State of Agile Marketing 2018
Earlier this year our team at AgileSherpas conducted our first annual State of Agile Marketing survey in partnership with our friends over at Kapost.
After getting input from over 600 marketers, we learned a lot about how marketers are adopting Agile practices (and what’s holding us back).
As we begin preparations for the 2019 version of this survey, I want to share some of my favorite takeaways from this year’s study:
- 37% of marketers report using some form of Agile to manage their work. 40% are traditional, planning a lot up front and sticking to their plan. 18% work day-to-day without a well-defined process.
- Most Agile marketing teams don’t confine themselves to a single methodology. 44% say they use a hybrid methodology.
- Agile marketing teams are far more likely (81%) to be satisfied with how their department handles work than traditional (44%) or ad hoc (27%) teams.
- The three most common practices being used by Agile marketing teams are user stories (51%), frequent releases (47%), and retrospectives (43%).
- Following an Agile transformation, marketing teams enjoy a wide variety of benefits. The three most widely reported were an ability to change gears more quickly (55%), better visibility into project status (52%), and higher quality work (47%).
- Two barriers stand in the way of more thorough Agile adoption: a lack of training or knowledge about Agile approaches (38%) and a belief that current processes are working well enough (26%).
- Agile is growing in popularity, as nearly two-third (61%) of traditional marketing teams report plans to start an Agile implementation within the next twelve months.
What Agile Marketing Means (in this study)
We tried very hard to make sure that when we asked if marketers were Agile it was very clear what we meant. Some folks, after all, persist in believing that a never-ending series of pivots makes them Agile.
So, for the purposes of our survey, we did our best to create clarity. We asked respondents to put themselves into one of three categories:
- Traditional: we plan our work in advance using a lot of detail and try to stick as closely as possible to that plan.
- Agile: we use at least some part of an Agile marketing approach to manage our work, such as daily standups, a backlog, Sprints, kanban board, etc. We have plans, but they’re flexible and change often.
- Ad hoc: We don’t make long term plans. We work on what seems right from day to day and don’t have a well-defined process for managing incoming work.
Based on these categories, we got the following responses from 692 marketers:
This worked out to 279 who called themselves traditional, 254 who called themselves Agile, and 127 who called themselves ad hoc. Just under five percent (4.6%) selected “none of the above.”
For more details from this year’s survey, check out the complete results at AgileSherpas.com. (And, if you’d like to be among the first see the 2019 results, be sure to subscribe while you’re there.)