PART 1
PRINCIPLES
The Fertile Soil of Marketing Agility

But a war, a strike for a principle is never a mistake, never odious, never unwise on the part of those who contend for the principle, for the right, for the truth.

ANONYMOUS, THE STATION AGENT, JANUARY 1894

I’LL BE THE FIRST to admit, the detailed processes and practices that form the latter part of this book are a little like the sleek exterior of a sports car. They’re what everybody sees, the things that elicit “oohs” and “aahs” from passersby.

But without a foundation, even the shiniest surface fades. A snazzy sports car with a crappy engine is a major disappointment. Likewise, without shared principles acting as a driving force, even the best-intentioned process stands little chance of lasting success. So with these principles, you’ll build the engine of your Rimarketing vehicle.

Rimarketing is based on the seven principles summarized below. They’re not lifted directly from the Agile Manifesto or the Scrum Guide, but if you know Agile, you’ll recognize some themes. Here, like everything in these pages, they’re tailored to marketing’s needs.

1. Customer Focus: All members of the marketing organization, from the CMO to the brand new intern, understand and value customers, defined as the external audience for marketing messages, the internal customers and stakeholders, and all who have bought (or will buy) something.

2. Radical Transparency: Put simply, information is shared. Teams know what’s going on with their members and with other teams. They know the long-term direction of the company, and they know whether the milestones to those objectives are being met. Information hoarding, at the executive or individual level, does not exist in Rimarketing.

3. Continuous Improvement: Things can always be better. Even if we’re far from where we want to be, we willingly take steps, short and long, to reach our goal. Rimarketing processes harness the power of forward momentum.

4. Adaptability: Planning is important; plans, less so. We acknowledge and embrace changing conditions, folding them, when appropriate, into planning and execution.

5. Trust: Teams must trust the direction of senior leaders, leaders must trust their teams to do great work, and team members must trust one another to support their shared goals. Outside the marketing organization, customers must trust in the ethics of the marketers who are communicating with them. Internal customers and stakeholders must also trust marketing to deliver on its commitments.

6. Bias toward Action: Do something, even if it might be wrong. Although we prefer to take action based on long experience and great data, we also prefer acting on incomplete information over waiting until we have an overwhelming body of evidence.

7. Courage: Rimarketing calls on its members to make hard choices regularly. Whether it’s advocating for the customer, pointing out a process flaw, or calling out colleagues on poor behavior, everyone needs the courage to do the right thing.

Principle 1: Customer Focus

As used here, “customer” includes many who have not bought and some who may never buy. A marketing team’s customers fall into three main categories, and some teams may serve more than one of them:

• ■ Internal customers: An organization has lots of people—those in sales, product development, customer service, user experience, and even other marketing functions—who need things from the marketing team. Although these internal groups probably aren’t a firm’s sole customers, a Rimarketing team must still serve them and balance their needs against those of paying customers.

• ■ Content marketing consumers: With the rise of content marketing since the early part of the twenty-first century, most marketing groups direct the bulk of their time and resources to cultivating a relationship with an audience. The team hopes these people will become customers, and they continuously create and give away valuable content for them to that end.

• ■ Traditional customers: A Rimarketing team, of course, attends also to those who buy what the organization sells.

Any team activity must clearly serve at least one of these customers. Only a request with a clear customer connection makes it into the workflow. (We’ll look more closely at the value of saying no from a process perspective later.) The Rimarketing team knows its customers intimately, and it pushes back hard against taking on work that doesn’t serve them.

Of course, one customer’s needs may conflict with another’s. A sales representative may want us to drop everything this week to create custom marketing materials for a high-dollar prospect call, and we’ve planned to spend the week creating new content resources for our pre-purchase audience. Sales is an internal customer, and email subscribers and social media followers who consume our content are also customers. What do we do?

Here, process kicks in, putting the team’s leadership in contact with the requesting sales rep so that leadership can evaluate the request against the team’s existing commitments. Since understanding each customer is central to the customer-focus principle, we—our team and its leaders—must prioritize based on what we know about each customer.

This level of understanding requires effort. Taking time to explore the needs of customers up front is vital, but we don’t want the Rimarketing process stalled by a need to learn the basics about our customers so that we can make a time-sensitive prioritization call.

Getting to Know Your Customers

Per the sixth Rimarketing principle, we have a bias toward action, even in our customer exploration. We don’t want to spend months on persona creation when we can use lightweight tools to get to know them. This approach enables us to move quickly from an informed position, while understanding that our knowledge is basic and incomplete. Finally, we balance all the Agile exploration tools that we’ll discuss here against the need to hold, whenever possible, conversations with real customers.

And by “conversations” I don’t mean looking at their lead score in your customer-relations management (CRM) software, or reviewing segment behavior in your website analytics. I mean talking with actual people who represent your customer segments. Some of the tools described below focus these conversations on actionable takeaways; others help you document an imaginary dialogue with a customer you already know well. But never assume that a canvas or a persona is a replacement for regular interaction with the people you want to reach.

Minimum Viable Persona

The first customer centricity tool we’ll explore is the Minimum Viable Persona. Based on the Minimum Viable Product concept popularized by Eric Ries’s Lean Startup, this approach to audience categorization aims to collect the minimum amount of information necessary to begin communicating effectively with a group.

Traditional marketing teams are prone to spending many months and thousands of dollars on crafting a perfect, data-centric persona. They conduct lengthy surveys, slice and dice the data dozens of ways, follow up with in-person interviews, and refine it all into a beautiful document like the one shown in Figure 3.

Don’t get me wrong; personas are valuable components of modern marketing. I do not advocate their elimination. What I’m arguing for is something more lightweight, more Agile.

FIGURE 3
Traditional Persona Diagram

Source: Author.

Like a Minimum Viable Product, a Minimum Viable Persona assumes that you can’t know everything up front, no matter how many surveys you distribute or how many customer interviews you conduct. Knowledge gaps remain.

Furthermore, you uncover the most actionable and important pieces of information about your audience in the earliest parts of your research. Later efforts serve as validation for early insights; they rarely reveal anything new. If we map the value we derive on persona creation against the time it takes us to obtain it, we see diminishing returns.

Chances are that the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is at play here. This mathematical principle tells us that the relationship between most things follows an 80/20 split. Eighty percent of the value from our persona efforts, for instance, comes from just 20 percent of the work.

So we need to get that revelatory, actionable information quickly. We want to accomplish that super valuable 20 percent of the work first; then we can decide whether to pursue the remaining 80 percent. (Because it forms a foundational idea of Rimarketing, this principle recurs throughout the book: we identify and execute first those activities that provide a disproportionately large amount of value.) One way to do this is to tap into internal knowledge about our customer base(s), using an exercise called Four Objects.¹

To use this tool, have someone who’s intimately acquainted with your target audience collect four physical objects that provide insight into the customer’s ideas, behavior, and personality. For instance, if you’re a B2C marketer selling athletic shoes to people who are new to running, your four objects might be (1) a stack of books on basic running topics, (2) screen shots of podcasts on living a healthy lifestyle, (3) athletic-style headphones, and (4) medals and bibs from marathons. Bonus points if you can find a member of that audience segment to help collect these items. Preferably these components of the person’s personality will intersect with your own product, service, or marketing messaging, but you can work with what you have.

Next, gather a group who’ll be responsible for communicating with this audience member. Most likely you’ll have marketing, sales, and customer experience/success/service in the room; you may also want to bring in executives and other leaders, but be aware that their presence might decrease brainstorming potential.

Finally, have everyone take a look at the objects and fill out the Minimum Viable Persona Canvas depicted in Figure 4. (You can find a downloadable version at MasteringMarketingAgility.com.)

You’re looking for a way to tap into the knowledge of the group and get consensus around the following:

• ■ core traits of the audience that will form the foundation of your marketing messaging for them

• ■ several hypotheses that can be tested with marketing or sales efforts—that is, ideas that some people believe are true but that lack consensus from the internal focus group

FIGURE 4
Minimum Viable Persona Canvas

Adapted from a canvas by Centerline Digital.

You can also supplement your on-the-ground persona work with secondary data from the internet. Identify a representative from your audience segment about whom you already have insights through your existing tools. (Even a simple Google Analytics review works here, but it’s more effective to pull a record from your CRM and review real activity.) What pages do they visit on your site? How do they behave on social media? What words do they use when talking about their problems and solutions? What content do they share and respond to?

Use the answers to some of these questions to resolve discrepancies that emerge during your Persona Canvas creation. Again, you’re looking for just enough information to get started, so don’t burn a week on this investigation. This is, as discussed, a Minimum Viable Persona, not the final product. What do I mean by these terms?

• ■ It’s “Minimum” in that we’ve collected the smallest amount of information possible to enable future action.

• ■ It’s “Viable” because it’s a functional, stand-alone document—but by no means the end of the process.

As we learn more about this customer by communicating with them, we expand and update our canvas. Communication here may take place through conversations, email exchanges, or phone calls, or it may occur through marketing channels. The level of engagement this person displays with our marketing collateral tells us how accurately we’ve characterized them. We document the answers to our initial questions and hypotheses and use the new information to adjust how we communicate with this audience segment.

We expand on our Minimum Viable Persona, adding value and functionality until, ultimately, it resembles the beautifully crafted persona document shown in Figure 3. And rather than sit while we spent months creating a perfect piece of research, we connect with our audience and regularly learn about them.

Value Proposition Canvas

Once we know more about who we’re communicating with, we then make sure that we solve their problems with our marketing. We do this by conducting a handful of customer interviews, discussing with them their previous problems and current solutions. Our goal here is to align our work with what our customers want, rather than with what we imagine they want.

Take fifteen or twenty minutes to interview a few customers, and you’ll be amazed at what you learn. Use the following questions to guide the interview, letting the conversation flow easily. Do not press to have all your questions answered!

1. Triggering Event: What are the conditions that created a desire for change? What’s hard about ______?

2. Desired Outcome: How was success first defined? If you previously experienced success, what was it like?

3. Old Solution: What existing solution (if any) is already in place?

4. Consideration Set: What alternative solutions will be/have been considered?

5. New Solution: What new solution was selected last time you were in this situation?

6. Inertia: What habits/anxieties/behaviors hold you back from switching to the new solution?

7. Friction: What habits/anxieties/behaviors got in the way during the use of the new solution?

8. Actual Outcome: Was the job done? Was it done well? How could it be better?

9. Next Summit: What are you going to do next?

If that format seems heavy, you can always just ask, “What was hard about the last time you [did the thing we’re hoping to help you do]?” If you listen closely, what you discover may be surprising.

Remember that your customers might not always be external; don’t be afraid to try this same thing with your internal customers.

Once you’ve conducted the initial interview, use your notes to complete the right side of the Value Proposition Canvas shown in Figure 5. You can also download a blank version at Mastering MarketingAgility.com.

As illustrated, you want to split your insights into three sections:

1. Gains

2. Pains

3. Jobs to be done

This last insight comes from product development, where feature creep can be avoided by aligning the group around a focus on what the customer wants the product to do. For instance, we might say that as marketers we hire email-marketing software to send emails to the right people at the right time so that we don’t have to do it manually.

FIGURE 5
Value Proposition Canvas

Canvas based on original by Alexander Osterwalder.

Given that point of view, people developing email marketing software can focus on building things that help us do those jobs. They can create all kinds of spam or GDPR compliance features, or make it dead simple to design stunning emails, but if those aren’t the jobs we want this tool to do for us, we don’t buy the product based on those features.

Similarly, we want to create marketing materials that solve the problems our audiences face. They have jobs to do; we want to be the ones they choose to help them.

Continuing with our email automation example, the marketing team for this tool would want to focus on creating collateral that helps marketers do the identified jobs, for example:

• ■ Send to the right people.

• ■ Send at the right time.

• ■ Avoid manual work.

Notice that the canvas identifies three kinds of jobs: tactical, emotional (or psychological), and social. As marketers, we must focus on differentiating among these because people hire our marketing to accomplish tasks across this spectrum, especially when it comes to sharing content.

Emotional tasks make us feel or think a certain way. If I can send more emails and all of them get higher levels of engagement, I feel successful at my job. I might also feel less overwhelmed by the volume of emails I have to create by hand. The marketers for the email automation tool can build on that psychological task in their messaging and campaigns.

Social jobs are more about how activities make us look to people around us. For marketing this is most relevant to things like social media shares and email forwards. When customers, prospects, or audience members share something we’ve created, what message are they sending to their followers? Do they look smart for being up on the latest research? Are they clever for sending around a funny email-related meme? Sometimes we need to lean into the social tasks and away from the more serious tactical ones.

That can be hard to do, because tactical jobs are the ones we really like to talk about. These are the ways our features and benefits make customers’ lives easier. That’s a tried-and-true marketing conversation, and it’s one we want to have all the time. There are certainly times when tactical tasks should be the focus of our marketing, but even then it should be about what a customer would hire our product, service, or marketing collateral to do for them. It’s their job to be done, and we’re here to help. They’re the hero of the story; we’re the supporting character.

Once we’ve completed the right side of the canvas and identified these areas of opportunity, we can start designing actual marketing activities to meet those needs. Now’s the time to talk channels and tactics, all with the focus on the items collected on the canvas. This helps us stay attuned to the audience, rather than getting lost in great ideas for cool new campaigns that may or may not add value.

Principle 2: Radical Transparency

The second Rimarketing principle involves a willingness to be open about all aspects of a process. Said another way, it’s a commitment to providing visibility into everything you do in a way that demands very little work by your team or an outside observer.

Information hoarding—at any level, by anyone—does not happen in Rimarketing. Teams know what’s going on with their own members and with other teams. They also know the long-term direction of the company and whether interim goals are being met.

Radical transparency as a concept was first introduced by Ray Dalio in the early 1990s. He explained it this way in a recent interview: “When I say I believe in radical truth and radical transparency, all I mean is we take things that ordinarily people would hide and we put them on the table—particularly mistakes, problems, and weaknesses—and we look at them together.”²

If you’ve built a workflow but it’s in a password-protected document, or in a tool that requires a lengthy account creation, or on a wall in a part of the building that nobody visits, you might be adhering to the letter of this principle, but you’re missing the spirit. Likewise, if you’re a leader who created a yearly vision, complete with high-level objectives, and you buried it on slide 137 in a deck that you emailed on a Friday afternoon, you’re not really practicing radical transparency.

Again, information hoarding cannot happen if Rimarketing is to thrive. Each member of every marketing team needs to be comfortable sharing the details of their work, and that includes leaders.

The knee-jerk reaction to this kind of blanket statement can be that it’s dangerous to give everyone access to everything; surely we need to keep some things under wraps. Or perhaps information overload will burden our teams, or excessive sharing will distract them from getting their day-to-day work done.

There’s certainly a limit to openness, beyond which sharing becomes hazardous to a company’s productivity and financial health. I’m not asking you to cross any ethical lines in the pursuit of radical transparency. What I am trying to avoid is a situation like the one I recently encountered in which a CMO declined to join her team for a training session because she didn’t want them to see her learning. Despite Agile marketing being a completely new operating model for the whole department, this executive wanted to appear fully informed from day one.

Although leaders’ roles in an Agile environment are unique (we often train them on specific leadership topics in a separate session), the attitude conveyed in this small interaction is troubling. It runs directly counter to transparency; it’s more concerned with maintaining appearances than with sharing an experience.

Consider Buffer, a SaaS company that has for years practiced radical transparency across the enterprise. They state their value as “Default to Transparency,” and they’ve devoted an entire section of their website to it (https://buffer.com/transparency).

You’ll find some typical things on that list, such as a product roadmap and their corporate values. Not typically, you’ll also find the salaries for every employee, an editorial calendar showing all upcoming content ideas, and a real-time revenue dashboard. Before embracing oversharing, Buffer wasn’t making many waves. They were another startup in a sea of martech vendors. As soon as they defaulted to transparency, they distinguished their brand and became a sought-after employer and a trusted name among marketing tools.

New data explain Buffer’s success. A 2011 experiment comparing consumer valuation of websites that provided operational transparency—in this case by revealing more detail about what their software was doing (searching databases, collecting results, analyzing responses)—showed that more transparency created a perception of more value. According to Ryan Buell and Michael Norton, the authors of the study, this type of operational transparency “provides cues for consumers to better understand how the quantity of work being conducted translates into how hard the company is working for them.”³

Those of us in marketing can likewise increase our perceived value, internally and externally, by being radically transparent about what we do. We can provide internal partners with a detailed, prioritized list of upcoming work through the use of a queue (more on this in Parts Three and Four). And like Buffer does, we can let our external audiences know what content we’re thinking about sharing with them by making available our editorial calendar and publishing schedule. Both practices enhance marketing’s perceived value by providing a radical change from a combative corporate culture and a way to offset the decline in consumer trust of brands, both of which plague the marketing profession.

Workfront’s 2016 State of Marketing Work discovered that 98 percent of marketers experience conflict with other teams.⁴ We’ve got a lot of fences to mend. Whether those conflicts arise because marketing fails to hit deadlines, fails to align on shared objectives, or simply leaves other teams in the dark, radical transparency improves marketing teams’ relationships with other groups.

When it comes to our external customers (remember, these may include regular customers as well as the audience for our content who haven’t yet purchased anything from us), marketers could use a shot of perceived value as well. Marketing work is inextricably linked with brand value and associations, so if the brand suffers a setback, our work becomes harder. This is becoming increasingly common, as trust in brands across the board has declined for the past decade and a half.

According to Young and Rubicam’s Brand Asset Valuator, adult consumers in the United States simply don’t trust brands as much as they used to. Trust, running at 44 percent in 2001, sat at 18 percent in 2017.⁵ Radical transparency in marketing can help reverse this trend too.

Although useful and valuable, these relationship-focused benefits are often secondary. The importance of radical transparency for Rimarketing lies primarily in its ability to bring to the surface impediments and improvements in process, remove misunderstandings, and enhance collaboration at all levels of the marketing function.

It is vital to avoid confusing radical transparency with excessive oversight. As we’ll see in Part Two, “People,” Rimarketing demands trust and empowerment of employees. In a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Ethan Bernstein argues, “For all that transparency does to drive out wasteful practices and promote collaboration and shared learning, too much of it can trigger distortions of fact and counterproductive inhibitions.”⁶ After conducting field research of his own and reviewing existing literature, Bernstein found a disconcerting connection between secrecy and observation. When they were monitored constantly, employees responded with instinctive secrecy. Bernstein found that “individuals and groups routinely wasted significant resources in an effort to conceal beneficial activities, because they believed that bosses, peers, and external observers who might see them would have ‘no idea’ how to ‘properly understand’ them.” This is, in fact, an argument in favor of radical transparency across the organization, not just at the team or individual level. When everyone shares naturally, you don’t need Orwellian tactics.

Employee productivity declines when people feel constantly monitored, so it is important to make sure that transparency is freely practiced by all members of the marketing team rather than rigidly enforced by marketing leadership. Creating this balance requires a nuanced understanding of human behavior and biases, and it requires that leadership be willing to walk a fine line in the service of achieving outstanding results.

Principle 3: Continuous Improvement

As we’ll learn in later parts of the book, Rimarketing focuses on processes and practices that yield benefits early in the transformation process. While these early wins might tempt us to sit back and hit pause on our operational efforts, the benefits continue only as long as we’re committed to long-term, continuous improvement.

Groups looking to overhaul their operations typically pass a tipping point, a place where the discomfort and inconvenience of change is less than the pain and inefficiency of their current ways of working. The danger of making simple, quick adjustments is that we may soon find ourselves back, just barely, on the other side of that tipping point. We haven’t created lasting solutions to our process problems; we’ve merely alleviated the most acute pain points.

To produce all the benefits of agility that Rimarketing offers, the approach to improvement must be continuous, not a one-and-done item on a checklist. We’re looking to change operations at their core; only this deep level of evolution delivers lasting innovation and consistent, sustainable, valuable marketing work.

Think of it as an evolution that begins with a revolution. You can do some things right away—especially if your existing processes are in a particularly dismal state—to get you faster, better marketing. That’s the revolution—the early changes that yield a big impact. But the ongoing, continuous evolution of the way you plan and design campaigns, structure your teams, hire new talent, and respond to success and failure is what alters your marketing team’s DNA. This kind of change is what creates innovation and extraordinary achievement, and this kind of change is what Rimarketing delivers over time.

Like most of the seven principles, continuous improvement applies at all levels of an organization. Individuals, teams, and leaders must commit to climbing the ladder of progress. Let’s consider each of these groups in turn.

Individual marketers commit to improving their skills and broadening their capabilities to become cross-functional members of the Rimarketing organization. Cross-functional (T-shaped) marketers have a broad foundational knowledge of marketing, enabling them to contribute to a wide variety of work (see Figure 6).

FIGURE 6
T-Shaped Marketers

Rimarketing Framework^® AgileSherpas.

FIGURE 7
Stages of Team Development

Adapted from Stages of Team Development by Bruce Tuckman.

We’ll discuss more ways to develop or hire such people; at the moment, simply note that all marketers must know what their crossbar (the top of the T) looks like now, and what it must look like for them to be most effective. They must have a plan for shoring up weak spots and increasing their subject-matter expertise. People who chafe against self-improvement may find this challenging; it’s up to the team to decide whether to accept any member who can’t (or won’t) formally embrace the principle of continuous improvement.

Speaking of teams: in a good Rimarketing implementation, these persistent groups strive to achieve high-performing status, working through the issues that arise in the early days of the team’s formation rather than sweeping them under a rug (see Figure 7).

You’ve probably encountered these four phases before; they were originally outlined by educational psychologist Bruce Tuckman back in 1965 in his article “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.” The idea is that every team must move through these phases to reach the performing pinnacle. High-performing teams deliver extraordinary results again and again, if they’re allowed the space to improve their process and grow as a unit. Rimarketing builds that space into the way work is done, giving each team a shot at reaching the high-performance peak. As with individual improvement, however, achieving those heights demands diligence and effort.

Finally, we come to leadership’s role in ongoing improvement. In Rimarketing, leaders of all kinds look for ways to become more effective stewards of agility, growing more self-aware and guiding individuals and teams on their own journeys. Being a marketing leader in a traditional environment presents challenges, as evidenced by the short tenure of most CMOs. Rimarketing leadership is more rewarding and less painful, but that’s not to say it’s effortless. Agile leaders (which is what Rimarketing requires) must know their own weaknesses and strengths so they can address the former and play to the latter.

You’ll find more details in the next part of the book, along with concrete steps that Agile leaders can take. For now, take away that getting placed in a leadership role inside a Rimarketing team is not an acknowledgement of perfection achieved. It’s the beginning of a lengthy journey of self-discovery and improvement in the service of the teams and the entire marketing organization.

Rimarketing is not analogous to a crash diet that you stick to for a few weeks or months and then abandon as soon as you hit your goal weight. It’s a profound lifestyle change that you adopt for as long as you want to enjoy its benefits.

Principle 4: Adaptability

The ability to respond to meaningful change is one of the most valuable parts of any successful Agile system. Adaptability can, of course, get teams into trouble—particularly marketing teams, who navigate lots of outside commitments. If abused, adaptability can become an excuse to overpivot. Beware the leader or stakeholder who says, “I know you’ve already planned your work for the next few weeks, but you’re Agile now. You adapt quickly! Right?” In this principle more than any other, nuance is key.

If you’ve encountered the original Agile Manifesto for Software Development, you’ll recall that one of its core values is “Responding to change over following a plan.” These values were written in this format intentionally to signal that given the choice between responding to new information and following a pre-established plan, there is typically more merit in the former. It’s not to say that planning goes away, or that we ignore our plans anytime anybody asks us to change for any reason. Later in the manifesto, when outlining the twelve Agile principles, the authors elaborate: “We welcome and plan for change. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”

This is crucial (and quite difficult to achieve). Agile, broadly, and Rimarketing, specifically, recognize that in complex knowledge work like marketing, we can’t know everything up front. Our plans will be incomplete and inaccurate. Spending months crafting a perfect plan doesn’t make work more likely to succeed; it just delays its start. Instead, we create a series of short-term plans. Opportunities to inspect results and adapt accordingly are built into the process. We’ll dig into what this means for Rimarketing in Part Three. For now, take away that adaptation is not the same as interruption.

We want to be able to welcome, plan for, and incorporate change into what we do—when doing so provides a clear, competitive advantage for our customers. Remember, in Rimarketing our customers might be internal, and sometimes a rapid change delivers a competitive advantage to an account executive. Rimarketing teams execute that change when the time is right.

We do not, however, respond to every interruption that comes our way. When no plan is safe for even a few days, teams rightly recognize the act of planning as wasteful, and they avoid it. They then end up with ad hoc marketing, chasing shiny objects with no larger objective in mind. As you can imagine, this approach delivers poor outcomes and contributes to burnout among marketing team members (and that depressingly low CMO tenure we discussed earlier).

So adaptability needs to be balanced with stability. The final aspect of this Rimarketing principle to consider is the point at which adaptation flips from being helpful to being frustrating and fatiguing (take a look at Figure 8).

The two circles in the center of the chart—the weekly and quarterly levels—are where adaptability is powerful. Here we learn about the efficacy (or lack thereof) of our day-to-day work, and we adjust our short-term plans in response. These are meaningful changes rather than shiny-object-centered interruptions.

Where we don’t want to introduce a ton of change is at the annual (or six-month) level, where marketing leadership sets the strategic direction for the department over the long term—based, we hope, on the even larger organizational objectives for that same period. Teams get frustrated when these high-level goals are not set, are set in secret, or are changed over the period they’re supposed to cover.

FIGURE 8
Planning Levels

Rimarketing Framework^® AgileSherpas.

Each small plan that a team creates uses these big objectives as its guide; changing the objectives is like changing the rules in the middle of a game.

Think of yearly objectives as the destination of a department-wide road trip. The teams are told, “We’re starting in San Francisco, and by the end of this year we want to have reached New York City. Along the way we want to see Salt Lake City, Denver, and Boston.” The teams come up with a general plan for meeting those targets. They’ll probably plan to hit one city per quarter. As the trip begins, they respond to incoming data about road conditions, weather, and wrecks. Each leg of the journey includes small adaptations based on what’s really happening. Teams can’t plan things perfectly; they can’t say, “Drive west in a straight line at fifty-seven miles per hour for exactly 157 minutes, and then change lanes to avoid a slow-moving truck.” Drivers constantly adjust their behavior in response to what’s going on around them. Adaptability at the micro level is vital for a successful trip.

If, however, they’re halfway to a destination and leadership tells them, “Just kidding! We want to go to Denver via Santa Fe,” they can’t merely adapt their daily plans; they also have to recalibrate their midlevel plan, all while still moving forward toward their goals. This situation is what leads to the common feelings of “building an airplane that’s already flying” or “changing the tires on a moving bus.”

The same thing happens when the destination simply isn’t set. The team can’t design effective routes if they don’t know where they’re heading. Again, they can’t do nothing, so they thrash about and create a bunch of stuff, but nobody feels satisfied or confident that they’re really moving the needle.

In the Rimarketing framework, we welcome and plan for change. We adapt to new information to deliver a competitive advantage to our customers. We don’t steer blind, and we don’t constantly reroute. Daily and weekly adaptability must dance with stability at the level of yearly objectives.

Principle 5: Trust

At first blush, trust and marketing may seem unrelated. This is largely because marketers and their advertising precursors haven’t been reliable stewards of customers’ trust. In my previous book, Death of a Marketer, I charted the decline of this trust relationship in detail, so I’ll summarize it here.

Advertisers and marketers have been barging into living rooms and airwaves and browser windows for decades, which helped establish a trust deficit in the first place. From the moment it became possible to crank out a handbill, entrepreneurs plastered poles and fences with ads. When more portable media like newspapers and magazines came along, fledgling ad agencies weren’t far behind, eager to establish a symbiosis that would link ads with the printed word. Then came radio, and, in the United States at least, advertisers appeared on the scene instantly, helpfully offering sponsorships as a means of bringing education, edification, and entertainment into every living room.

When television flickered to life, advertisers could hardly believe their good luck. An invention had arrived that would deliver their messages in irresistible packages that completely grabbed the audience’s attention. This powerful new medium had the potential to change everything: how brands defined themselves, how advertisers ran their businesses, and how consumers engaged with content. Already positioned as the benefactors of radio audiences, advertisers knew how to bring TV viewers the programming they craved, complete with ads interspersed among the laughs and learning.

It all sounds sweet and symbiotic in the abstract, but in every case—printed handbills, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and digital media—we advertisers and marketers eventually wore out our welcome. In our (mostly) legitimate attempts to drive sales for our clients and employers, we abandoned concern for the audience. It’s a cycle that has continued for nearly 150 years, and one that has proven itself as magnetic as a black hole.

Rimarketing seeks to counteract this trend by establishing more consistent lines of communication between marketers and audiences. Teams using these processes release marketing work frequently, and they release things when they say they will. When Rimarketing is done well, teams set and keep their publication promises—their publicly stated cadence for releasing certain kinds of work. Many traditional teams don’t clearly state their release goals, hoping that by keeping things private their audiences won’t notice when they fall behind.

Agile teams are customer-centric (recall Rimarketing Principle 1), which means that a steady drumbeat of content creation isn’t enough. We also need to deliver value to audiences, customers, and stakeholders. Marketing to serve, not sell, is the only viable way to approach our profession in the twenty-first century. And we can’t serve anyone if we’re racing from one missed deadline to the next.

In keeping with the second principle, Radical Transparency, Rimarketing teams share their plans far and wide. They understand that transparency builds trust. Recall the earlier example of Buffer; they share their editorial calendar publicly, so their audience knows what kinds of resources the Buffer content team is planning to deliver and when. Trust can seem like a complicated concept, but it really boils down to this: you state that you’ll do something, and then you do it.

Of course, cadence isn’t the only meaningful metric in marketing work; delivering terrible stuff frequently is just as bad as doing nothing at all. Emails with missing or broken links and landing pages whose buttons do nothing are just as harmful as a missed deadline. As with most marketing activities, there’s a fine line to walk here. Do you delay release of a blog post so a dozen people can spend two weeks reviewing it? Or do you release it on time and risk a missing image or a broken link? When an astute subscriber points out a typo in your weekly newsletter (as happened to me quite recently), do you drop everything and issue a full apology? (I didn’t.) Sometimes the error requires attention; at other times it’s a form of waste to (as one of my coaching clients would say) keep “polishing the apple” long after it’s sufficiently shiny.

Garrett Moon, CEO and cofounder of CoSchedule, tells his marketing team not to go back and fix errors in their old blog posts.⁷ I’m an English major and a total word nerd, so for those of you having tiny heart attacks right now, I was right there with you. But here’s the thing: if you’re fixing typos, you’re not doing something else more impactful. For Garrett, it’s about “prioritizing the work you do to reach your marketing goals ten times faster. Don’t do the trivial minutiae that suck productivity away and fail to drive growth.”

CoSchedule runs a lean, Agile marketing shop that focuses on doing the right work at the right time. They have results to back up their methods, enjoying 434 percent more page views, 1,222 percent more email subscribers, and 9,360 percent more marketing qualified leads than when they started. Ignoring typos for the win—who knew?⁸

Maybe you’re a marketer for a financial services firm, and compliance breathes down your neck every time you log in to Twitter. This exact approach might not work for you. But shipping work regularly, even when it’s not absolutely perfect, is a value that can, sometimes paradoxically, help us build trust. After all, we’re human. And humans occasionally create typos.

The consumer trust situation is admittedly bad, but it’s only one component of trust that marketers need to rebuild for new processes to take hold. In addition to reestablishing trust with their customers and audiences, Rimarketing teams are also concerned with:

• ■ trust between leadership and marketing teams

• ■ trust among team members

• ■ trust between stakeholders and marketing teams

Trust between Leadership and Marketing Teams

Rimarketing teams and their leaders complement one another nicely; they’re the yin and yang of awesome marketing work. Leaders set strategic goals and clearly communicate them to the marketing teams. Teams ensure that their day-to-day work supports the strategy. The two work in alignment, thanks to the trust built up between them.

When you lose the trust between your marketing teams and leaders, rebuilding it takes time, just as it takes time for your audience to regain trust in your brand when you fail to keep your publication promises. Again, simply state what you plan to do, and then follow through. Once marketing leaders determine when they’ll set annual and quarterly goals, they must stick to that schedule. They must also embrace the Radical Transparency principle and ensure that all goals and objectives are documented and publicly available.

When high-level objectives are set, they’re set. Annual goals remain in place for the year they’re intended to cover, and quarterly goals remain in place for the quarter they’re intended to cover. If the high-level goals are vague or contain wiggle room—if they’re unclear and imprecise—teams can’t trust them. They’ll hesitate to commit to short-term plans because they expect the destination to change, forcing them to scramble to react. Take another look at Figure 8, “Planning Levels,” and consider again the strategic planning circles. The vision, themes, and epics must be stable so that the stories and tasks can flex. For teams to be able to respond to meaningful change, they must trust that the big picture will hold steady.

Of course, trust is a two-way street. Teams must earn and maintain their leaders’ trust by stating their own plans and following through. The team queue, which we’ll meet later, solves the first half of that equation. It publicly documents the team’s plans so that leaders know exactly what’s coming up. If something goes awry and it becomes clear that the stated plan won’t come to fruition, the team can maintain trust by exercising their own radical transparency and being open about what’s happening.

We don’t want teams to hide negative information for fear of punitive action by their leaders. As we’ll see later, many of the components of Rimarketing support communication between teams and leaders, facilitating trust. Trust rarely appears overnight, but a commitment by both groups to sharing plans, coupled with follow-through, fosters a space in which trust can quickly grow.

Trust among Team Members

We’ve all worked with people who, for one reason or another, consistently struggle to get their work done well and on schedule. They’re classic overpromisers, folks who consistently and dramatically overestimate their ability to get things done. This behavior can decimate a team’s trust, particularly when teams are smaller. If everyone needs to pitch in on practically every project, and someone’s piece is always missing—always “just about done”—it’s a major problem.

In an Agile marketing environment, daily standup meetings reveal these kinds of problems and help illuminate solutions. If someone’s daily standup contributions start to sound like a broken record, the team can intervene. Again, we build internal team trust by stating our intentions (without overcommitting) and following through. Practices like daily standup and work visualization automate these steps while revealing trust issues within a team.

We also need for team members to be comfortable talking to their teammates about challenges. They need to trust the team to rally around them and help solve the problem rather than judge them (either openly or silently) for failing to do what they thought they would. This creates what’s known as psychological safety.

The People Analytics team at Google is tasked with making life at Google “a little bit better and a lot more productive,” and to that end they undertook a massive study of how teams inside Google functioned. Led by Laszlo Bock, People Operations scoured the literature, interviewed Google employees, and diagrammed the complicated relationships between teams. When presenting their findings, Bock reflected, “There’s a myth we all carry inside our head. We think we need superstars. But that’s not what our research found. You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish.”⁹

The “right way,” Bock and his team found, could be summarized in five norms:

1. Teams need to believe that their work is important.

2. Teams need to feel that their work is personally meaningful.

3. Teams need clear goals and defined roles.

4. Team members need to know that they can depend on one another.

5. Most important, teams need psychological safety.

All these norms are necessary for Rimarketing teams to create the optimum environment for true agility, but psychological safety is paramount. In the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety as a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. . . . It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”¹⁰

Attempts at continuous improvement quickly break down when teams feel unsafe sharing potentially contradictory ideas. Process can’t improve if no one is willing to open up about the pieces that need adjustment. Psychological safety not only increases a team’s morale and productivity; it’s a prerequisite for agility.

But how do we cultivate it?

Team leaders foster psychological safety by modeling these behaviors in their own interactions with the team—even, and especially, when it would be easy to avoid doing so. In reviewing his exhaustive research on the topic, Charles Duhigg puts it this way:

There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.¹¹

Team members themselves foster psychological safety by sharing control of the team with teammates. We demonstrate that we’re actually listening by repeating what someone just said and responding respectfully. If a teammate seems upset, we react with compassion instead of pretending nothing is amiss. By ceding control to the group and consistently displaying our empathy, we create a stronger, more Agile team environment.

As you can imagine, we’re more likely to achieve psychological safety, and other conditions for high performance, when a team stays together. We’ll come back to this issue later, but for now keep in mind that the more a team is persistent, the more likely teammates are to learn to trust one another.

In a high-performing Rimarketing team, individual members must trust each other to contribute effectively (and on time). This internal trust helps to build up the other kinds, including trust with audiences and with internal stakeholders.

Trust between Stakeholders and Marketing Teams

If a trust gap exists between marketers and their audiences, a trust chasm divides marketers from their internal stakeholders. Every time we commit to providing sales-enablement collateral and then miss the deadline, the chasm widens. Every time the CTO expects us to buy a new piece of martech this quarter and we can’t get our act together soon enough to make a decision, the chasm widens. Thanks to this recurring cycle, many marketing teams I’ve coached have been referred to as “black holes”—places where work requests go in but nothing ever comes out.

Part of the blame for this perception can be laid at the feet of an organization’s processes, but marketing teams are also victims of their own accommodating natures and marketing’s position at the hub of brand experience. Because marketing is a vital part of how customers interact with a company’s products and services, most people inside an organization need things from the marketing department. Believing that their needs are crucial and time sensitive, these people make demands of marketers (with varying degrees of civility and detail). Marketers want to be obliging, useful colleagues, so they agree to all requests and then run around like headless chickens trying, and of course failing, to get it all done.

Unfortunately, experiment after experiment proves that the more we work on, the longer everything takes. Multitasking has been shown to reduce productivity by 40 percent, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.¹² This is not a pleasant equation, but we’ve all felt its effects when staring down a monster to-do list. What’s more, without a formal work-management process in place to limit our work in progress, we say yes to every incoming request, and then everything takes forever.

This painfully common scenario is no doubt the source of some 2016 data from Workfront’s State of Marketing Report, which found that 98 percent of marketers experience conflict with other departments.¹³ Ouch.

To bridge the chasm between marketing and our internal stakeholders, we must—wait for it—state our intentions and follow through on them. This often involves a serious winnowing of the things we’re already doing. In other words, we have to get better at saying no. MarketingProfs’ 2019 Marketer Happiness Report discovered that 41 percent of marketers say no only a few times per year to projects that aren’t aligned with their goals, and another 26 percent reported they don’t have the authority to ever say no.¹⁴

We’ll tackle this problem toward the end of the book. For now, we need to acknowledge that behavior by both parties—marketers and their stakeholders—has historically contributed to dysfunctional dynamics. Paradoxically, only by empowering marketers to say no and to focus on high-value activities can we deliver on other groups’ expectations and begin to cross the yawning trust gap.

Principle 6: Bias toward Action

Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Our good friend inertia may have initially been theorized to explain the behavior of the physical world, but it applies to knowledge work as well. The hardest part about exerting almost any kind of effort is getting started. But if we can get in the habit of getting started, if our default mode is to act, to be in motion, then we begin to have a bias t