Published nearly a quarter century ago, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published almost a quarter century ago. Man that makes me feel old!
Before agile, the waterfall model was king: gather requirements, build the software, test it, and release it. This probably ‘worked’ because everybody was doing it and there were no alternatives.
While agile has been widely adopted across software engineering teams everywhere, it seems modern approaches to marketing and sales have parallels with this software methodology.
Individuals and interactions over process and tools
In the context of a development team, this speaks to keeping stakeholders, especially customers/future software users, closely involved during design and implementation.
But even in marketing and sales, one could argue that engaging and talking with prospective customers will help inform the product roadmap and help build trust and excitement. It helps you learn the language of your customers, which will feed into your marketing copy, social posts, and sales calls.
Having a process to collect emails and set up drip campaigns in Mailchimp is mechanical, and yes, also valuable. But absent customer interaction, that effort risks being wasted.
Working software/campaigns over comprehensive documentation
Having a well-defined and documented marketing plan and sales process feels robust and mature. But it risks stagnating and drifting from the mark.
The time spent defining and perfecting the sales pitch or marketing copy is better spent executing because when you are executing, you are collecting data, learning, and hopefully improving!
There are so many different marketing channels and ways of communicating, the only way to truly know what works is by experimenting and analyzing the results. Continuously.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Ok, this one is trickier to find a parallel for. The spirit of it is to work closely and collaboratively with customers so that the product that gets built meets their needs most effectively. In marketing and sales, that collaboration can occur across the product teams, including marketing, sales, and engineering.
In large organizations, departments tend to get siloed, with the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. Tasks are defined, contracted, and tossed over the fence to another department. It’s easy to see a more collaborative approach would go further, and faster.
Responding to change over following a plan
I recently studied dungeons and dragons, but have never played. When I got to his item of the manifesto, I was immediately reminded of what I learned about being a dungeon master: don’t lay out the entire story in advance as players will do what they want and lay waste to your epic story.
In a Startup, the players include the team members, stakeholders, and customers. Anyone who thinks they know exactly what the product is that they need to build, or exactly how product development, adoption, and growth will be achieved is delusional.
Yes, develop a plan, but plan for that plan to change. Plan. Plaan, Plahn.
