We precocious introduced you to the Agile Marketing Navigator, a flexible model for navigating agile selling for marketers, by marketers successful the article A caller mode to navigate agile marketing. The navigator has 4 large components: Collaborative Planning Workshop, Launch Cycle, Key Practices and Roles. Within these categories, determination are respective sub-pieces for implementation.

Today we proceed our heavy dive into Roles by looking astatine the relation of the Marketing Owner. This relation is cardinal to ensuring that concern goals and priorities are intelligibly understood, and is the connective insubstantial betwixt stakeholders that petition enactment and the squad that gets the enactment done.

If you’re acquainted with Scrum, you whitethorn person heard of a Product Owner. The Marketing Owner relation is fundamentally the same, but the nuances of moving successful selling versus managing a merchandise whitethorn change the relation slightly.

Don’t miss Stacey Ackerman and Michael Seaton discussing agile selling astatine MarTech.

Who fits into this role?

A communal question I often get asked is who astatine a institution is champion suited to beryllium the Marketing Owner? A communal reply is simply a strategist due to the fact that determination whitethorn beryllium a batch of similarities betwixt the occupation they’re already doing and the relation connected an agile selling team. However, this tin alteration truthful overmuch from institution to company, truthful present are immoderate bully qualities to look for successful filling this role:

• Has authorization to marque decisions for the squad regarding priorities of work.
• Knowledgeable astir the institution and the marketplace it serves.
• Works good some successful the day-to-day tactical satellite arsenic good arsenic with a larger strategical vision.
• Is disposable to the squad to reply questions astir the work, but doesn’t archer the squad however to get their enactment done.

Why the Marketing Owner relation is the backbone to occurrence of the team

While this relation is considered an adjacent squad member, and determination isn’t hierarchy connected an agile team, the relation tin marque oregon interruption a squad due to the fact that the Marketing Owner is guiding the squad directionally. Without that azygous idiosyncratic communicating the imaginativeness and priorities, the squad is often pulled successful a cardinal antithetic directions.

I erstwhile trained a ample retailer that had been moving successful agile selling for a while, but had ne'er acceptable up a Marketing Owner role. After listening to maine speech astir it successful class, they realized that this was the crushed that their squad was overloaded. Instead of a azygous idiosyncratic to filter each of the stakeholder requests through, each squad subordinate was exposed to them — truthful they were often moving connected conflicting priorities.

Prioritizing enactment is essential

The Marketing Owner’s quality to prioritize enactment efficaciously is truly important. Within the Navigator, we acceptable retired a beauteous casual strategy for doing that. The Marketing Owner is liable for penning the Guidepoint, which helps directionally navigate the squad astatine a precocious level. The Blueprint is the instrumentality the Marketing Owner creates to stock quarterly enactment that the squad is readying to deliver, but this is meant to beryllium flexible and initiate conversations. From determination a single-ordered backlog is owned by the Marketing Owner and it’s this person’s occupation to continually shuffle this arsenic caller priorities surface.

While we’ve fixed the Marketing Owner a batch of tools to marque this occupation easier, this relation truly needs to beryllium respective steps up of the squad and person a large moving narration with each of the team’s cardinal stakeholders.

Effective leadership

It’s important for the Marketing Owner to beryllium an effectual leader. This means that the squad should ever beryllium capable to inquire wherefore enactment was chosen and what result is desired, but the Marketing Owner needs to enactment retired of the team’s mode erstwhile it comes to however the enactment volition get done. I marque the wide favoritism betwixt the Marketing Owner’s relation and the remainder of the squad by saying, the Marketing Owner owns the “what” and the squad owns the “how”. If the Marketing Owner is overly prescriptive, they aren’t apt to get astir originative and innovative ideas from the team.

Opinions expressed successful this nonfiction are those of the impermanent writer and not needfully MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.