Marketing Project Management is Broken

Marketers waste far too much time trying to wrap their heads around what’s going on, what needs to happen, and who’s working on what. They get trapped in silos, paralyzed waiting for information they need to do their jobs, and ultimately frustrated with the whole system’s inefficiency.

The costs of these problems are staggering. How much time has your marketing team wasted waiting for clarification or details about priorities? Now consider the long-term costs of all those people sitting around waiting instead of acting independently to drive critical projects forward. 

You simply can’t afford these delays in today’s fast-paced marketing environment.

Managing work visually with Agile task boards takes the guesswork out of everyone’s daily to-dos. In other words, Agile task boards create a single source of truth for the team. 

By organizing tasks, priorities, and all the details needed to execute in one place, they empower everyone to be more independent and effective. When a task is finished, the team immediately knows what the next priority is. When someone starts a task, all the details they need to complete it are right at hand. The effect is nothing short of transformative.

The next thing you know, you’re actually tackling your marketing backlogs instead of watching them continually grow!

Learn How to Manage Your Backlog

For marketing project managers, this also means a lot less micromanagement and a lot more strategic thinking and team empowerment. Instead of asking for status updates, answering questions about priorities, and stressing when time is wasted because something wasn’t clear, managers can think deeply about how to make their teams more effective.

Better yet, getting an entire team to work off a single visualization tool helps create a sense of teamwork and shared ownership. It’s easy to see who’s working on what, meaning less need for micromanagement or questions like “who’s working on that campaign again?” 

All of this transparency, visibility, and shared ownership helps build a truly effective team culture that’s  centered on accountability and collaboration. 

Learn About Visual Management Boards

You can have the most efficient marketing team in the world, but if you’re not prioritizing the right work, you’re just not going to be effective. It’s a bit like driving a very fast car in the wrong direction. You’re just not going to get where you need to go.

That’s why ruthless prioritization is at the heart of any effective project management in marketing. It’s about working smarter instead of harder, finding ways to 10x your impact, and ultimately just delivering more value by working on the right tasks. 

But how can you achieve this level of focus? Prioritization is the key. 

It starts with understanding who your stakeholders are and what kind of value they need. After all, if your business desperately needs to improve retention to survive, having marketing bringing in tons of new customers only creates more problems. Regularly gathering information from your stakeholders helps ensure you’re focusing on the right things.

Next, you need to identify what tasks will help deliver the value your stakeholders need. This usually involves bringing marketing together to come up with ideas and build an effective Marketing backlog.

Guide to Building a Backlog

Once you’ve got a backlog of tasks aimed at delivering that stakeholder value, you can prioritize. That can mean stack ranking, MoSCoW, priority poker, or other methods. The goal is to find a structured approach to deciding how much effort tasks will take, what value they will deliver, and how to prioritize them as a result. 

Learn How to Refine Your Marketing Backlog

Armed with a structured approach, you can begin quantifying your performance and improving your results over time. Instead of guessing whether you’re getting better or worse at delivering value to your stakeholders, you can know for certain and act on that information. 

The end result is a flexible, efficient, and effective way of ensuring your marketers do the right work at the right time.

Improve Your Prioritization

Massive complex tasks can intimidate even the most seasoned marketing project managers. The reasons are actually quite simple: these kinds of tasks are difficult, inefficient, and downright demoralizing. 

By the time you’re done, priorities have shifted and the work can easily feel wasted. It’s no wonder nearly everyone dreads them.

That’s why you want to break down bigger tasks into smaller ones. In practice, this often means spending a lot of time and resources creating budgets, timelines, and subtasks before you even begin work. The problem comes when you actually start executing and quickly learn that your guesses weren’t very accurate, forcing costly rework and readjustments.

The solution? Agile marketing processes! Specifically:

• Transform huge projects into actionable tasks
• Phrase task as actions
• Include a clear definition of done for all tasks
• Iterating as you go

Instead of doing all the planning at the start of a project, you can break down tasks only as much as needed when needed, giving you greater flexibility and adaptability when things inevitably change.

Of course, this whole process starts with empowering the people who are closest to the work itself. They know the realities of getting things done better than anyone else. Armed with autonomy and clear priorities, these teams can put bigger work items into their backlog and assume ownership. Then they can break those items down and pull them into their workflow as needed.

Finally, there’s the all important Agile work breakdown structure. By breaking your work into iterative cycles, you can give your marketers time to pause, reflect, and identify ways to improve. The result is marketing that actually tackles its own problems quickly, instead of letting them fester until they become catastrophic.

At the end of the day, marketing always runs on processes. The question is whether you’re owning that process or letting it own you.

Learn About Agile Work Breakdown Structure

There’s a reason complaining about meetings is a universal white-collar sport: so many are just bad. They run too long, fail to produce meaningful next steps, and cost a small fortune in everyone’s time. 

But abandoning meetings altogether usually isn’t feasible.

Happily, shorter, more focused, and more effective meetings can transform how your marketing function operates, and even boost the morale within your teams. The question is how you can transform how your meetings operate to achieve those goals. Fortunately, Agile marketing has answers.

Embrace Effective Meetings

The first step to better meetings is ensuring they begin with a detailed agenda and that everyone sticks to it. This helps people determine whether their presence is needed, keeps the meeting on track, and enables attendees to think about the tasks at hand before the meeting begins. 

One crucial part of this agenda is the desired output of the meeting. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, then there’s no point having a meeting.

When all of this prep work is done, it’s easier for people to arrive prepared and keep meeting participants on topic. Meetings are less likely to wander from topic to topic and end with participants asking “what was that even for?” That prep also makes it easier to invite only essential participants to your meeting, saving everyone else time and making it easier to stay focused.

Lastly, make sure someone is taking notes (luckily, AI can help with that now). Those notes can form the basis of a meeting summary that includes concrete next steps. So, instead of ideas or conclusions getting forgotten about, you can ensure every meeting moves things forward.

If you’re curious to see some examples of how Agile marketing teams use specific types of meetings to get real work done, you can find some examples below.

Learn About Useful Types of Agile Meetings

Marketing project managers, especially of hybrid or fully remote teams, know that bad communication is expensive. It creates delays, misunderstandings, and frustration that hurts team performance and morale. 

Then you have information silos, which prevent vital information from reaching the people who need it. They also hamper the ability of marketing to use existing tools and resources effectively.

Even for non-Agile teams, Agile communication strategies offer a solution. 

First, by prioritizing face-to-face conversations (yes, even for remote workers) you prioritize efficient and effective communication. Emails and messages feel convenient, but they miss crucial information or context far more often than live conversations.

Next, visualization tools quickly and accurately convey a high volume of information. Looking at something like a Kanban board instantly tells you where problems are occurring, what kind of work is happening, and who to approach to get it fixed. When you have to hunt through emails, instant messages, or a giant pile of notes on your desk, it’s far less efficient.

Similarly, Agile artifacts like user stories and definitions of done hold a high volume of information that can still be easily digested. With user stories marketers can see who the audience is, what problem they’re trying to solve, and what needs to happen to tackle that problem in just one sentence. The structure of these artifacts helps you avoid wasting time with overly long and complex documentation.

Try Agile User Story Mapping

Then there’s the problem of meetings. When they become the preferred way of communicating everything, you end up wasting staggering amounts of time and resources. Agile is all about having fewer and more effective meetings. By ensuring meetings are focused, only have the necessary participants, and follow a clear format, you can ensure they actually feel worthwhile.

Learn Why You Need Agile Communication

Lastly, trying to communicate the way Agile shifts your marketing project management priorities presents its own challenges. The Agile Project Management Triangle is a simple communication tool that helps convey how and why an Agile marketing team will shift how it functions. 

Check it out and try using it to work with your stakeholders.

Learn How to Apply Agile Communication