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Marketers Need to Do Less

Conflicting priorities are a plague on marketing productivity. To focus on the right work and say “no” or “not now” to everything else, we need effective workflows, empowered teams, and supportive leaders. If you’re ready to focus, we're ready to help.

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Pesky Prioritization Problems

When we try to spread out effort and energy out over multiple priorities, a funny thing happens: all of those things we thought we were focused on take way longer than they should have. Context switching – jumping back and forth between tasks – is the culprit.

Effects of Context Switching

Screenshot 2024-08-05 at 2.30.53 PM

Source: Quality Software Management

How Marketers Can Accomplish More by Doing Less

Instead of splitting our attention over lots of projects, activities, or campaigns, we need to ruthlessly prioritize just the most important ones. This means debating and agreeing with other teams, leaders, and stakeholders on what really matters to the business right now.

Get all the interested parties together and put everyone’s ideas out in the open. Brainstorm freely, focusing on the marketing work that’s most likely to support well-known organizational goals.

Choose a rigorous approach to determine which ideas bubble up to the top. You don't want to default to choosing only ideas from senior leaders; the best ideas should prevail.

Once priorities have been agreed on, don't let them get derailed (unless there's a really good reason). Marketing leaders should protect their teams so they can focus their efforts.

What Is Agile Prioritization?

At its core, Agile is all about working smarter instead of harder. By working on the right tasks at the right times, you’re able to deliver far more value with the same amount of effort. The trick is finding a consistent way to identify what those tasks are. That’s where Agile prioritization comes in.

By applying Agile values and principles to the work prioritization process, you can identify those high-value tasks that will really move the needle for your stakeholders. But how exactly does this work? You can find a more detailed breakdown below, but Agile prioritization starts with understanding what your stakeholders value, alongside your own goals and objectives.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can begin building a backlog of all the work you could be doing. Then, by applying your knowledge of what you want to achieve and estimating the amount of work required to complete tasks, you can prioritize them based on which will deliver the most value with the least amount of effort.

There are many ways to go about this, various methods of estimating workloads, and even gamifying the entire process. But the core always remains the same: identifying what work will deliver the greatest ROI. Over time, you’ll consistently hone the prioritization processes you use to make that determination.

Start Improving Your Prioritization

How to Do Prioritization
in Agile

Now that you have an understanding of what Agile prioritization is, let’s dive into the practical steps you can take to realize its full potential in your organization. Start making time for vital work.

Here at AgileSherpas, we’ve seen countless examples of teams seemingly “doing things in an Agile way” without actually seeing the benefits. The reason usually ties back to a lack of a true Agile mindset. With so many different ways to handle prioritization, it’s easy to fall into the “practices only” trap and undermine your entire effort. A solid understanding of the Agile mindset helps ensure your approach to Agile prioritization gets you the benefits you want.

Every step listed below is built on Agile ways of thinking. From understanding your stakeholders, choosing the right objectives, and prioritizing work on a backlog, Agile ways of thinking are fundamental. 

Building that mindset takes time, but you can start with simple online learning or instructor-led courses. Then, taking the time to apply those principles to real-world situations on your marketing teams will help solidify them. That may mean having teams practice Agile prioritization with the help of an Agile coach. 

However you approach it, be sure to consider mindset before diving straight into Agile ways of working. Be warned: Skipping this step may make effective Agile prioritization far more difficult!

Build Your Agile Mindset

As with any practice, trying to implement Agile prioritization for its own sake is unlikely to get you the benefits you want. Why? Because you need to approach the process with a clear idea of what those benefits are to begin with. Otherwise you’re taking a road trip without considering the destination and getting frustrated you’re not getting there.

The first step towards setting Agile marketing objectives is shifting from a focus on outputs to one of outcomes. Launching a set number of campaigns, emails, blog posts, etc. is meaningless unless those actions produce the kinds of outcomes your stakeholders want. Understanding those outcomes by communicating with your stakeholders is crucial for success.

Next, you want to ensure the goals you set are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). These criteria help ensure the goals you use can serve as an effective north star for your Agile prioritization efforts.

Then, once those objectives are set, remember they can and should evolve when needed. When circumstances change, you should be changing to meet them. For example, if your stakeholders decide on a new strategic priority or if a campaign reaches your intended goals early, you can adapt and set new goals.

How to Set Agile Marketing Objectives

Armed with a solid Agile mindset and a clear idea of what you want to achieve, it’s time to build a backlog. Agile backlogs are lists of all the work your team intends to do, usually in the coming quarter or so. Those items can be big or small, which is why estimating their size (described below) is important.

Of course, in addition to this kind of team-level backlog, you can have others which encompass longer-term goals for your marketing function or organization. You may have a vision backlog that senior leaders use to track strategic initiatives. From there, backlogs get more granular until you have the task-level backlog used by execution teams.

Once you’ve built this list of all your intended work, you’ve got the raw material needed for Agile prioritization. That process begins in the next step with backlog refinement.

Start Building an Agile Backlog

Backlogs are great, but without refinement they’re not truly ready for use. So what is backlog refinement? In short, it’s the process of ordering your backlog by priority and adding details to the items as needed.

Because if you’re going to put all the work you have for an entire quarter in your backlog and then add details like who work is assigned to, due dates, definitions of done, etc. much of that information will be irrelevant by the time someone is ready to work on the task. This is why you want to gradually increase the amount of detail on tasks as they get closer to being high priority.

Of course, that requires prioritization. Using your understanding of your team and stakeholders, you should be able to order all the items in your backlog by priority. The idea here is to consider how much value work items will deliver to stakeholders against the effort required to complete that work. You may also want to consider the cost of delay. By prioritizing this way, you set yourself up to work smarter instead of harder, completing tasks that deliver the maximum ROI.

Don’t forget that your backlog should be a living and evolving thing. That means backlog refinement isn’t just something you do once a month or quarter, it should be a regular activity. This ensures your backlog is current and relevant, something everyone on your team knows reflects current realities.

That said, if everyone is able to change the backlog at all times, you’re going to have chaos. It helps to have clear processes for how work items get added to the backlog and taken from the backlog to be worked on.

Agile Backlog Refinement Best Practices

Effectively refining your backlog requires estimating how much work is required to complete a task. The problem is, we’re terrible at doing this. Not we as in marketers, we as in human beings. Even seasoned marketing leaders typically fail to reliably guess how long projects or individual tasks will take to complete. So how can you ensure your estimations are reliable enough to base your Agile prioritization on?

The first step is deciding how you want to estimate: based on the hours a task takes or its difficulty. In general though, we recommend estimating based on complexity as this tends to be more accurate and useful for estimating how much work a team can complete in a set period. Difficulty estimation also accounts for unknown factors better than hourly, as a task may be marked as difficult simply because it’s complex and hard to estimate.

When it comes to the estimation itself, there are a few techniques you can use. Some teams assign tasks t-shirt sizes, while others will use abstract ideas like fruit or dogs to represent size. Here at AgileSherpas, we use the fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on) because it reflects the reality that as task complexity increases, the duration, dependencies, and unknowns increase as well. Thus the exponentially increasing scale of fibonacci numbers automatically accounts for that factor.

However you approach estimation, it’s vital you check your accuracy so you can iterate over time. If your estimates are always wrong but you never track this and try ways to improve, that improvement is just never going to happen. One way to gamify this process is called planning poker. But however you approach it, estimation needs to be taken seriously and viewed as a multi-faceted approach.

Start Estimating More Reliably

You can talk about prioritizing the right work to deliver value to your stakeholders all day, but without measurement, you’re going to be doing so blind. Identifying and tracking the right Agile metrics is crucial to seeing how your prioritization efforts are translating into real value. Armed with this information, you can then experiment and improve your processes further.

One way to get feedback on the value you’re delivering is by getting regular feedback from your stakeholders about the work you’re delivering. But tracking how well you’re functioning is also important. One important metric to use here is lead time. This is the time between when a piece of work is requested by a stakeholder (or when you begin actively working on it, depending on how your team functions) and when it’s delivered.

This helps you track your team’s process efficiency. Of course, you can still experience delays in reviews, handoffs, etc. leading to longer lead times, which should be addressed. But overall, tracking and iterating on your team’s process efficiency enables you to supercharge the impact of your prioritization. If Agile prioritization is enabling you to do the right work at the right time, tracking and iterating to improve lead time enables you to do more of that valuable work.

Start Tracking Your Lead Time

As you’re going through your Agile prioritization process, stakeholder management is vital. It’s how you can ensure you get enough information to understand their priorities without getting overwhelmed with constant feedback. It’s also how you can understand how effectively you’re ultimately delivering that value.

The first thing to consider is who is responsible for this stakeholder management. In general, marketing owners will take the lead on more strategic issues while Agile leads can handle operational ones. For Agile prioritization, this means marketing owners can work to understand stakeholder priorities while Agile leads manage the day-to-day delivery of work and feedback on that work.

Just be sure to structure this relationship. In most cases, you want to interact with and get feedback from your stakeholders on a set cadence. This can help prevent lots of unplanned work and confusion among marketers. One way to do this is with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that explicitly lay out precisely how that relationship should function and what each side can expect from the other.

Finally, as with all things in Agile, be ready to troubleshoot. If you’re not getting information on shifting strategic priorities enough, maybe you need more frequent touchpoints. Experimentation is key to finding the right stakeholder management strategy for you.

Try Modern Stakeholder Management

Key Agile Prioritization Techniques

While you can simply decide what tasks are high priority with your judgment, having a formal process is extremely helpful. These are a few of our favorite techniques.

Stack ranking is what most of us use when prioritizing things. It’s simply listing them in order of priority. This can be useful when most or all the tasks you’re tackling are of a similar size/difficulty, but once things get more complex you’ll want to consider a system designed for that complexity.

Stack ranking is what most of us use when prioritizing things. It’s simply listing them in order of priority. This can be useful when most or all the tasks you’re tackling are of a similar size/difficulty, but once things get more complex you’ll want to consider a system designed for that complexity.

No, there’s nothing Russian about this approach. MoSCoW is an acronym for the four categories this system breaks items down into. Mo for Must Have, S for Should have, Co for Could have, and W for Won’t have. Instead of simply listing by priority and assuming all work will get done, MoSCoW helps teams think about whether a task should be done at all.

Unlike MoSCoW, this technique does come from where you imagine it might. Popularized by President Eisenhower, this prioritization matrix breaks work down into four categories based on two factors. The first is Important and Not Important. The second is Urgent and Not Urgent. Obviously work that is urgent and important gets prioritized while things that are not important and not urgent gets deleted - you just don't do them. Not Urgent & Important gets scheduled, Urgent & Not important gets delegated to someone else, another team or vendor for example.

Another more advanced prioritization framework to consider is cost of delay (CoD). This framework helps to quantify the economic value of completing work sooner rather than later by calculating the cost of not doing the work compared to the time required to complete it. 

This calculation considers the value of the work to the business or customer, and its urgency over the duration of the initiative. The results are more data-driven and can provide useful data points to stakeholders asking for changes in priority.

middle-aged-woman-presenting-in-meeting-600x600 Why Better Project Plan Quality Starts with Doing Less

Steps You can Take for Better Marketing Planning

Your top priority should be the task that shows the best ratio between effort required and value delivered. That might be a very difficult task that will substantially move the needle or it might be a task that’s extremely easy but still will do something important for your stakeholders. The mantra you should follow to make that decision should be doing “the right work at the right time.”

This is a crucial question because when anyone or everyone sets priorities, you get chaos. First, marketing leadership sets the vision, goals, and overarching priorities for the marketing department. On Agile teams themselves, the marketing owner should be the one to prioritize the backlog and thereby set team priorities. However, this doesn’t mean they do so alone. The team itself should also have input in things like estimation while stakeholders will help set the strategic priorities the marketing owner will aim to achieve.

Information on task deadlines should be contained in the cards connected to those tasks. Those deadlines are one of the aspects that need to be considered during prioritization; important work with a tight deadline would rank lower than important work with a later deadline. Often, deadlines are informed by stakeholders, events like product launches, seasonal events like Black Friday, etc. Knowing deadlines upfront can assist with prioritization, but it's not the only determining factor.

Trying to prioritize multiple tasks, particularly complex ones with varying levels of complexity, can be extremely difficult. But the best approach is to be structured and deliberate. By using the Agile prioritization process laid out on this page, you can estimate and prioritize multiple tasks in a way that delivers maximum value to your stakeholders without putting undue pressure on marketing teams.

While it’s important to take deadlines into consideration, they shouldn’t be what drives your prioritization. If something is “due today,” but won’t deliver any real value to stakeholders, then it probably shouldn’t get done at all. That’s why Agile prioritization considers value delivered and effort required above deadlines. So when a task has no deadline, you should simply rely more on those basic considerations or contact the stakeholder to understand when something is due so you can factor that into your prioritization.

Agile ways of working don’t have specific set levels of priority. Instead, there are many different ways to break down tasks by their levels of priority like stack ranking, MoSCow, etc. Rather than focusing on what the levels are, it’s best to simply adopt a structured approach that works for you and iterate on it as needed.

The Pareto Principle has become a core idea for Agile ways of working. It says that 80% of the impact can be generated by focusing on 20% of your work. In other words, most of the value you create likely comes from a small fraction of the work you actually do. This is a key reason why prioritization is so important in Agile. It’s how you determine what that 20% is so you can focus your efforts there.

A prioritization framework is a systematic approach for prioritizing work. Importantly, Agile marketing does not have a single prioritization framework that everyone uses. Instead, different teams can apply Agile values and principles in their own ways to find an approach that works best for them. Experimenting and iterating is crucial to figuring this out for your team.

Ready to Tackle Your Prioritization Problems?

AgileSherpas’ prioritization bootcamp takes this thorny problem and breaks it down into manageable steps. In just 6 weeks you’ll have a handle on one of the biggest barriers modern marketers face.

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