Key Takeaways

• Agile marketing is not simply “Agile applied to marketing,” but a full operating system designed for the ambiguity, creativity, and cross-functional challenges that modern marketing teams face.
• Because marketing has evolved from managing a handful of predictable channels into juggling dozens of platforms, metrics, and stakeholders, traditional ways of working are no longer sufficient. Agile is especially valuable in the GenAI era, where marketers face more data, tools, and uncertainty, making adaptive planning and transparency essential.
• Many organizations think they’ve adopted Agile marketing, but simply renaming meetings or adopting a tool doesn’t create meaningful change, leading to poor results.
• Marketing requires its own unique Agile approach because its work is intangible, highly dependent on other functions, fragmented by differing team languages, flooded with requests, and often rewarded for output rather than outcomes.
• The Agile Marketing Operating System™ provides a structured solution by aligning mindset, culture, planning, process, and people, ensuring that true agility only happens when all dimensions work together.
• Agile marketing requires focusing strategically on customer value rather than campaign volume, supported by quarterly planning, backlog prioritization, and outcome-based metrics.
• Ways of working in Agile marketing adapt established frameworks but always prioritize rhythm, reflection, visual alignment, and sustainable pace through tools like Kanban boards, standups, retrospectives, and WIP limits.
• Scrum gives marketing teams structure through sprints, defined roles, and rituals, but requires discipline in maintaining backlogs and adapting to frequent changes in priority.
• Kanban emphasizes visualizing work, limiting tasks in progress, and continuously optimizing flow, making it highly adaptable for teams with many dependencies or varied sizes.
• Scrumban blends Scrum’s cadence with Kanban’s flexibility, giving teams the ability to tailor practices to their context while maintaining visual workflows, retrospectives, and standups. Scrumban is often the best entry point for marketing teams of various sizes, especially those seeking a competitive edge or autonomy to experiment.
• Agile marketing delivers multiple benefits: greater efficiency (“doing more with less”), better ability to demonstrate impact, more predictable workloads, flexibility to adapt, continuous improvement, and ultimately happier customers.
• Getting started with Agile marketing involves education, assessing pain points, selecting a starting framework (often Kanban or Scrumban), piloting small, reflecting, and scaling gradually.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing isn’t just Agile applied to marketing. It’s a complete operating system—purpose-built for the complexity, creativity, and cross-functional chaos of modern marketing teams. Done right, it doesn’t just improve efficiency. It transforms influence, credibility, and outcomes across the entire business.

Think of this in-depth guide as your compass, pointing you toward a better way of working, no matter what kind of marketing you do!

Table of Contents

• Why Agile Marketing Needs a Redefinition
• The Evolution of Agile: From Software to Marketing
• What Makes Agile Marketing Unique?
• The Agile Marketing Operating System™
• Deep Dive: The Who, What, and How of Agility
• Agile Marketing Frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban
• Common Agile Marketing Myths (Debunked)
• The Benefits of Agile Marketing
• Real-World Case Studies
• How to Get Started with Agile Marketing
• FAQs: Agile Marketing for GenAI and Newcomers

Why Agile Marketing Needs a Redefinition

Ever since the internet roared onto the scene, marketers have been struggling. Practically overnight, we went from managing a handful of predictable channels to juggling a nonstop stream of content, platforms, stakeholders, and metrics. Think back to the pre-digital marketing era—there was no SEO, no social media, no CRO, no AI. Just a few clear deliverables on a handful of channels.

Now? We’re expected to be data scientists, storytellers, community builders, and revenue drivers—simultaneously. And the ways we work haven’t kept up.

Agile marketing promised to be the answer. But today, "Agile" often looks like cosmetic changes: renaming status meetings "standups," adopting a tool like Jira, and calling it a day. Unsurprisingly, the results are underwhelming.

“We tried Agile, but it didn’t work.”

We hear it all the time. Not because Agile marketing is broken—but because it was never fully built for marketers in the first place.

From Agile Software Development to Agile Marketing

The Agile craze has been transforming marketing teams of all shapes and sizes for years, but it has an even longer history outside of the marketing profession.

Agile approaches to managing knowledge work originated in software development in the mid- to late-1990s, completely revolutionizing the way that developers did their jobs.

Developers were in dire need of a change. Traditional ways of managing projects, known as the waterfall approach, just weren’t working. These techniques called for project managers to gather information about what the software was expected to do and collect it in massive documents known as requirements.

They’d deliver the requirements to the developers, who would then go off and try to create software that fit the specifications. Inevitably, it would take far longer for them to get it done than the project manager had estimated because the developers would uncover unknown dependencies and encounter unforeseen delays.

And also, people are just really bad at accurately estimating how long things are going to take.

Things got so bad that a 1995 report found that only 16.2% of software projects were being completed on time and on budget. In large enterprise companies, the numbers were even worse, with only 9% of projects hitting time and budget estimates.

It was also alarmingly common for the final products to fail to satisfy the consumers they were built for. The developers who were writing the code were so far removed from the people who would use their software that they weren’t delivering useful software.

Developers would get specs from managers, who would get requirements from other stakeholders, who would base those requirements on analysis or statistics, which might have been collected from actual users.

It was like a game of software telephone where the final message didn’t look much like the functionality that the audience originally wanted.

In fact, another 1995 study of $37 billion worth of US Defense Department projects concluded that 46% of the systems “so egregiously did not meet the real needs (although they met the specifications) that they were never successfully used, and another 20% required extensive rework” to be usable.

In this environment, early Agile pioneers like Jeff Sutherland, David Anderson, Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, and many others started searching for a better way to do work. In February of 2001, seventeen software practitioners met and wrote the original Agile Manifesto for Software Development.

From there, methodologies like Scrum and Kanban began to emerge as ways to apply those core principles to software creation.

The results of applying these new systems were staggering.

Agile software development teams could now provide:

• Transparency and visibility into their work throughout the development process.
• Early and predictable delivery of small increments of work instead of one huge project that might take years to complete.
• Predictable costs and schedule rather than ever-expanding scopes and timelines.
• Adaptation to changes in the market and business goals.
• A focus on user needs and business value.
• Higher quality products with fewer bugs and defects.

Over time, it’s become obvious that other aspects of modern businesses could benefit from taking similar approaches to their work, and so Agile has begun to spread from software into other functions.

Agile marketing is one of the newer applications, with the Agile Marketing Manifesto having been written in 2012, and that specific use case is the focus of the rest of this guide (and this site in general).

What Makes Agile Marketing Unique?

Here’s what most generic Agile approaches get wrong about marketing:

1. Our Work Is Often Intangible

How do you measure the ROI of a rebrand? Of an awareness campaign? Even with the best tools, attribution is fuzzy at best.

2. We Have Constant Dependencies

Want to launch a campaign? You need legal to approve copy, IT to deploy the site, and sales to align on messaging. These handoffs delay and disrupt work.

3. Our Teams Lack a Shared Language

A performance marketer and a designer may sit in the same room, but they don’t speak the same “work” language. Misunderstandings create waste.

4. We’re Drowning in Requests

Without Agile guardrails, marketers become order-takers—churning out landing pages and decks with no strategy in sight.

5. We Reward Volume Over Value

Output (posts, emails, campaigns) gets measured, while outcomes (customer impact, growth) are harder to track.

This is why Agile marketing needs more than borrowed frameworks. It needs a purpose-built system.

Before proceeding to learn about the Agile Marketing Operating System™, why don't you take a second to get the most recent State of Agile Marketing Report?

The Agile Marketing Operating System™

AgileSherpas built the Agile Marketing Operating System™ (AoS) to provide that purpose-built system.

It’s a unified model that aligns how teams work, what they work on, and who does the work.

“Only at the intersection of How, What, and Who does true agility live.”

At its core, the AoS includes:

• Mindset: Progress over perfection, experimentation, iteration
• Culture: Trust, transparency, radical candor
• Planning: Strategic quarterly plans with sprint-level adaptations
• Process: Kanban boards, WIP limits, sprint rituals, backlog prioritization
• People: Empowered teams with clear roles and leadership support

This is not a theory. It’s the system we’ve installed and refined across hundreds of marketing teams.

Deep Dive: The Who, What, and How of Agility

The Who: People and Teams

• Leaders must become coaches, not controllers
• Marketers need space to learn, experiment, and improve
• Teams should be cross-functional and stable, not rotating task-forces
• Customers (internal + external) must be centered in decision-making

The What: Strategic Focus

• Customer Value is the north star, not just campaign volume
• Quarterly Planning sets goals, but leaves room to pivot
• Metrics are clear and tied to business outcomes
• Backlogs are prioritized and reviewed frequently

The How: Ways of Working

• Frameworks (Scrum, Kanban) are adapted, not blindly copied
• Ceremonies create rhythm and reflection (standups, retros, planning)
• Visual Tools (Kanban boards, dashboards) align teams
• Practices like WIP limits reduce burnout and increase flow

This three-dimensional model lets teams work faster and smarter.

Before proceeding to learn about Agile marketing frameworks, take a moment to explore The Agile Marketing Credo — the new foundation for how modern marketers work with clarity, focus, and impact.

Agile Marketing Frameworks

There is no one-size-fits-all Agile framework. That’s why marketers often mix and match. Here are the most common:

Scrum for Agile Marketing

Scrum uses fixed sprints (usually 2 weeks) to deliver prioritized work. It includes roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner), rituals (planning, review, retro), and a shared backlog.

Best for: Teams that can operate independently and commit to work in chunks.

Challenges: Tough to sustain if priorities change daily or teams are overloaded.

What is Agile Marketing Like With Scrum?

Ok, let's talk about Scrum. This is a basic diagram of how Scrum works on a team, which you may have seen before. Let's start by talking about what we see here.

First, we see the backlog, which is simply a prioritized to-do list for the marketing team to use as the source of all their work. That's a nice, simple explanation, but backlogs are shockingly difficult to maintain.

To be at their most useful, they need to be constantly updated, and the work near the top needs to have enough detail that the Agile marketing team could start working on it immediately without asking anybody any questions. 

A good backlog is the heart of a high-functioning Agile team of any kind, and if you neglect it, you'll quickly find issues cropping up throughout the process.

At the start of each Sprint, the marketing team pulls work from the comprehensive marketing backlog to form the smaller Sprint backlog. This is the amount of work they believe they can complete within their next Sprint. It's up to the team to make this call, not their manager, the director, or the CMO.

The idea is that the Agile team who executes the work has the best understanding of how long things REALLY take to get done, so they're best qualified to decide how much they can complete in the next few weeks.

Sprint Planning Meeting

The meeting where the team figures all of this out is called Sprint Planning.

Generally, you should plan to take an hour for each week of your sprint for planning, meaning a two-week Sprint will take two hours to plan. If you're estimating the size of your work, that should also happen during Sprint Planning.

You can assign points to each project to reflect its relative size, typically using the Fibonacci sequence that you see here. So a project that's a 2 is twice as big as a project that's given a size of 1, and so forth.

The total number of points that the team is working on is known as its Velocity and ideally, that number should climb steadily as the team stabilizes and gets better at practicing Scrum.

Estimating helps you get a more objective look at how much the team is doing, but it's a bit of a controversial practice.

Some people think estimating is actually a waste of time because humans are really, really bad at it.

We get it wrong a lot, especially when we're new to the practice. Others think that without estimating, it's practically impossible to track a Scrum team's progress over time. Estimation can also help quantify the costs of interruptions or emergencies, because the team can say, "when we have an external interruption, we only get 25 points done, but without interruptions we get 32."

As with most things on an Agile team, my recommendation for you when it comes to estimation is to try it out and see if it helps your team. That said, planning poker has been found to reliably improve accuracy over time, so it’s worth a try.

Be honest about whether the time it takes is getting you the benefits you're after, and adjust accordingly. Just make sure you devote plenty of time to the experiment, i.e., at least a couple of months, because it can take teams quite a while to get good at experimentation.

During the Sprint

After the Sprint Planning meeting, the team is committed to a set amount of work, and the Sprint begins. Ideally, once they've started the Sprint, the team is locked into only the work they've chosen.

Nobody should be able to add anything new onto them.

In reality, there are usually unplanned things that come up, so you can either negotiate these events by taking some work out to make room for the unplanned projects, or you can leave some of the team's time unplanned, knowing that something will happen to fill that time.

As the Sprint proceeds, the team meets every day to share their individual updates on how things are going during the Daily Standup meeting, also known as the Daily Scrum.

This meeting shouldn't last any longer than 15 minutes, because otherwise you're wasting a ton of the team's time. It helps to have everyone actually standing up to motivate them to keep things nice and short. 

The traditional format for standup is to talk about only three things: what each team member did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and any roadblocks they're experiencing. It's very easy for this meeting to devolve into a boring check-in, but it should be more like a mini-strategy meeting or a football huddle.

All team members should be thinking about how they can join forces in the next 24 hours to get things done better, just like a football team decides what play to run next in each huddle.

As the Sprint comes to a close, the goal is to have something that could be released to the audience. If it's a small component of a larger campaign, you don't HAVE to release it, but the great thing about Scrum is that it helps us deliver useful marketing work to our audience constantly and consistently.

Post-Sprint Meetings

Also, at the end of the Sprint, the team holds two final meetings: the Sprint review and a Retrospective.

The Sprint review is like a show and tell. Any and all internal stakeholders attend, and the marketing team shows what they've completed during the previous Sprint.

This meeting isn't useful if only the Scrum team attends, because they've been working together for weeks on these tasks, and they don't need to show them to each other yet again. Make sure the team leads are getting the people who asked for that work into the Sprint review so they can actually use what's been created and give their feedback.

A retrospective, on the other hand, is attended only by the Scrum team.

It's their opportunity to honestly discuss how the process is working for them and how they might make it better. Any suggestions for improvements that the team comes up with should be documented and added to the backlog to make sure they're acted on. There's nothing more frustrating than talking about the same things at every single retrospective because the problem isn't being addressed.

Retros are another meeting that can stagnate easily if you don't keep them fresh. Be sure you have a facilitator to run the meeting and encourage participation from every contributor as well as respectful debate. These meetings should be one of the most important hours that your team spends together.

And then, after the retro, it all starts again with a Sprint planning meeting.

Members of the Scrum Marketing Team

That's a high-level look at WHAT happens on a Scrum marketing team, but we also need to talk about WHO belongs on these teams. Traditional Scrum roles include a Scrum Master, a Product Owner (PO), and developers, but marketing teams don't usually look like this.

For one thing, few of us have the budget to hire our own dedicated Scrum Master. I suggest getting a couple of people on your team certified and rotating Scrum Master responsibilities among them so they can still perform their "regular" jobs too.

As their name implies, the Scrum Master helps ensure the team is using Scrum in the best way possible. They facilitate meetings, help the team embrace the Agile mindset, and provide suggestions for process improvement.

As for the Product Owner, this Scrum role is designed to be the intermediary between the development team and the business. They keep the backlog current, communicate with stakeholders, and help the team make sure they're doing the right work at the right time.

Marketing teams typically find the best success when they give the Product Owner responsibilities to a marketing leader such as a director or senior manager.

Also, there's no need to formally change someone's title to Product Owner. The important thing is that they (and the people they interact with) understand their duties as the PO.

Finally, Scrum originally envisioned a team of purely cross-functional folks who all had the title of developer. Marketing teams tend to be far more specialized than this, so don't worry about changing everybody's title to "Marketer."

Who Should Use Scrum

As I said, Scrum works great in particular contexts, but it's not necessarily right for everyone. For one thing, it was designed to work on teams of five to nine people. When teams are larger or smaller, things get a bit more complicated.

It also works best when the team is cross-functional, because that means they can complete all their work from start to finish without relying on someone outside the Scrum unit. This gives them a much better chance at actually delivering the work they committed to during Sprint Planning.

So if you rely on freelancers or agencies and want to use Scrum, your best bet is to get them on board with your cadence.

Scrum can also be great for teams that suffer from a lot of external interruptions because it gives you a nice way to say "No" or "Not right now" when people want to throw something onto the team. You can politely say that you'll put it into the backlog and get to it in your next Sprint.

Finally, if your marketing team is open to some serious change in how they manage work, then Scrum could be a good fit for you. Not everybody is up for major alterations in their workflow, so you may encounter resistance if you don't have a really willing marketing team.

Kanban

Kanban visualizes workflow on a board, limits work in progress, and promotes continuous delivery.

Best for: Reactive teams with lots of dependencies or in-house/external collaboration.

Challenges: Needs strong discipline to avoid chaos.

What is Agile Marketing Like With Kanban?

As you can probably tell, Scrum is a pretty prescriptive approach. It has strong opinions about how and when we should do certain things. Kanban, on the other hand, is far more adaptive. It's designed to work WITH the way you already get work done.

Rather than a strict work management system, Kanban is more like a continuous improvement tool.  

Kanban is based on something that sounds a little paradoxical: by limiting the amount of work we do at any given time, we get more done.

Another way of saying this is that Kanban encourages us to stop starting new tasks as a way to postpone finishing tasks that are already in progress.

To show us how much work is in progress we need to see our work, so an accurate visualization of the workflow is one of the central tenets of Kanban. 

Known as a Kanban board, this is a simple system for showing all the possible states that work could be in on your team, and how much work there is in each state at any given time. You've probably seen boards like this; Trello has made them a popular way of managing all kinds of projects.

But just using a Kanban board doesn't mean you're using the Kanban methodology.

In addition to this workflow visualization, we're going to talk about 3 other components of a successful Kanban marketing team: WIP limits, explicit policies, and work item types.

About the Kanban Board

No Kanban team can function without its Kanban board, which must be an accurate representation of how work REALLY gets done on the team, not how you wish it got done or how your managers think work gets done.

When we have our process made visible like this, we can easily see where things are getting stuck, known as bottlenecks. The team can then start to make adjustments to eliminate those bottlenecks and make the work flow more quickly through the team, improving output and efficiency.

If you're having trouble figuring out how to structure the board, think of any serious gates or gatekeepers in your workflow, like approvals, reviews, handoffs from one person to another, or releases to the audience, and use those to create columns.

The board also has to have reasonable start and end points. These should represent the outer limits of where your team controls its workflow.

So if some of the sources of your work are outside the team, if they come from sales, for example, then your workflow visualization shouldn't start with brainstorming new projects.

The same thing goes for the endpoint. If legal has to review everything you do before it's published, you may have to end your board at "ready for review." You don't control how long it takes for legal to review things, so including that stage of work could really mess up your understanding of your workflow. Work would appear to be stuck in Review all the time, but you couldn't do anything to fix that bottleneck.

One more thing about the board: it needs to accurately represent how work happens on your team, but it should also be as simple as possible.

Keep your columns, the states that work goes through before it's done, under seven if you can, and definitely don't let them grow to more than ten. At that point, the system is too complex, and you'll have trouble optimizing the flow of work. If you feel that you need more than ten states of work, you may actually need more than one board.

Don't hesitate to create several different boards if sub-sections of the team do very different kinds of work.

The point of all this visualization, of course, is to see where work is getting stuck and how much people are working. You can't go any faster than your bottleneck, so by finding out where it is and doing your best to mitigate it, you'll improve the flow of work through the team.

WIP Limits

Once we have the board all set up, we need to put limits on how much work can be in each state at any given time. This is called a Work in Progress, or WIP, limit, and it's one of the most powerful tools in the Agile toolbox.

We don't want a WIP limit that's too high, because then we have tasks that sit idle.

If the WIP limit is too low, then we have people who are idle and don't have anything they can work on. In both cases, the work flows sluggishly through the system, which is not what we want.

We need a Goldilocks WIP limit that's just right, keeping people busy and tasks flowing quickly from one state to another. We know we've got this right when we get down to just one bottleneck in the system.

That means there's just one point in our workflow that's operating at maximum capacity, or just one person (or team) in our marketing department working at full capacity all the time.

Everyone else will experience moments of downtime or slack.

Slack is an amazing byproduct of a high-functioning Kanban team (or any high-functioning Agile team, for that matter), because it purposely creates moments when people aren't working. During that time, they can think about ways to improve the process, do some professional education, or strategize about the next great project for their team.

It doesn't matter too much what they do, but the fact that people on the team have time to reflect and consider their next step is a major improvement over marketing teams who spend their time running non-stop without any idea where they're going or why they're going there so fast.

As you're working towards this promised land and setting your first WIP limits, start higher than you think you need to and work down.

That will allow you to take a sufficient amount of work into the system to see how things are flowing (or not flowing). If you start too low, you won't have enough tasks in the flow to see where the areas of improvement really are.

A good rule of thumb is to look at how many people can work on each phase, and double that to set your initial WIP limit. So if we have three writers on the team, the "Writing" column would have a WIP limit of six. 

Making Policies Explicit

The next crucial piece of a Kanban implementation is to create explicit policies about how work gets done on your team. Most of us have implicit policies, or ways that we all just do things, but by making them clear and publicly visible, we eliminate misunderstandings and create consistency across the marketing function.

One of the policies we have to clarify first is the cadence for our Agile marketing team, because we don't have Sprints to provide structure around things like retrospectives and backlog refinement.

This can be powerful because we can have retros every week, but only work on the backlog when it gets down to fewer than five items.

These two activities don't have to be tied to a Sprint schedule; they can happen whenever is best for the team.

Just make sure you clearly define when backlog refinement, retrospectives, and releases will happen. You'll still have standup meetings, but those should continue to happen daily to get the best results.  

You'll also need to create policies around how different kinds of work get done. Deadline-driven projects should automatically take priority over "nice to have" work, and emergency requests from the C-suite may have to put all other work on hold.

Kanban Work Item Types

The most efficient way to get these kinds of policies in place is to create categories or buckets for your work, known as Work Item types. That way, when new work comes into the system, you can quickly categorize it, which allows the team to know which policies apply, and therefore, how they should handle that new work.

This combination of work item types and explicit policies allows Kanban teams to get away from estimating each individual piece of work like some Scrum teams do, so don't neglect these pieces of the Kanban process. 

Try to keep your work item types under six, otherwise, it's difficult for the team to easily recall them as they're planning work.

The same thing goes for the policies that you put in place around your work item types -- you want to keep it around six or fewer so that team members can always remember exactly how to handle various kinds of work that the team is asked to do.

Who Should Use Kanban

Finally, let's talk about who should consider Kanban as their first step on an Agile marketing journey. As with Scrum, I want to share four characteristics that may indicate that Kanban is right for you.

First of all, Kanban can work for teams of just about any size, but it can be particularly useful if your team falls outside of Scrum's sweet spot of five to nine people.

In fact, single-person teams can easily use the Kanban system, and it scales up without much additional effort.

Second, teams that aren't cross-functional can find great benefit in Kanban. So if you rely on external resources, whether that's another department in your organization, freelancers, or agencies, then Kanban could be for you.  

This also means that Kanban is excellent for remote teams, because the board acts as a single source of information everyone can work off of. Instead of asking someone 7 time zones away and waiting all day for a response, the board and its cards should have everything you need to keep going.

If you've got skeptics in your organization who want some quick proof that Agile could work for marketing, Kanban may be able to get you those kinds of results faster since it's designed to work on top of your current system without demanding a whole bunch of change before you start seeing benefits.

And finally, if your marketing team is already super burned out and stressed out, but you still want to help them out with an Agile approach, you should definitely use Kanban. It's so adaptive that it won't disrupt your output or force them to overhaul their systems right away, meaning they can start without much drama.

Scrumban

The best of both worlds. Teams use Kanban boards and WIP limits with sprint planning and retrospectives.

Best for: Most marketing teams. It offers flexibility + structure.

What is Agile Marketing Like With Scrumban?

As you've probably guessed, Scrumban is a combination methodology, taking some elements from Scrum and others from Kanban to create something different. Simply put, it involves applying a Kanban system in a Scrum context.

In practice, that typically means visualizing the workflow on a kanban board that employs WIP limits while continuing to plan and release work within recurring Sprints

While I say "typically," that's really just the most common kind of Scrumban implementation.

Each team will have their own way of applying the Scrumban methodology, and no two will be exactly alike. The great thing about Scrumban is that it's like having access to a fully loaded buffet of Agile options and getting to choose whichever ones you like best.

A few things that you should definitely keep, however, are daily standup meetings, a visualized workflow, and regular retrospectives. Those three things form the foundation of just about any good Agile team, so whatever other components you decide to use, don't get rid of those three.

Some of the use cases for Scrumban are similar to the ones we talked about for Kanban. So if you have very small or very large teams or rely on external sources to complete your work, Scrumban may be a good fit for you.

You might also consider trying Scrumban first if your team is already fairly stable and you're looking for a competitive advantage to give you a leg up on the competition.

Because Scrumban gives you control over every single aspect of the Agile system, you can get some amazing results pretty quickly when you roll it out right.

Likewise, if your team has a good deal of autonomy to experiment with its process, then Scrumban is a great place to start your Agile marketing journey. Autonomy will give you the freedom to experiment across the full range of Scrumban options, so you'll find multiple opportunities for improvement faster.

Common Agile Marketing Myths

Despite being several years from the creation of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, misconceptions about Agile marketing still run rampant, creating misunderstandings and misinformation about the application of Agile principles to marketing.

As part of this explanatory piece, I want to debunk two of the most common (and most dangerous) fallacies that I encounter when talking to marketers about agility:

1. If you’re Agile, you don’t plan anything
2. Agile marketing = using Scrum on your marketing team

Myth #1: Agile is Anti-Planning

This myth can be summed up in a single line from an article claiming to be about Agile marketing: “Can you plan to be agile? Isn’t that cheating?”

Sadly, this author isn’t the only one to make this mistake:

• “Some of the most impressive examples of Agile marketing happened because of an event that couldn’t be planned for.”
• “This is where Agile marketing comes in: small bursts of quickly developed content designed to catch the public mood at just the right time in order to capitalize on a brand new global trend.”
• “Responding to social trends means flexibility, and Agile marketing doesn’t work with controlled and deliberately timed plans.”
• “It’s important to capture and engage with your audience at the right moment, which can’t always be planned for in advance, which is why an effective Agile marketing strategy is key.”*

There’s a lot more roaming unchecked in the wilds of the internet, but my blood pressure is climbing to dangerous levels from re-reading these things.

So I’m going to stop here, because the theme of these excerpts is clear: Agile is the opposite of planning.

I don’t usually like to shut down debate, but…

No.

That is wrong.

Agile marketing includes planning. Requires planning. Embraces planning.

Quite a lot of planning, actually.

Heck, there’s a meeting in Scrum actually called “Sprint PLANNING.”

To be perfectly clear, Agile marketing requires a strategic vision, as well as short-, medium-, and long-term marketing plans.

Truth: Agile Marketers Plan

Agile marketing isn’t free-form, on-the-fly marketing.

What those well-meaning authors that I quoted a few paragraphs ago are talking about is newsjacking, not Agile marketing.

Staying on top of emerging trends and inserting your brand into those conversations is great, and a nifty marketing tactic if you can pull it off, but it has nothing to do with managing your work day-to-day in a truly Agile fashion.

Sure, we want our teams to be agile (note lowercase “a”), as in nimble, responsive, and adaptive, and running your marketing team using Agile principles sets you up to be all of those things.

But Agile marketing teams still execute against marketing strategies and quarterly plans. They just do so with an eye to making adjustments to those plans and strategies as needed, kind of like this:

Myth #2: Agile Marketing is Just Scrum

Now, onto my next pet peeve in Agile marketing content: assuming that all Agile marketing teams will use Scrum.

My friends, Scrum IS NOT the only way to be Agile.

If you encounter an article that explains what Agile marketing is by referencing Sprint Planning, Sprints, or Scrum Masters as if they are non-negotiable components, that writer has made the all too common mistake of equating Agile with Scrum.

To be clear: I’m not a Scrum hater.

I’ve used it.

I like it.

I’m a certified Scrum Master and Product Owner.

Scrum protects many marketing teams from capricious external interruptions and helps them work more effectively. But check out these results from our State of Agile Marketing Report:

Unlike software development, Agile marketing teams have more mixed preferences. For years, our research has found a clear preference for hybrid methods, though that has shifted recently. Today, marketers use the main frameworks almost equally, but that diversity shows just why there’s no single perfect approach.

So please, don’t think that if you want to adopt Agile marketing you have to do so using Scrum.

Truth: Marketers Take a Buffet Approach to Agile Methodologies

Agile marketing takes many, many, many forms.

As we saw above, our State of Agile Marketing Report reveals that marketers use all kinds of frameworks. That said, our own experience has led us to strongly prefer the flexibility and capabilities of hybrid approaches. They’re more likely to deliver some of the more powerful benefits of agility:

The methodology you choose, be it Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, or Lean, should reflect your team’s unique situation.

It’s likely that over time you’ll pull components from multiple methodologies to create your own personal hybrid methodology, but in order to do so, you’ve got to understand what components are available in the first place.

And, not to be a downer or anything, but this process demands serious research and education.

You can’t go out, read a couple of articles with the phrase “Agile marketing” in the title, and figure you’re good to go.

As the disheartening quotes from earlier made clear, not everybody writing about Agile marketing knows their stuff.

So instead of trying to eat the topic of Agile in one enormous bite, take a few smaller bites and digest them one by one. Investigate each methodology in turn, and choose the one that meets your current needs. Then be prepared to evolve it over time.

“Agile marketing isn’t a plug-in. It’s a mindset and a system.”

The Benefits of Agile Marketing

Doing more with less

We’ve got this first on the list of benefits because it’s such a game-changer for marketers and their stakeholders alike. Because Agile enables teams to laser-focus on identifying and prioritizing the most impactful work, they’re able to deliver more value with the same amount of effort.

The Pareto principle tells us that 80% of the value a team produces often comes from just 20% of the work it does. Agile helps you identify that 20%. Or, put another way, Agile is just as much about figuring out what work you shouldn’t be doing as figuring out what you should be doing.

That’s a big reason why marketers have such a positive experience with Agile. That enhanced efficiency gives them more time for long-term planning, creative thinking, or just a chance to catch their breath on occasion. For leaders, this usually translates into better retention rates and happier marketers. 

We’ve seen this in action at places like Charles River Laboratories. Their Agile marketing transformation resulted in dramatic improvements.

Demonstrating your impact

Agile marketing focuses a lot on two things: delivering value to stakeholders and measuring wherever possible. Together, they make it far easier for marketers to show the impact they’re having on broader strategic goals for the organization.

Demonstrating that impact has two important effects. One is that it enables marketing to ask for more resources to further improve its impact. That benefits the entire organization. But it also helps marketers themselves feel more valued. They know leaders can see the results that come directly from their work, so they feel better about that work.

The result is happier marketers and happier senior leaders.

More predictable workloads

Whatever Agile framework you use, one of the key benefits of Agile marketing is predictable workloads. “Wait” I hear you say, “I thought Agile was all about being flexible? How can you be flexible and predictable at the same time?”

It comes down to how Agile marketers structure their work. By regularly stopping to evaluate priorities, estimate how much time tasks will take, and ensure no one has too big a workload, you get both. Each of these pauses is a chance to flexibly shift priorities if the situation warrants it.

But by coming together and assigning work as a team like this, it’s far easier to flag when someone has too much or too little work. When that happens, that person can ask teammates to step in and help. The result is that Agile marketers tend to have a lot more stability in their workloads, leading to less stress.

Read more about Quadient’s Agile experience.

Greater flexibility

Speaking of flexibility, that’s another major benefit of Agile marketing. As we just mentioned, regularly coming together as a team to evaluate priorities, update work based on new information, etc., enables teams to operate with far greater flexibility.

But most teams have such meetings every two weeks or so, what about in between? That’s where the predictable workloads come in. When most or all marketers on a team are operating at around 70% capacity most of the time, that excess capacity can be used to handle crises when they arise.

So at the end of the day, predictability and flexibility aren’t in opposition. In fact, they support each other!

Continuous improvement

One of the core ideas behind Agile ways of working is that nothing is truly permanent. No process is ever going to work well forever because the world around it is always changing. Traditionally, we simply use a process until it becomes so hopelessly broken and outdated that we’re forced to change it, often quite painfully. Agile takes another approach.

By building continuous improvement into how your marketing teams operate, you’re able to identify those issues and address them far earlier. Typically, this begins with someone talking about something that could be improved at a retrospective meeting. Then, the team can brainstorm potential solutions that can be tested and confirmed with data.

If the tests improve things, fantastic! If they don’t, you take the learnings and develop another idea to test. Because this process is continuous and built into how Agile marketing teams function, processes get improved long before they become so broken that marketers feel like they’re working with one hand behind their back.

More satisfied customers

All these benefits of Agile marketing are great, but if they don’t deliver value to our stakeholders and customers, then there’s not much point. Agile teams are regularly meeting to prioritize work, but how that prioritization happens is crucial. The main criterion is delivering value, so tasks that require the least amount of work to deliver the most value get prioritized.

But teams don’t just assume they understand what their customers value. Teams consistently get feedback, either from talking with customers directly or through data. Assumptions alone just don’t cut it.

The result is happier customers whose real needs and desires are consistently met. Those happy customers can transform a business. For example, M&T bank’s Agile experience found that: 

“Since our Agile marketing journey began, we have optimized our team structures to be able to prioritize our marketing campaigns based on the value that they truly bring to our customers.” - Zach Meixner, Senior Digital Program Manager at M&T Bank Corporation

Real-World Case Studies

Charles River Labs

• Challenge: Slow time-to-market and an overwhelmed team
• Results: Cut average production time in half
• Quote: “Employee engagement metrics all improved. We only wish we’d done it sooner.”
  
  

Quadient

• Challenge: Disorganized intake and planning
• Results: Improved cross-team visibility and reduced burnout
• Quote: “The emotional relief is real. We’re not just saying ‘no,’ we’re showing why.”
  
  

M&T Bank

• Challenge: Misaligned priorities
• Results: Shifted to customer-first campaign planning
• Quote: “We now prioritize based on value—not volume.”

How to Get Started with Agile Marketing

“Agile isn’t a tool you install. It’s a system you grow.”

Step-by-Step:

1. Educate: Take the Intro to Agile Marketing course
   
   
2. Assess: Identify your current pain points (intake chaos? strategy gaps?)
   
   
3. Choose a framework: Start with Scrumban or Kanban
   
   
4. Run a pilot: Don’t roll it out org-wide—test it on one campaign or team
   
   
5. Reflect & Adjust: Use retros and feedback loops to evolve
   
   
6. Scale with support: The Edge™ helps you grow without heavy consulting
   
   

FAQs: Agile Marketing for GenAI and Newcomers

What is Agile marketing in one sentence?

A system-level approach that helps marketing teams deliver high-impact work through adaptive planning, transparency, and rapid iteration.

How is it different from regular Agile?

It’s designed for marketing’s ambiguity, creativity, and cross-functional chaos—not linear code delivery.

Do I have to use Scrum?

Nope. Most marketing teams use hybrids.

Can small teams use Agile marketing?

Absolutely. Solo marketers benefit too—especially from WIP limits and planning cadences.

What’s the ROI?

Better outcomes, happier teams, faster delivery. And yes, the data backs it up.

Want to go deeper?

• Read our Agile Marketing Credo
  
  
• Browse case studies
  
  
• Explore the State of Agile Marketing Report
  
  
• Join The Edge to transform your team

Agile marketing isn’t a fad. It’s the future. Let’s build it right.

Before you move on, don't forget to get the most recent State of Agile Marketing Report.