BFSI Marketing Is Struggling
Marketers in financial services, insurance, and banking are stuck between compliance, technology-driven disruption, and cutthroat competition. Many assume Agile can’t work in these industries, but major players are using it to move the needle on their most important KPIs while saving millions.
What Does Agile BFSI Marketing Look Like in Practice?
It’s easy for Agile to make sense in theory, but what are the realities you can expect when implementing it?
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One of the oldest (and most incorrect) Agile myths is that Agile teams don’t plan, they just act in the moment. This understandably convinces many BFSI marketers that Agile can’t possibly work for them. However, the truth is very different. Planning is absolutely essential for effective Agile marketing, it just works a little differently.
Right now, most BFSI marketers are victims of complex and detailed planning that takes place well before work actually begins. This kind of planning is wasteful, usually generating plans that are quickly out of date and actually prevent marketers from responding to new information effectively. Agile planning reacts to these problems by taking a very different approach.
Instead of laying out a detailed linear set of steps, Agile planning is built around identifying a guiding objective and iterating around it. Because those iterations are designed to happen quickly, you regularly have the opportunity to assess whether your original objective is still correct. This makes pivoting or simply honing in on the right objective far easier. It also helps balance stability with adaptation, something BFSI marketers in particular need to get right.
But what do those iterative cycles actually look like?
They begin with understanding the needs of your stakeholders (usually customers). Then you can put together a small number of objectives for delivering value to those stakeholders. MVPs and experiments allow you to test ideas around those objectives, learning lessons fast before applying those learnings to the next cycle. During these cycles, you want to put your assumptions to the test by getting feedback from your stakeholders early and often.
These short cycles keep busy BFSI marketers focused on what’s actually important: stakeholder value. Instead of getting sidetracked on following a plan for its own sake, plans are allowed to evolve and change when new information comes in. The end result is marketing that can run circles around competitors still working with traditional planning models and processes.
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One of the most fundamental ways Agile marketing delivers value to BFSI organizations is by ensuring marketers do the right work at the right time. That begins with having everyone work from a unified backlog.
A backlog is simply a prioritized list of work that needs to be completed. Importantly, it is NOT a place to park random half-baked ideas. Part of the value of a proper backlog is that everyone understands the items at the top are the top priority. Anyone can start work on those items without wondering “is this really important? Shouldn’t I also ask to make sure this is still a priority?” Avoiding those questions and the delays they cause can dramatically improve how your teams function.
But how does creating a unified BFSI marketing backlog work in practice? The first rule is that everything needs to be in the backlog, otherwise it becomes impossible to effectively prioritize. This also helps ensure balanced workloads, avoiding burnout. The level of detail in those backlogs can vary depending on whether they’re for an entire department, team, or individual.
A common practical challenge is accounting for the size of items in your backlog. One may be a major task that will take months while the next could be finished in 20 minutes. Trouble is, we’re generally bad at estimating how much effort tasks will take, but there are Agile estimation strategies to mitigate that. Otherwise, backlogs should contain about a quarter’s worth of work to ensure they don’t become too difficult to manage effectively.
How you use your backlog can vary depending on the Agile framework you use. But in most cases, you’ll pull work from the top during a sprint or when able. As long as you’re regularly prioritizing the work, this will ensure your BFSI marketers are focused on the most urgent and impactful work at all times.
It will also help you manage incoming requests. When someone says “I need this now” it doesn’t mean everyone drops their work. Instead, that gets prioritized on the backlog like everything else. As a result, teams are better able to manage stakeholder requests and keep their own workloads reasonable while doing the most impactful work possible.
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Zach Meixner, Senior Digital Program Manager at M&T Bank Corporation’s description of how they prioritizes pre-Agile should sound familiar to most BFSI marketers:
"We heard things like ‘this is the highest priority to senior management’ or ‘this is a regulatory requirement’ -- basically anything to get their request pushed to the top of the pile. Sometimes it was a priority, but sometimes it was just a lack of planning. And then, more often than we care to think, a lot of our resources had multiple things in flight at once."
In these situations, the highest priority work isn’t what will actually deliver the most value but the work that’s championed by the loudest voice. As a result, resources are used inefficiently and high-value work just doesn’t get done.
How can BFSI organizations improve how they prioritize marketing work? It starts with stakeholder analysis. Once you understand who your internal and external stakeholders are and what they value, you can start prioritizing around that. Next, by adopting a structured prioritization process like MoSCow or Stack Ranking, you can begin applying that stakeholder knowledge to prioritizing the right work at the right time.
Finally, once you have a process in place you can begin iterating. Get feedback from those stakeholders, use planning poker to ensure you’re accurately estimating the work tasks will require, and hone your process over time.
The beauty of this process is that once you begin prioritizing the right work, you can deliver a lot more to those stakeholders without needing to necessarily work more. That translates into happier team members, less burnout, and higher retention rates alongside greater productivity.
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Nearly everyone wants to have fewer meetings. But there’s also no denying that some meetings are tremendously useful. The Agile approach to balancing these two facts is to have fewer but more impactful meetings. But how can you reduce your meetings while ensuring those that remain actually provide value?
The first step is ensuring all meetings have a detailed agenda. It should be clear how attendees should prepare, what will be discussed, and what outcomes are expected. This ensures meetings are focused affairs with prepared participants instead of rambling and drawn-out wastes of time.
Agendas also help keep everyone accountable for the meeting’s outcomes. If your meetings start failing to produce what they aim to, it may be time to evaluate why and experiment with solutions. This might mean assigning a notetaker (or getting AI to do it), reducing the headcount, or trying a software solution to manage meeting outcomes.
In any case, a core part of making meetings effective is ensuring you have as few as possible, and that the ones you do have are as short as possible. That said, it’s also about recognizing that meetings, especially face to face ones, can be extremely valuable. Minimizing their use helps maximize that value by eliminating waste and ensuring everyone takes meetings seriously. In other words, meetings are only held when they are necessary.
For BFSI marketers struggling to manage workloads and remain competitive, that translates into more valuable time to get real work done.
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Context switching is one of the most reliable ways you can reduce a team’s productivity and focus. Yet, it’s a near constant reality. This is particularly true on many BFSI marketing teams with stakeholders constantly demanding priorities be shifted here or there. The ironic truth is that one of the most effective ways to achieve more in such situations is simply by doing less.
How can BFSI marketers practically work on fewer things at a time? The solution lies in limiting Work In Progress (WIP).
Putting hard limits on the number of active tasks you can have in categories like “reviewing” or “in progress” does a few things. First, it pushed team members to finish what’s already in progress before starting something new. This helps translate that in progress work into completed work capable of delivering value faster. When you multiply that speed by multiple work items per week and many team members, you start to see major gains in overall marketing productivity.
WIP limits also help us identify and address bottlenecks. For example, if work is piling up in review it can be easy to just ignore that problem and assume the reviewer will get to it eventually. But that bottleneck is doing immense harm to your team’s efficiency and should be addressed. With WIP limits, everyone is forced to stop work and address that bottleneck before they can continue, ensuring it gets addressed quickly.
Finally, these WIP limit benefits help build greater trust with marketing stakeholders. They see valuable work getting delivered more regularly, meaning they can more accurately predict how long that work will take in the future. Armed with that valuable information, they can plan more accurately and enjoy greater flexibility.
Practical Financial Services Marketing Operations Tips
With all the challenges faced by marketers in banking, financial services, and insurance, you need practical tips for streamlining your marketing operations. Try these 5 to unlock faster and more effective marketing teams.
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One of the most crucial decisions for a BFSI marketing team trying Agile for the first time is choosing the right framework. These frameworks structure your approach to Agile and answer questions like: will you work in sprints? What roles will your team members have? How will you measure progress?
Agile marketers generally use one of three types of frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid. Often marketing departments will go with the framework used by other functions within the organization, but it’s possible to use multiple different ones within the same organization, as Huntington National Bank does.
Otherwise, Scrum is generally a more prescriptive framework with rigid roles and meetings. It’s effective but not as flexible and therefore isn’t quite as popular with marketers. Kanban is all about optimizing the flow of work and is quite flexible in how that gets done. For years, the most popular option has actually been a hybrid of the two which combines some of Scrum’s structured sprint work with Kanban’s flexible flow optimization.
Both choosing the right framework and adapting it to your needs is a process. Agile is not a one-size-fits-all thing and the specific needs of BFSI marketers may require unique approaches. Figuring out what will work best and avoiding framework adjustments that will undermine agility may require working with experienced Agile coaches.
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Agile transformations are never easy, particularly when facing the host of specific challenges that come with the BFSI space. An effective way to tackle this problem is by creating an Agile Center of Excellence (CoE).
This is an internal group dedicated to ensuring a successful Agile transformation. They provide experience, knowledge, and a single source of information about every aspect of Agile within the organization. In particular, they can offer advice on how to apply Agile principles to BFSI-specific challenges. They can also provide Agile coaching and training.
It’s important that your CoE brings experience that’s relevant to your needs as a BFSI organization. It’s easy to gather Agile experts with experience in IT and assume they can aid in transitioning other functions like marketing, but this isn’t the case. Most of the Agile learning your teams will do won’t be around Agile fundamentals, but applying those principles to your everyday work. Supporting that learning requires knowledge and experience of that work.
In fact, an ideal CoE will bring together people with experience from a variety of functions. This diverse experience makes it easier to apply Agile principles to all kinds of challenges throughout your organization.
An Agile CoE can also help in making Agile sustainable within your organization. Backsliding is a common problem, particularly in the BFSI space. Having a dedicated team within the organization that can actively support the maintenance of Agile ways of working goes a long way.
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Ideally, Agile marketing teams will be cross-functional: IE they will contain all the people and skills needed to complete their work. However, with BFSI marketing that often isn’t possible. For example, M&T Bank found it was difficult to consistently utilize all members of their marketing teams. One or two people would end up with very little to do because they were only occasionally needed.
So, for example, if you have several marketing teams that each need a designer for around 4 hours a week, it doesn’t make sense to give each one a full time designer. However, having one designer operate as a part-time member of several teams makes Agile planning difficult. One solution might be to find team members who can do design work alongside other relevant work on the team. But if that’s impractical or impossible, you can create a Shared Services Team (SST) of designers.
SSTs pool people and skills that can be used across multiple Agile teams. Ideally, you’ll use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to lay out how your SSTs will work with other teams. For example, how quickly work should be completed, etc. This ensures everyone is on the same page about how work should happen, making it easier for both sides to function.
Around 80% of marketing work at M&T Bank was done by their Agile teams with the last 20% being done by a SST at the CoE. This setup has given them the flexibility and productivity of Agile marketing while adapting to their unique internal capabilities as a financial services company.
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Becoming effective BFSI Agile marketers requires a balance between two basic things: a foundation in Agile principles and the ability to implement those principles in the real world. While that first step can come through resources like online learning, the second is where most teams tend to struggle. That’s where effective Agile coaching comes in.
Agile coaches are well versed in the theory of Agile, but more importantly they have practical experience applying that theory to real world challenges. They can help inspire, educate, and guide your teams through the early stages of Agile adoption or transformation. This experience is invaluable as it can dramatically improve your chances of success by helping you overcome obstacles more consistently.
That said, not all Agile coaches are equally qualified to help a BFSI marketing team. Ensure you work with Agile coaches that have experience in the BFSI space. Here at AgileSherpas, we’ve heard plenty of stories about teams bringing in coaches who present a form of Agile marketing that’s totally disconnected from the realities of their work.
For example, an Agile coach with BFSI experience might have specific suggestions for adapting Agile frameworks to work effectively with compliance and legal teams. They may know the language and strategies that will be more effective at building support for such an approach in those teams as well. This kind of experience can often be the difference between failure and success.
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One final tip for BFSI marketing teams looking into Agile is to ensure the resulting teams are stable. True, agility is all about flexibility, but Agile teams don’t perform well when they’re constantly forming and reforming. In fact, it typically takes around 3-6 months for an Agile team to really hit its stride.
Stability here also applies to the people on that team. Members of Agile BFSI marketing teams need to be on those teams full time. Trying to bring some people in part-time makes prioritization, estimation, balancing workloads, and virtually every other process that drives an effective Agile team difficult to impossible.
This is why it’s so important to form reasonably sized cross-functional teams that contain all the people needed to complete the team’s work. Of course that’s not always possible, in which case skills that are rarely needed can come from a shared services team.
Once you have a stable Agile marketing team, you can shift from flowing people to work towards flowing work to teams. In other words, instead of gathering whoever is available and creating ad hoc teams when needed, you have established and stable teams you can send work to.
Those teams can also use that stability to gradually improve their internal processes, create psychological safety, and become more effective over time. Instead of regularly wasting time figuring out how to adapt processes to new teams or team members, that time goes to continuous improvement. Teams end up with a shared sense of purpose and the knowledge that together they are continuously improving.
