Using Scrum for Marketing: An In-Depth Introduction

For the right team, Scrum is transformative. However, adapting Scrum for marketing requires understanding whether Scrum is right for you. Then, it’s essential to figure out how Scrum can be adapted for marketing by breaking down its roles and events. Then you can follow a few simple steps to implement it while avoiding some common challenges and pitfalls.

"Whenever people are involved in a complex, creative effort, whether they’re trying to send a rocket to space, build a better light switch, or capture a criminal, traditional management methods simply break apart. - Jeff Sutherland, Scrum

When they hear the phrase “Agile marketing,” most people think of Scrum. It was the original Agile methodology for software, and it still gets the most press.

For some marketers, it’s a fantastically efficient way to streamline their processes and achieve previously unimaginable levels of efficiency. For other marketers, Scrum is a frustrating mess because they were simply told to use it and struggle to adapt it to their needs.

The key is understanding whether or not Scrum is likely to work for your specific marketing needs and how to best adapt it. Fortunately, we’ll explore both here. By the end, you’ll understand whether Scrum is appropriate for your marketing team and how to get the most from it.

What Is Scrum and Why Use It as a Marketer?

Featuring timeboxed sprints, clearly defined roles, and multiple required ceremonies, Scrum is one of the most popular -- and most prescriptive -- frameworks for transitioning a team to Agile. It was developed in the late 90s by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, who pioneered the system to address huge problems in the world of software development.

Before Agile software development and Scrum came along, development teams tried to produce functional, useful software based solely on massive requirements documents. These tomes were supposed to contain all of the requirements for the software or feature, but they never did.

New things always came up during the development process that increased the size of the project; you know this phenomenon as scope creep. The developers themselves often underestimated the complexity and difficulty of their work; they had become all too familiar with the whooshing sound of yet another deadline flying by.

Incomplete requirements, scope creep, and overlooked complexity all rained down on development teams, creating projects that were over budget, late, and barely functional.

It’s not hard to see why they were desperate for a new mode of operating.

Today, Scrum is used in highly regulated environments like HLS and BFSI marketing as well as in startups and everything in between. But why should marketers consider it?

For one, if you can easily break your work into 1-4 week sprints, the structure Scrum offers can help you achieve major productivity gains. That said, if your marketing team tends to work on projects and tasks that take longer, it might be difficult to adapt Scrum to your work.

Likewise, Scrum works well for marketers who don’t deal with as much ad hoc work. It provides an excellent balance of adaptation and planning, but means you won’t be able to take on tasks that weren’t included in your sprint from the start. 

Overall though, the appeal of Scrum for marketing organizations largely comes from its structure. The roles, the way work is structured, the metrics you’ll gather, etc. are all crystal clear. Many marketers thrive with that kind of structure.

Goals of Using Scrum for Marketing

The original goal of Scrum was to embrace the uncertainty and creativity that already governed software development. “At its root,” Jeff Sutherland believes, “Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want?” 

(See what I mean by аgility being based in common sense?)  

To make those simple goals possible, Scrum provides a framework that creates a culture of transparency, inspection, and adaptation while making it easier for team members to produce consistently great products.

That framework has two basic parts: events and roles. The events, also referred to as ceremonies, create a regular, predictable cadence for Scrum teams. They include:

1. Sprint Planning
2. Daily Scrum (also known as Daily Standup)
3. Sprint Review
4. Sprint Retrospective

Scrum events translate fairly easily from a software team to a marketing department. The second half of Scrum — the roles of the people who occupy the framework — doesn’t adapt nearly as well. Typical software Scrum roles are:

1. Product Owner
2. Scrum Master
3. Developers

Most organizations who adopt Scrum for marketing as their methodology of choice adjust the roles; we’ll get to that soon. By keeping the components of Scrum that work well (events) and adjusting those that don’t apply (roles), we can arrive at a framework, for marketers, that enables us to creatively and effectively use Scrum. Let’s start with the events first.

4 Crucial Scrum Events

The Scrum framework consists of only four formal events: sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint Review, and sprint retrospective. Here’s an overview of how to structure these ceremonies, drawn from my experience, The Scrum Guide, and Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum.

Note: each event has a purpose within the Scrum framework.

Let’s start with one thing, Scrum has a lot of processes. That’s why it can seem, especially in the early days of adoption, that you spend all of your time managing the process, and you may be tempted to ax one or more of these meetings. Give them a chance before you cut them out.

“Each event presents a formal opportunity to inspect and adapt,” The Scrum Guide reminds us. “Not including an event will risk losing transparency and missing opportunities to improve the Scrum process.” 

I’m not the Scrum police, so I won’t come to haul you off to Scrum jail if you eliminate your sprint reviews. Chop components if you must, but only to improve your process and performance.

Sprint Planning

It’s what it sounds like. You get the team together to make a plan for what you can get done during your next sprint.

To keep things manageable and releases rapid, sprints always last less than four weeks. Experiment to see what sprint duration makes sense for your team, and then stick to that; it doesn’t work to set a one-week sprint and then a three-week sprint. When implementing Scrum for marketing, structure, and consistency are key.

During the meeting, the entire marketing team creates the sprint plan based on what’s at the top of the Backlog, the prioritized to-do list that governs the work of all Agile marketing teams. The creation of the Backlog can be a group effort or the responsibility of a single person, but it typically happens through collaboration between a Marketing Manager, Marketing VP, or another leader, and a representative of the marketing team, most likely a Product Owner (or equivalent).

While stakeholders create the contents of the Backlog based on business goals and departmental priorities, the Agile team chooses when and how to accomplish that work.  

A key outcome of the sprint planning meeting is the sprint goal, the primary objective of the coming sprint.

For marketing teams, the sprint Goal can focus the sprint on completing a project or a shippable piece of a long-term initiative; without the sprint goal, it’s easy to fixate on completing one-off tasks that don’t help achieve larger marketing goals.

Keep in mind that a sprint goal “can be any other coherence that causes the [Marketing] Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.” 

Remember that!

Team members often work simultaneously on widely disparate tasks and projects. Sprint goals can remind us that we’re all driving together to one finish line.

At the end of the sprint planning meeting, the team commits to completing their chosen amount of work within the coming sprint. This should be a formal process of agreement, because it’s now the team’s responsibility as a group to get all that work done.

Here comes a difficult but vital rule of Scrum for marketing: no one should be able to change or add to their workload once the sprint has begun.

This team sanctity is one of the most important pillars of Scrum, particularly in the interruption-driven world of marketing, so make sure executives and other departments are clear about your team’s sprint goals and what work they’ve committed to completing. It should be clear that any ad hoc requests made in the middle of a sprint will have to wait for the next sprint to be considered.

How to Know How Much You Can Do: The Estimation Enigma

An obvious question comes up at this point: how does a team know how much work they can do in a sprint?

To figure this out, you need to estimate the size of the work in the Backlog so that you know how much your team can realistically handle during the next few weeks. Jeff Sutherland recommends never trying to estimate in hours, “because people are absolutely terrible at that.” 

Instead, he suggests estimating by relative size, such as t-shirt sizes: x-small, small, medium, and large, or with the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.

The Fibonacci sequence is often more helpful than t-shirt sizes because there is more distinction between the estimated sizes. A size-2 project or task is exactly one-quarter of a size 8; the difference between a small project and a large project is entirely arbitrary and subjective.

(You can mitigate this lack of precision by assigning numerical values to the t-shirt sizes: x-small is a 1, large is an 8, and so on; but then you might as well use Fibonacci.)

Experiment with work-estimation methods to see what works best for your team and the kind of projects that you typically work on.

After a few sprints, data tells you how much work you’ve done. You want this value, known as the team’s velocity, to increase consistently, which is why you spend time on task estimation.

If your velocity starts to dip, it’s time to take a look at process and team performance to see what’s changed or needs to change. If your team experiences external interruptions that impact velocity, your objective data shows you the real-world consequence of outside forces on your sprint.

Finally, estimating your marketing work enables you to track the team’s ongoing output with a Burndown Chart – the number of points needed to complete the sprint vs. the number of days left in the sprint. Ideally, you plot a steep downward slope that simultaneously crosses zero on each axis.

Getting the Most Out of Standup Meetings

The second Scrum event, and one of the most powerful in the whole Scrum for marketing methodology, is known as the Daily Standup or Daily Scrum.

It takes place every day during a sprint; it is attended only by those who contribute directly to reaching the sprint goal; it features each team member discussing his or her progress and impediments.

It’s strictly timeboxed to 15 minutes, a limit to be enforced by the Scrum Master. During this Daily Scrum, each team member outlines:

• What they did yesterday to contribute to achieving the sprint goal
• What they plan to do today to contribute to achieving the Goal
• Barriers – the individual’s or the marketing team’s – that threaten achieving the Goal

Strictly speaking, no one who is not on the marketing team or directly contributing to the sprint goal(s) should attend the Daily Scrum.

Because team members rarely work on just one thing, it can be a challenge for each one to stay engaged while others share their updates. To counteract this common problem, follow Jeff Sutherland’s suggestion that the team adopt an approach to Daily Standup that’s closer to a football huddle than ticking boxes on a checklist:

"A wide receiver might say, “I’m having a problem with that defensive lineman,” to which an offensive blocker might respond, “I’ll take care of that. I’ll open that line.” Or the quarterback might say, “Our running game is hitting a wall; let’s surprise them with a pass to the left.” the idea is for the team to quickly confer on how to move toward victory -- i.e., complete the sprint. Passivity is not only lazy, it actively hurts the rest of the team’s performance. Once spotted, it needs to be eliminated immediately. I want aggressive teams -- ones that come out of the daily meeting knowing the most important thing they need to accomplish that day. One person will hear another say that a task will take a day, but another team member might know how to do it in an hour if they work together. I want teams emerging from that meeting saying things like, “Let’s nail this. Let’s do this.” The team needs to want to be great."

Sanctioned Showing Off in the Sprint Review

Sometimes called a sprint demo, this meeting happens at the end of a sprint once the work has been completed.

Unlike sprint planning and daily Scrum meetings, sprint reviews are open to anyone who wishes to attend.

The team shows off what they achieved during the sprint, including content, social media posts, email campaigns, new ads, etc. This is no time for quality assurance or edits; it’s a moment to review work that's completed and approved.

If you have work that was released earlier in the sprint, you can share any preliminary performance data that you’ve collected.

Sprint reviews often result in changes to the backlog, as stakeholders in attendance make adjustments based on what they see. They might want to adjust priorities to further iterate on an unexpected success, or they might choose to pull the plug on some dud in the backlog.

Finally, conduct your sprint review with an eye to your upcoming iteration.

Spend time considering the next steps for any projects to be included in future sprints. For example, if you create one branch of an email nurture campaign and plan to add another during an upcoming sprint, discuss and document any lessons from this iteration that might improve the execution of the next.

During the sprint review, look at changes in the marketplace, departmental priorities, budgets, or timelines so that they can be incorporated into future sprint planning.

Focus on the Team with the Sprint Retrospective

The final piece of Scrum is the sprint retrospective, a vital meeting in which the Scrum team inspects itself and its processes for opportunities to improve. Hold this meeting after the sprint review and before the next round of sprint planning, because outcomes from the Retrospective (sometimes abbreviated as Retro) almost certainly impact the next planning meeting.

Again, the retro isn’t just about preparing to plan; it’s about creating and using a safe environment in which the team does the work of identifying ways that they can improve and where they can grow as a unit. Post the retrospective prime directive somewhere in the retro meeting room:

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

Traditionally, the sprint retrospective is structured around three questions: What should we stop doing next sprint? What should we start doing next sprint? What should we continue doing next sprint?

And, while these can certainly be helpful in launching a discussion about how the team can continuously improve its process, asking them over and over again during every single sprint retro can quickly lead to stagnation. Here are a few alternative ideas to help you mix things up. Even just shifting the questions around can generate new insights:

1. Ask, “What went well? What went poorly? What should we change?”
2. Have everyone describe the past sprint in one word by writing it on a sticky note. Then go around and ask each team member to explain why he or she chose that word.
3. What’s something that caused problems last sprint? If you could change one thing about the last sprint, what would it be? What don’t we know yet?
4. What did you Like, Lack, Learn, and Long For during the past iteration?
5. Break down topics of discussion into what made the team Mad, Sad, and Glad.

Regardless of the structure you use, make sure that every member of the team has plenty of room to contribute.

Retros can also be a great time to discuss experiments you may have conducted during your sprint, reviewing the results and deciding whether to conduct a new test during your subsequent sprint or make a permanent change. This kind of regular experimentation is extremely valuable for things like implementing AI in marketing, so don’t neglect it!

Also, note that people who are uncomfortable speaking up may not work to make their voices heard, so the Scrum Master (or whoever is facilitating the meeting) needs to help them. Simply asking everyone to write their thoughts down on sticky notes first, and then having them share in turn, can prevent dominant personalities from taking over the meeting.

Make sure that your intense discussion culminates in some action that can be incorporated into your next sprint. To be effective, the concept of process improvement, also known as the kaizen, requires concrete, measurable changes. It frustrates a team to spend hours coming up with ways to function more effectively if, sprint after sprint, nothing changes.

A Word About Sprints Themselves

They sound like something fancy, but for marketers, sprints are simply discrete periods of work done to achieve an objective. Some teams structure their sprints around completing a campaign or finishing a piece of a larger, ongoing project, but you need only ensure that the team is working on the most important set of tasks.

In the software world, each iteration exists to produce a potentially shippable piece of code – one that functions well enough to be released – but there’s no requirement to ship, or even release, at the end of each sprint.

For us, each sprint is an opportunity to rebalance priorities and adjust the plan based on new information. Since we work in a fast-paced digital world, systematizing this practice is enormously powerful, as Scott Brinker points out in Hacking Marketing:

"Overall, the management metabolism of short sprints isn’t about working harder or faster. It’s about dynamically reallocating our efforts more frequently, to take advantage of new information and innovations more quickly than quarterly or yearly plans permit. Yet it lets us do this in a considered and balanced manner, avoiding a chaotic, interrupt-driven frenzy. That’s agility."

Adapting Scrum Teams for Marketing

So far we’ve stayed pretty true to the Scrum practices that were created for software development teams. Sprint planning, Daily Standup, sprint reviews, and retros all work much the same for both. But when it comes to Scrum team members, we need to make more significant adjustments to make Scrum for marketing work.

Software Scrum teams consist of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. The Scrum Guide states how these teams function:

• Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.
• Cross-functional teams have all the competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team.
• The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity.

These functional ideals – self-organization and cross-functionality -- apply, and we optimize our Agile marketing teams for flexibility, creativity, and productivity; but our team structure often differs.

Agile teams work best without hierarchy among the team members.

But someone needs to manage the process of continuous improvement -- the traditional realm of the Scrum Master -- and we must have a liaison with stakeholders outside the team who manages the contents of the Backlog -- a function usually filled by the Product Owner.

Chiefmartec’s founder Scott Brinker suggests changing the Product Owner to a Marketing Owner, a title that makes more sense on marketing teams that aren’t actually producing a product.

In the case of the Scrum Master, most marketing organizations lack the resources (if not the will) to dedicate someone’s entire day to managing the Scrum process. The Marketing Owner may do double duty, serving as both the protector of the Backlog and the process facilitator (as illustrated above), or the responsibility may shift, monthly or quarterly, from one team member to another.

Moving Scrum Master responsibilities around like this can better help team members with little Agile experience see how the process works and why it runs as it does. It’s also an opportunity to regularly get a new perspective on the process and how it could work better for the team.

Don’t worry about getting each and every team certified as a Scrum Master if you plan to migrate the role, by the way; a basic understanding of Scrum principles is all you need to get started.

Choosing Your Scrum Team Size

The traditional formulation for Scrum team sizing is 7 plus or minus 2. Anything larger, and coordination becomes too difficult. The team – especially a distributed team – falls out of sync, and camaraderie and shared ownership fade.

Departments too big to fit into a single Scrum team can form multiple Scrum teams, based on project types (website, content, social media) audience segments, products, stages of the buyer’s journey, or whatever cross-functional groups help you achieve the greatest velocity.

Smaller teams can also work -- Jeff Sutherland says he’s seen Scrum work teams as small as three -- but lighter-weight methodologies, like Kanban, often work better for teams of that size.

How to Implement Scrum for Marketing

When you’re ready to take the plunge and actually start using Scrum, where should you start? Here’s a simple 5-step breakdown.

1. Get Buy-In from Teams and Leaders

Getting Scrum to work well takes time and resources. One of the worst mistakes people make when implementing any Agile framework is doing so without leadership support. What happens is they fail to achieve the expected results within the first few weeks and the plug gets pulled. Everyone involved ends up worse off and the Agile well is poisoned for years to come.

It’s absolutely worth convincing leadership that Scrum for marketing is worth taking the time to do right. Our latest State of Agile Marketing Report found that marketers with leaders who felt Agile was essential for success were far more likely to be successful. Investments in training likewise contributed majorly to overall success, so you may want to consider that as a tool for building internal support and capabilities.

2. Plan How You Want to Adapt Scrum for Marketing

As we’ve discussed above, Scrum was not originally designed for marketing and needs some level of adaptation. Use the earlier sections in this article to think through what Scrum should look like for you. Here it may be helpful to employ an Agile coach with experience doing that. 

It’s also important to remember that how you implement Scrum for marketing can (and likely will) change with time. For example, you might start with two-week sprints before deciding that three weeks makes more sense for you. So don’t feel like you have to get it perfect from the start.

3. Form Your Team(s)

Once you’ve got your plan ready it’s time to form your Scrum team! That means selecting who will be the product owner (that’s usually a given) and the Scrum Master. Bear in mind that being a Scrum Master will probably require some training or even a certification. Also don’t forget to make your teams cross-functional wherever possible.

4. Build Your First Backlog

Now you’re ready to kick off your first sprint. The first step is building a backlog of work you want to tackle during that sprint. Again, you’re probably not going to get this right at first. It’s normal to start off with too much or too little work. The point of Scrum for marketing isn’t perfection, it’s continuous improvement.

5. Test, Iterate, and Evolve

Speaking of continuous improvement, once your first sprint has commenced that is the name of the game. From this point on your goal is to use the events and structure of Scrum to conduct experiments, identify what can be improved, and generally hone your processes. Remember that this is never something you “complete” but a continuous process that’s at the core of Scrum.

Challenges of Implementing Scrum for Marketing

Playing Fast and Loose

We’ve mentioned here already but it’s worth saying again: Scrum relies heavily on structure for success. While some of its rules can be adjusted to meet the needs of Scrum for marketing, most really should not be tampered with. For example:

• Skipping events like standups or using them for unrelated discussions
• Filling your backlogs with vague requests that lack clear user stories and definitions of done
• Allowing stakeholders to make new work requests in the middle of sprints
• Allowing some team members to be part-time
• Taking on work that doesn’t fit into sprints
• Consistently over-committing to work in your sprints
• Having fluid or unclear roles for things like product owners or stakeholders

This is where working with coaches with extensive experience in adapting Scrum for marketing can help a lot. They can help you know the difference between changes that are fine to try and changes that might break the entire system.

Neglecting Retros

Retros are an essential driver of the continuous improvement that really makes Scrum work for marketing. It’s easy to get to the end of a sprint and say “well, I don’t know if we really did or learned enough to run a retro, so let’s skip it.” If you find yourself saying that, the issue is that you’re either not testing or experimenting enough or not giving team members enough opportunities to raise issues to discuss during the retro.

Scrum for Marketing FAQs

Does Scrum work for marketing?

Scrum is exceptionally well suited for marketing. Years of surveys have shown that Scrum is popular among marketers and enables them to simultaneously improve their productivity and reduce their stress. 

What is a Scrum Master in marketing?

The role of Scrum Master in marketing isn’t substantially different from their role in traditional Scrum. They ensure the team follows the rules of Scrum, act as a liaison between the team and outside stakeholders, and generally manage the Scrum process.

What is Scrum best suited for?

When your team works best with a rigid structure, you are able to commit to set backlogs for several works while avoiding ad hoc requests, can build cross-functional teams, and feel ready to commit to trying Scrum, you should be well suited to try it. 

When should Scrum not be used?

There are a few indications that Scrum may not be the best Agile framework for you. If your team’s work isn’t able to fit into a 2-4 week sprint, you can’t turn down ad hoc work requests, you’re not able to fulfill specific roles like Scrum Master, or you’re just not culturally ready to adopt Scrum. If these apply to you, it may be better to try Kanban, a hybrid approach, or further investment in Agile training.

Will Scrum for Marketing Work For You?

Although Scrum is the most popular methodology, that doesn't mean it has to be your default choice.

Think carefully about your team's needs, and be sure you're selecting a methodology that works in your unique context (Agile marketing training can help a lot here). You may want to check out these introductions to Kanban and Scrumban so you understand all the alternatives available to you!

Also, be sure to check out the library of microlearning content we developed based on years of working with Agile marketing teams, and the following  4 microlearning paths in particular:

• Path 1: Agile Basics
• Path 2: Agile Team Applications 
• Path 3: Agile Leadership
• Path 4: Agile Culture & Transformation

Each of them contains 10 bite-sized lessons, 20 short engaging videos, and 10+ downloadable resources that can boost your Agile knowledge in minutes even during the busiest days. Whether you're just getting started with Agile or embarking on a full Agile transformation, there's plenty of value you'll take away from these lessons.

Before you move on, why don't you take a second to get the most recent State of Agile Marketing Report?