of training your team members receive. Starting with structured learning, you want to devote about 10% of your time to eLearning, workshops, webinars, etc. Here you give learners a foundation in the basic principles and values of Agile marketing.

Once you’ve built that foundation, you can start to build some momentum by learning from others. This might mean Agile coaching, but it can also mean mentoring, or simply looking at content about people’s real experience implementing Agile marketing. Developing the connections between theory and practice in this step is crucial to avoid Agile feeling like a bunch of theories and ideas disconnected from your on-the-ground realities.

Having an Agile coach is important in this second step because they have experience applying Agile to practical challenges. They can lead by example or just explain concepts that may be confusing at times. Still, even this crucial second step should make up just 20% of Agile learning.

The final 70% of learning actually takes place when you actually integrate all this learning into your own work. In other words, 70% of learning should be learning from experience. Coaching remains helpful here because you can still run into challenges at this stage. But the bigger point of the 10-20-70 model is that coaching alone isn’t enough.

Another way to think about how Agile coaching fits into Agile training is as a part of a greater journey of ongoing development. As neat as it sounds, your actual experience isn’t going to break down exactly like the 10-20-70 model. People learn at different rates, have capacity for structured learning at different times, etc. Your approach to Agile training needs to account for that.

That said, you also can’t allow Agile training to drag on indefinitely. In our experience, it can be helpful to structure this process in a 90-day timebox that both allows for flexibility while ensuring you keep up momentum. It’s a time to blend education and execution so that by the end, your team is unlocking real value from Agile.

Learn How to Get More from Agile Coaching
: One of the main goals of Agile coaching is to help teams work through the challenges of adapting Agile ways of working to their needs. The reason is that those challenges are basically inevitable. No Agile implementation is going to be perfectly smooth, you’ll always run into bumps along the way.

That’s why Agile pilots are so crucial when you want to implement Agile on a large scale. By piloting Agile adoption in a single team, you’re able to encounter and address those challenges on a smaller scale. As a result, it takes far fewer resources and creates far less disruption.

Compare this to Lean product design. You don’t pay a factory to make 10,000 units of a prototype only to find out they all have the same issue. Instead, you create small batches to work through the issues until you come to a better solution.

Think of an Agile pilot in the same terms. You’re prototyping on a small scale to understand the challenges so when you scale up your use of Agile ways of working, those issues are already addressed. So Agile pilots function as Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) of a sort.

That said, not all Agile pilots are created equal. One thing to avoid is having a team try out Agile part time. For all its flexibility and adaptability, Agile just does not work when you only do it occasionally. That means teams need to be 100% devoted to Agile adoption and the members need to be 100% on that single team.

How do you ensure every member of the team is solely devoted to that team’s work? Start by making your teams cross-functional. This is when the team contains all the people and skills needed to accomplish its work. Of course this isn’t always possible, so as a last resort you can try creating a shared services team with some specialized skills you need across multiple Agile teams.

Learn More about Agile Pilots

Why Is Agile Coaching so Important?

While there are a few obvious ways Agile coaching can bring value to your organization, it’s worth taking a deeper look at some that are less obvious.

For all the importance Agile training and education play, you can’t forget that Agile marketing without Agile leadership is doomed to fail. In this case, Agile leadership refers to leaders with a deep understanding of Agile marketing principles and a dedication to actively supporting Agile within the organization.

That leadership is vital for a few key reasons, first because Agile adoption takes time. If leaders aren’t dedicated to making agility work, they can (and often do) pull the plug at the first sign of trouble. This leads to a lot of wasted resources and frustration amongst the people who worked to adopt Agile in the first place.

Speaking of resources, Agile adoption also requires allocating budget for things like education, training and Agile coaches. Without support from senior leaders, you’re unlikely to get access to the kind of resources you will need for all these elements.

Not having Agile leaders also creates a difficult disconnect between how senior leaders behave and how the teams under them function. While Agile marketing can work on a team level, it functions best when adopted more widely within the organization.

But how does Agile coaching fit into this need for Agile leadership? Leaders need to master Agile fundamentals and learn how to apply those principles to being an Agile leader. But just like with team members, that structured learning is just the start. Agile coaching can help leaders understand how to troubleshoot issues and generally adapt Agile to meet their needs as leaders and the needs of their organizations.

Leaders also need to evolve their leadership style from traditional command-and-control to new more adaptive styles that enable them to function as servant leaders. Coaches can help with this process as well, ensuring Agility can thrive and deliver value at all levels of the organization.

Adaptive Leadership Styles for Agile Leaders

It’s extremely important to appreciate the fact that you’re never fully done becoming an Agile marketing team. It’s a bit like adopting a healthy lifestyle: you can’t just do it for a few months and then say “I did it!” and return to the status quo.

Agility is something that needs to constantly be maintained in order to sustain its benefits. When that doesn’t happen, many teams experience Agile backsliding. This is where old non-Agile ways of working eventually begin to creep back in, eroding the value Agile provides and undermining all the work you’ve done to this point.

That’s why it’s just as important to have a plan for sustaining agility in the long-run as it is to get it in the first place. But how can you go about that and what role do Agile coaches play? First, Agile coaches can help prepare individuals to be effective Agile leaders. Their role in sustaining Agile is crucial as they provide the ongoing support and guidance that keeps teams on track.

Agile coaches and consultants can also promote sustainable agility by ensuring you begin with a clear strategy. By laying out exactly what you want to achieve with marketing agility, it becomes easier to remain focused and build alignment. When people at all levels of the organization understand the goal and strategy, it’s far easier to sustain the effort needed to remain on track.

The goals tied to that strategy also need to have clear metrics attached to them. Agile coaches can aid in choosing the right metrics as well as creating a cadence for tracking and iterating around them. On a related note, having an experienced Agile coach there to help you understand what challenges may be involved is crucial. You want to enter an Agile adoption or transformation process with a clear understanding of what challenges lay ahead.

Overall, you can think of Agile coaches as being a bit like a trainer or personal coach. Sure, you can achieve goals on your own, but having an expert there to guide you, inspire you, and lend their knowledge makes an enormous difference.

Learn How to Sustain Agility

While Agile coaches can help build strategies that align organizations around the goals of an Agile marketing transformation, that’s just the beginning. They can also aid in improving the alignment between functions within an organization. To understand what this looks like in practice, we can look to a classic example: marketing and sales.

How does this happen? First, Agile’s focus on delivering value to stakeholders helps ensure both functions consider each other. Instead of each only thinking about themselves or the customer, both marketing and sales function as internal stakeholders to the other. This makes it easier and more likely that the perspectives of each function are actually taken into account when making decisions. Getting there requires breaking down silos between the functions so they can actually share information, priorities, and generally just communicate.

Speaking of communication, embracing the higher quality of face-to-face interactions is a core Agile value. Agile coaches can help teams improve the quality of their communication both in meetings and person-to-person. That high-quality communication means less time going back and forth and more time getting actual work done for both sides.

Agile marketing also helps align functions like sales and marketing by ensuring they work towards common goals. Here, leaders set strategic priorities and both functions are given the flexibility to determine the best ways to achieve those goals. That flexibility, alongside viewing each other as vital internal stakeholders, helps ensure neither undermines the other as they work to achieve their goals.

Or, as Anthony Coppedge put it when speaking to us about aligning sales and marketing: “This happens when there is a shared view of the customer, a shared and aligned vision from leadership, and a shared and coordinated operation through Agile collaboration. What works well is a unified focus on continuously improving towards the same objectives, even when that includes different metrics.”

Build Better Alignment between Functions

: For all the importance Agile training and education play, you can’t forget that Agile marketing without Agile leadership is doomed to fail. In this case, Agile leadership refers to leaders with a deep understanding of Agile marketing principles and a dedication to actively supporting Agile within the organization.

That leadership is vital for a few key reasons, first because Agile adoption takes time. If leaders aren’t dedicated to making agility work, they can (and often do) pull the plug at the first sign of trouble. This leads to a lot of wasted resources and frustration amongst the people who worked to adopt Agile in the first place.

Speaking of resources, Agile adoption also requires allocating budget for things like education, training and Agile coaches. Without support from senior leaders, you’re unlikely to get access to the kind of resources you will need for all these elements.

Not having Agile leaders also creates a difficult disconnect between how senior leaders behave and how the teams under them function. While Agile marketing can work on a team level, it functions best when adopted more widely within the organization.

But how does Agile coaching fit into this need for Agile leadership? Leaders need to master Agile fundamentals and learn how to apply those principles to being an Agile leader. But just like with team members, that structured learning is just the start. Agile coaching can help leaders understand how to troubleshoot issues and generally adapt Agile to meet their needs as leaders and the needs of their organizations.

Leaders also need to evolve their leadership style from traditional command-and-control to new more adaptive styles that enable them to function as servant leaders. Coaches can help with this process as well, ensuring Agility can thrive and deliver value at all levels of the organization.

Adaptive Leadership Styles for Agile Leaders
: A core benefit of Agile marketing is the way it empowers individuals and teams to do the right work at the right time. Visualization boards, backlogs, and definitions of done (to name a few examples) help ensure individuals have everything they need to get work done.

Instead of getting stuck waiting for instructions or information about priorities, team members have everything they need at their fingertips. This goes far beyond just getting more work done, it fundamentally shifts the culture within a team. Individuals feel more motivated and empowered, because when teams are able to accomplish more their members feel better about their work.

When people shift from being reactive to being proactive as a result of these shifts, you can see big improvements in morale and performance. But this cultural shift also extends into experimentation. When identifying areas for improvement, brainstorming ideas, and testing those ideas becomes a core part of how teams function, you create a culture of continuous improvement.

But what role does Agile coaching play in team empowerment? Building this kind of a culture requires getting a lot of things right. That might be your team consistently struggling to finish all its work during sprints or it may be pushback against the changes needed to become an Agile team. Agile coaches can help you work through these challenges to build a more empowered and effective team.

Empower Your Teams with Agile
: It’s extremely important to appreciate the fact that you’re never fully done becoming an Agile marketing team. It’s a bit like adopting a healthy lifestyle: you can’t just do it for a few months and then say “I did it!” and return to the status quo.

Agility is something that needs to constantly be maintained in order to sustain its benefits. When that doesn’t happen, many teams experience Agile backsliding. This is where old non-Agile ways of working eventually begin to creep back in, eroding the value Agile provides and undermining all the work you’ve done to this point.

That’s why it’s just as important to have a plan for sustaining agility in the long-run as it is to get it in the first place. But how can you go about that and what role do Agile coaches play? First, Agile coaches can help prepare individuals to be effective Agile leaders. Their role in sustaining Agile is crucial as they provide the ongoing support and guidance that keeps teams on track.

Agile coaches and consultants can also promote sustainable agility by ensuring you begin with a clear strategy. By laying out exactly what you want to achieve with marketing agility, it becomes easier to remain focused and build alignment. When people at all levels of the organization understand the goal and strategy, it’s far easier to sustain the effort needed to remain on track.

The goals tied to that strategy also need to have clear metrics attached to them. Agile coaches can aid in choosing the right metrics as well as creating a cadence for tracking and iterating around them. On a related note, having an experienced Agile coach there to help you understand what challenges may be involved is crucial. You want to enter an Agile adoption or transformation process with a clear understanding of what challenges lay ahead.

Overall, you can think of Agile coaches as being a bit like a trainer or personal coach. Sure, you can achieve goals on your own, but having an expert there to guide you, inspire you, and lend their knowledge makes an enormous difference.

Learn How to Sustain Agility
: While Agile coaches can help build strategies that align organizations around the goals of an Agile marketing transformation, that’s just the beginning. They can also aid in improving the alignment between functions within an organization. To understand what this looks like in practice, we can look to a classic example: marketing and sales.

How does this happen? First, Agile’s focus on delivering value to stakeholders helps ensure both functions consider each other. Instead of each only thinking about themselves or the customer, both marketing and sales function as internal stakeholders to the other. This makes it easier and more likely that the perspectives of each function are actually taken into account when making decisions. Getting there requires breaking down silos between the functions so they can actually share information, priorities, and generally just communicate.

Speaking of communication, embracing the higher quality of face-to-face interactions is a core Agile value. Agile coaches can help teams improve the quality of their communication both in meetings and person-to-person. That high-quality communication means less time going back and forth and more time getting actual work done for both sides.

Agile marketing also helps align functions like sales and marketing by ensuring they work towards common goals. Here, leaders set strategic priorities and both functions are given the flexibility to determine the best ways to achieve those goals. That flexibility, alongside viewing each other as vital internal stakeholders, helps ensure neither undermines the other as they work to achieve their goals.

Or, as Anthony Coppedge put it when speaking to us about aligning sales and marketing: “This happens when there is a shared view of the customer, a shared and aligned vision from leadership, and a shared and coordinated operation through Agile collaboration. What works well is a unified focus on continuously improving towards the same objectives, even when that includes different metrics.”

Build Better Alignment between Functions

: Another common Agile implementation challenge where Agile coaches can make a big difference is how you design your teams. Team design is a crucial element for Agile success. But what should your Agile marketing teams look like and how can you match that ideal with the realities within your organization?

First, Agile marketing teams should ideally be cross-functional. In other words, they should contain all the people and skills needed to accomplish their work. Those people should also be on that team full-time. In cases where this just isn’t feasible, Agile coaches can help design Agile solutions like shared services teams.

In addition to all the members of Agile marketing teams being on there full-time, those teams should also be permanent. High-performing Agile marketing teams generally need around 3-6 months to properly form. Regularly disbanding, forming, and altering teams will make it difficult for them to stabilize and reach their full potential.

When it comes to the structure of those teams, you ideally want them to be flat and flexible. Members can step in to help when another person gets blocked, teams don’t get crippled when one member gets sick or goes on vacation, etc. Such teams are more adaptive and ready to handle new challenges when they arise.

One result of this kind of team is that its members won’t work at 100% capacity all the time. That’s actually a feature, not a bug. By balancing workloads between team members, you can avoid burnout and ensure there’s capacity to deal with crises when they arise. As a result, work becomes more sustainable in the long run. Extra capacity can be devoted to things like process improvements that can easily get left behind when everyone is working at capacity all the time.

Of course there is no single perfect one-size-fits all way to build an effective Agile marketing team. The experience Agile coaches bring can help you adapt these principles and ideal situations to your own tough realities.

Find Your Ideal Marketing Team Structure
: Another way to think about how best to achieve Agile marketing success is to consider where to invest your time and resources. The first area to consider is Agile tools. While an Agile mindset and understanding of its values come first, using the right tools is also crucial.

The first Agile tool most teams look for is a visual management system. While some teams use physical Kanban boards for this, a digital tool is usually preferable for remote work. Such tools can help you set Work In Progress (WIP) limits, and automatically track key metrics you can use to optimize team performance.

Retrospective tools are also worth consideration. Most Agile marketing teams will run occasional retrospective meetings where areas for improvement are identified and solutions developed. Those solutions will then be tested (using the metrics your visualization tool gathers in many cases) to determine whether they really move the needle.

Dedicated tools can make it easier to run effective retrospective meetings. For example, they might allow participants to submit feedback anonymously or asynchronously, making it simpler for some members to participate. They can also track goals so you never forget to check in on an experiment you’re running from a previous retrospective.

Effective Agile marketing training is another major area where investment is critical for success. Agile marketing simply cannot work without a solid foundation of Agile mindset, principles, and values. The way you get there is through Agile training that balances structured learning, learning from others, and integrating that learning in the workplace. Investing in all three types of learning, with help from Agile coaches, is the most effective way to reach Agile marketing success.

Lastly, Agile success also comes from hiring the right people. Not everyone wants or enjoys the kind of empowered autonomy Agile aims to provide. Hiring people who will culturally embrace Agile ways of working instead of fighting them will make unlocking the value of Agile marketing far easier.

Invest in Marketing Agility
: One of the most important benefits of working with an Agile coach is getting access to their real experience implementing Agile in other organizations. Translating Agile principles and values into practical actions is something that benefits from experience. But even without hiring an Agile coach you can still access some hard-earned lessons from their experience.

One is the importance of saying “no” to external requests. Many marketing teams function on the assumption that whenever a stakeholder asks for something, they should get it. However, this makes prioritization and efficiency far more difficult. When teams know their own priorities and capacities are, they can push back on requests so they can focus on what matters most.

Another valuable lesson is that having more frequent touchpoints can help you avoid getting bogged down by endless meetings. A weekly or biweekly planning meeting that lasts 1-2 hours combined with daily 15 minute standups can add up to less than two hours per week. Crucially, these meetings are structured to be as short and valuable as possible.

So instead of spending hours more per week in planning meetings, check-ins and other touchpoints designed to get everyone on the same page, you have quick and efficient meetings at set times to do that. The result is that teams are aligned and on the same page far more often, meaning they can devote more time to getting real work done.

Work In Progress (WIP) limits are another tactic that coaches talk a lot about because they just work. Too often, marketers end up starting lots of tasks without actually finishing any of them. We get caught up in the allure of multitasking and end up with lots of things 50% done and nothing 100% ready. WIP limits force us to finish what we’ve started before taking on something new, ensuring that value gets delivered to stakeholders far faster and more often.

Lastly, years of working with Agile marketing teams has taught our coaches about the vital importance of differentiating between outputs and outcomes. Too many marketing teams look at their outputs as measurements of success: we posted four blog posts, sent 20 emails, etc. Success!

What gets left out is whether all those blog posts and emails actually accomplished anything. By focusing on the outcomes of the work we do (like customer satisfaction, conversions, etc.) we focus on what our stakeholders actually care about. This helps us avoid getting bogged down with busywork that doesn’t move the needle and focus on what actually does.

Key Lessons from Coaching Agile Marketing Teams
: Getting the most out of an Agile coach is easier when you know what challenges you can expect. So it’s worth looking at some of the most common barriers to Agile adoption that coaches see. Our annual State of Agile Marketing Report has data showing just what those challenges are.

Ironically, the first isn’t so much a barrier to Agile adoption as one to sustaining Agile. It’s that people revert to non-Agile ways of working. This is why Agile coaches are so focused on finding ways to make Agile sustainable in the long-run.

The second most common barrier is difficulty managing unplanned work. Here, Agile coaches often help teams learn to push back on work that doesn’t fit within a team’s current sprint or priorities. In other cases, this can result from a lack of alignment around strategic priorities or simply a lack of understanding around how Agile marketing teams function.

Many Agile marketing teams also complain about plans changing too often. This is an area where getting the cadence right is crucial and where an Agile coach’s experience can help. Teams should be adjusting their plans often enough to respond to new information but not so often it feels chaotic and reactive. But the right cadence for that balance will vary from team to team.

Other teams report difficulties estimating team capacity and velocity. This challenge stems from a basic fact: humans are very bad at estimating how long something will take to complete. Fortunately, there are proven ways to improve that with time. Gamifying the process with tools like planning poker helps teams improve the accuracy of their estimations. By regularly evaluating how accurate capacity and velocity estimations are, teams can learn with time and get better.

Finally, some teams report difficulty in measuring their results. This is where the importance of choosing the right metrics and following them comes into play. Using software tools to automatically gather data and ensuring your results are statistically significant can help ensure your results are meaningful and actionable. In general, it’s vital to ensure you plan what metrics you want to measure and how you will do so at the start instead of trying to figure it out later. Again this is an area where Agile coaches can help.

Understand Key Barriers to Agile Marketing

It was a great experience. I knew almost nothing about the topic when I entered, but our coach was able to bring me along with more experienced participants in a way that we all got something out of it. I'm grateful for the experience and look forward to taking it forward!

Anna Wilmoth Vice President Brand Strategy, Kaplan Early Learning Company

Our coach guided me and my company on how to transform to Agile based on our current situation. He not only gave us advice, but also helped us to recognize our own problems. That is just great support as a coach.

Anonymous

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