Prioritize Making the Important Great

Marketing has a reputation for always saying yes—and I’ve been leading that charge. Every request, every “quick ask,” every urgent project that wasn’t actually urgent…We’ve said yes to all of it, and I’ve watched you all work harder and longer to make it happen. That’s what has made our teams successful and it’s at the heart of thoughtfulness and high performance. It’s part of the foundation we built together.

However, urgency is often at the expense of strategy.

At times, our (and my) willingness to do everything means we’re not doing our best work on anything.

In a few weeks, we’ll implement Agile Marketing. That begins with a workshop and it will involve change. Change is hard and in this case it could feel quite odd in that we may do LESS work, but the work that we do will make MORE of an impact.

Agile Marketing

Starting August 20th, we’re implementing agile marketing. But honestly, the system is just the structure—the real work is personal. It gives us ownership, agency and visibility into our work and each other’s work.

Mike DiPietro, Operating Advisor at JMI, will be leading the workshop. Over the past year, Mike has become more than an advisor. He’s a champion for Apptegy doing things the Apptegy way. He believes in our culture, our contrarian approach to many things, and how we’ve built the business. He and I have had many conversations about how we move into our next chapter as a company and as a marketing organization.

Here’s where I need your help. In our sprint planning meetings (every two weeks, ~90 minutes), we’re going to practice transparent decision-making. When a new project/task pops up, I want to look closely at our current commitments—all of them, laid out visually—and understand the tradeoff of taking on something urgent instead of something planned and important.

This means I can’t make quick promises in hallway conversations anymore. Everything goes to the team for capacity planning. This is harder for me than it sounds—I like being the person who can say “we’ll make it happen.” But I’m learning that making promises isn’t helpful if it’s at the expense of something else.

Instead of “what do you want us to make” we’ll be focused on the outcome or “what do you want to happen.” Half the time, there’s a simpler way to achieve the outcome. The other half, we discover the request isn’t actually tied to any meaningful business goal or that its half-life is too short and isn’t as strategic as it must be to take the place of other work.

Organized, Prioritized and Supported

I’ll be honest—this is going to feel uncomfortable at first. It’s going to be difficult for me. And it’s going to be harder for some of you than others. Mike warns that agile marketing requires “discipline and commitment to working in a certain time period, which is not always comfortable for everyone.”

We’ll be organizing our work into bigger projects called “epics”—things like SchoolCEO Conference, quarterly product releases, case studies, magazines, enterprise account campaigns, ongoing conference support and materials, and so on. Each will have clear owners and many will be cross-functional. We’ll break these down into specific tasks and commit to what we can actually accomplish in two-week sprints.

Most importantly, we’ll be accountable to each other, not just to me or to a manager. Our stand-ups will look different and you’ll share what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today, and any obstacles you’re facing. Not solely for reporting, but for support.

Coming Soon…

In a few weeks, you’ll have more information, understanding, and will see it in action. I’m asking you to hold me and each other accountable to these new practices. If you see me reverting to “we’ll make it happen” without checking our capacity first, call me out. If I start taking on work in hallway conversations, hold me accountable (literally reshare this letter back to me).

As we move into this new system, there will be questions and those questions can help guide us to even better work, personal growth, and team effectiveness. Questions like: What feels most challenging about organizing our work around outcomes instead of tasks?; Do you overcommit or undercommit to your work?; What does it feel like to stick with a task/project to the end instead of switching to something new?

This may feel like more process, more meetings, more structure. And yes, it is. But here’s what I’m hoping we gain: the ability to do fewer things extraordinarily well, instead of doing everything just adequately. And we’ll be able to look back with pride (as we have been) and a clear picture of what we accomplished and how it made an impact.

Mike has implemented this with 15-20 other marketing teams. He says they all have the same reaction: “Yeah, it’s harder, but it’s great. This is what we need.”

Teams that focus on fewer initiatives and execute them well consistently outperform teams that spread their efforts across many initiatives.

Best,

Tyler

P.S. The one ask before August 20th is that you do NOT research this or go looking for more information. There are different flavors of Agile and Mike and I want to make sure that we all have the same vision and “version” of agile marketing going into this.