We talk with Andrew Burrows about the adoption and evolution of
Agile Marketing at IBM. He also shares his point of view
on the future of the movement and his involvement in the Agile
Marketing Alliance. Highlights include:
- What led him to Agile Marketing
- The challenges of spreading Agile Marketing like IBM
- Real-world success stories
- His vision for what is next for Agile in marketing
Transcript
Frank Days 00:29
In this episode, we’re going to talk about the adoption and evolution of the use of agile marketing at IBM, along with Andrew’s point of view on the future of the movement, and his finally his involvement in the Agile Marketing Alliance.
Jim Ewel 00:45
Thanks, Frank. Andrew, can you share with us how you got started with Agile marketing? Where did you Where did you begin?
Andrew Burrows 00:53
So I should open with the caveat that I do not speak on behalf of IBM, know my opinions on my own. Agile marketing. So it’s quite serendipitous. I’m an accidental marketer. I used to play video games. And that’s how I actually got my approach into Agile. And through doing that pretty badly in the 2007-2008 time, I started to get involved with lots of user groups in the area and building connections that led to an opportunity at IBM and I’ll be honest, I was very naive. I had never worked at a company that size before. The idea that you could have a sub-organization of 5000 people was not really something that even entered my head. So I dived in to solve a problem and found myself in the marketing org.
Frank Days 01:40
At IBM, your colleague, Anthony Coppedge, credited you with quote, “single handedly building the construct for agile marketing at IBM.” Pretty bold statement. What inspired you to lead this initiative?
Andrew Burrows 01:54
You can tell he’s from marketing, right? Nobody at IBM does anything single handedly? I’d say that’s the same for any kind of big organization here. So he’s very, very, very generous with his praise, or his comment. You know, we had the opportunity within IBM, when Michelle Paluso became CMO to really try to do things differently. And to really drive an agile way of working. And we made a few decisions really early on this is this would have been in 2016 or 2017. A few decisions really early on about how we were going to do this that he’s probably alluding to. We said we were not going to be framework first, right? That the people who would discover the best way of doing agile marketing will be the marketers who do it day in and day out.
Andrew Burrows 02:49
An agile organization is one where people, in our case marketers, are exhibiting agile behaviors more frequently. And for us agile behaviors were the 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, right? Can you see and hear those things actually happening? So our role would be, you know, stewards for that kind of behavior change. So all of our approach, the way that we set about the teams, the way we set about enabling the organization, fundamentally came down to: What is the difference between a marketing organization and an agile marketing organization? And how do we help the organization grow into that way of being?
Andrew Burrows 03:33
Another way we looked at it was to say, what is it that a marketing organization does, right? At its core, we believe a marketing organization is really almost behavioral science. But there are people out there who whether you’re B2B or B2C, there are people who may consider you, who may choose to buy from you, who may choose to deepen that relationship with you. So the goal of marketing is to increase the probability that they will decide to engage with you in that way. So clarity of outcome in our financial marketing organization would be how do we behave in accordance to our Agile values and principles and drive more of that kind of marketing outcome? So you end up focusing less on things like how many of our teams are keeping the stand ups within 15 minutes? And more things on like, how should a product marketer exhibit more agile behaviors? And how do you help somebody’s job change to embrace more of those kinds of approaches?
Jim Ewel 04:38
Andrew, I love the message. And I love that you started with kind of trying to create an agile culture mindset or whatever rather than with a framework. But IBM is huge, you know, 282,000 employees, I’m guessing five or six thousand people in marketing. How did you get the word out and change their mind? Setting the culture that large an organization?
Andrew Burrows 05:03
it’s incredibly challenging. I mean, I think one of the skills that you need to have working at a company that size is, is often just knowing who to talk to, right, when you have a problem. There’s just so many people and its so vast, when it came to what we were doing in marketing, we realized pretty quickly that in a really successful agile marketing organization, everybody knows their place. Everybody knows their role. Everyone understands how they contribute to the whole, people understand how the organization actually kind of works as a larger item.
Andrew Burrows 05:37
So we had to one really work on how do we communicate the necessary information for people to operate within an agile organization? And we created brand new internal communication channels, right, and conduits for how we would establish and scale that. We also said, what are all the different roles in the organization? What does it mean for them to be agile? And how do we scale that approach, which requires not only some internal design work with the leadership around what it looks like, but then hitting the road over the next 18 month period of that transformation. We visited every single marketer, in person first in the US, and then globally, where we held two or three day experiential meetings and workshops, where people could come together to understand how they should actually do marketing within this kind of construct, we hit the road and met people face to face. And we established that core messaging across. We also had, which I will always say we were very fortunate in the way the CMO who saw herself as agile, and would talk about it constantly. So you have that constant drumbeat of a message of here’s our CMO, and she’s doing it right and senior leadership may be saying, we’re not sure on how we want to do it, but we want to do it. So we have that constant drumbeat, which really kind of, I would say opened many doors for us when it came to getting down with people and helping them actually embrace things.
Frank Days 07:09
We’ve had many conversations on the podcast over the years about bottom up versus top down kind of motivations. And it’s certainly, in some ways, I don’t want to say faster or easier to foment that change in the org if you get it from the top. But it’s certainly that kind of leadership really helps. So when you’re out there doing this right, and you’re out, spreading the word, what surprised you most?
Andrew Burrows 07:33
One of the things that surprised me the most was how open people would ultimately be to considering a different way of working. I had some hesitancy right? Starting this hour, I think to myself, there are probably people like who’s this guy, I’ve been at this company for 25 years, I’ve worked my way up the ladder, I’ve gotten to where I am today, by being quite successful, who are you to tell me that I need to work differently? And I would say that we found most people, the vast majority to be very open and receptive to hearing there’s potentially a better way of doing this, my ears open, tell me about it. Now, in those situations, you have to make sure that you can actually say something of value that is going to encourage those people to embrace you and take you seriously. But I found typically the people are very receptive to hearing about this and you know, regardless of tenure or experience, or seniority or anything,
Andrew Burrows 07:37
Can you share with our listeners a specific success story, you know, something that came about as a result of this?
Andrew Burrows 08:42
One of the ones that actually I would call out there, one particular favorite of mine, would be, you think of an organization for the large organizations or even midsize organizations, there’s a fair amount of collaboration with agencies that goes on in order to help get work done. There are a number of situations where the agency and IBM are maybe struggling to work together well. And at some stages, both pointing fingers at each other and saying you’re not agile enough, right? To help us to stay this work through. That what we kind of did in those situations was to acknowledge that you’ve got two groups who are working in their own way and doing their thing try to collaborate together to try this work forward. And then you’ve got the the kind of dark matter in between them, right? Perceptions of each other, how they’re working together, how they’re driving that through.
Andrew Burrows 09:35
So we were able to work with teams and agencies and actually help them to start to gel and understand how to work better together through shared values and principles. And through these different approaches that would then drive to these more concrete outcomes, even to the point where we would ask them to, you know, analyze the other. We created personas of each group to help them understand the veterans and how they can work together. So you saw kind of efficiencies across all the different groups and different organizations and how they operate, that will kind of lead to better overall performance.
Andrew Burrows 10:13
The other thing that’s really interesting was IBM did an internal engagement score every year. And engagement across marketing was not very good when we when we started. Now, I was always a big believer in I think Ken Schwaber said, years ago, Scrum teams are happier and more productive. One of the ways that we showed the measurement of agile was we were to say, our agility, we measured our own into internal agile health approach will make people happier, to the engagement survey and more productive through marketing performance. And they can say that we went from one of the lowest in the organization to, I think, the highest in the organization in terms of engagement in two and a half years, which was an absolutely massive claim. And I believe that a lot to do with the cultural and working improvements that agility brought.
Frank Days 11:04
Regular listeners are familiar with me saying that, in many cases, agencies, the process of creating a brief and a proposal and all the sort of waterfall artifacts that come with traditional marketing, a lot of what even people are taught in school, right is, first you write a brief, and then you put a price on the brief, and then you execute against that. And then you send in change orders and all the things that come along with that. But at the end of the day, you know, we’ve talked to Roland Smart and I, when we were doing the podcast for a while, talked to a number of people who had some very interesting and very innovative agency models, much like what you did. They break down those walls, and a lot of that overhead that comes from having that old model, which is really designed maybe to protect people’s margins and to protect people from bad behaviors.
Andrew Burrows 11:51
I mentioned earlier how it was serendipitous how I got into marketing, because I came in to solve the problem. Didn’t really think through the industry. The first problem was we have all these people from different agencies, how do we get them to work together?
Frank Days 12:06
Another thing that I’ve spoken at a number of agile events, and frequently someone will come up afterwards, maybe a software engineer or someone who works in engineering, someone who works in an engineering organization, technical product side, and they’ll say to me something like, is agile, just agile? I mean, can you share a little bit about your point of view of why Marketers need their own flavor of Agile?
Andrew Burrows 12:29
I actually think at its core, agile is just agile, right? I mean, the fundamental values and principles should align whether we’re applying it to software development, marketing or anything else, right? Because it’s still people. At the end of the day, I think agility is a people science.
Andrew Burrows 12:48
I think that one of the benefits that you get around how do we reframe and point this toward an industry is that kind of an initial acknowledgment that industries are different, that there is some specialization in there and here’s how you can pass this by and apply it in a way that’s actually going to resonate and be effective in the industry that you’re part of. You know, I think a good tactical example of that would be during the Agile transformation at IBM. Midway through I made the decision to stop hiring external agile coaches, and instead, grow agile coaches from existing marketers who were showing that had an affinity for agility because I would find the external agile coaches that came in would typically come from other industries, and wouldn’t have the same knowledge or sometimes respect right before in the industry, like marketing, and would tend to bring with them a, it worked over here for this industry. So this is how I’m going to do it. Whereas if you found existing people who doesn’t work in marketing for years, to then put them in a position to say, how should you do this? Is this the right way of doing it, you get a completely different kind of thing on the other side. So at the end of the day, I believe an agile person is an agile person, regardless the industry they’re in, but how you put that into practice is going to vary by industry and how you understand and pass things is also going to vary.
Jim Ewel 14:22
I have to echo that because I found that marketers, you know, they have their own background, they have their own language. You know, if you look at the manifesto for Agile software development, it says something like working software over comprehensive documentation, right? I mean, what’s the marketer supposed to do with that? So I think you’re right, agile is agile, but we all have our own language and approach and, and all that sort of stuff and to talk to other people. You sort of have to walk in their shoes a little bit. What do you see as the future of Agile Marketing, you know, like, where are we now? And where are we going?
Andrew Burrows 15:03
I am so excited to be in marketing, right, and to be able to look at where we’re headed from industry I will share this quite openly. Agile, and what Agile is, and all our other practices and approaches and definitions and thought leadership around it may have originated in software. But I believe the industry that is in the perfect position to truly be agile and take it to the next level is marketing.
Andrew Burrows 15:30
If you think about the technological advancements in what’s happening as an industry, right, our closeness and proximity to the actual customer to be able to learn, right, and all the myriad channels that are now available, that you can do multivariate testing and A/B testing. I think about, you know, you’ve seen like Dal-E, right, and the AI-generated content and how there are other tools out there that will generate not only visual content, but written content to write think about how marketing can start to embrace a lot of that AI technology to do incredibly fast testing of the messaging and the narrative and the actual content that we’re using. And if you can get that kind of speed as an organization, where you’re able to test and understand your marketing content with an actual audience, you can actually then start to feed that thought knowledge back into the ultimate strategy for the organization right around your products and your targeting and your personas. Here are markets we haven’t even thought of, right, here are areas that we could actually get into, here are areas were falling behind. So marketing could really become a powerful engine, right? For an organization where the learning generated through marketing is as valuable as the actual marketing essence themselves.
Andrew Burrows 16:49
There was a report from Cognizant company, I think it was a couple of years ago, where they looked at the marketing jobs of 2030. And it’s kind of fascinating because that you don’t see product market performance marketer, content marketer, events marketer. You see things like haptic engineers, customer journey Sherpa, right, and all these kinds of different job roles. AI bias ethic scientist, these different kinds of roles. And to me, this is so exciting, because it shows the kind of evolution that the entire industry is going through, and none of those roles, you can’t do those roles in a non-agile environment. Right? You can’t be a non-agile haptic engineer, right? These things are really tied through. So I think that we’re really pleased that we should be thought leaders in the Agile space by 2030, in my opinion.
Frank Days 17:47
I see that you were a pretty early member of the Agile Marketing Alliance, along with Jim and Melissa and a whole bunch of other folks, what motivated you to get involved in the organization?
Andrew Burrows 17:58
So I’m a huge believer in community. And that a strong community is like the tide that lifts all ships. If I could go back into tell a personal story very quickly, and segue into this. In my late teens, early 20s – so we’re talking around late 90s, early 2000s, I lived in the north of England, I was really into music in Manchester, we were into a lot of we used the term EMO bands. There were a lot of really good bands out there in the north of England, as well as across England. And I was obsessed with San Diego, right and Gravity Records. And I’d look for who’s playing in the Shaker and discover bands. And I’d trade vinyl records with the roadie from the Blood Brothers up in Seattle. Right and you had this amazing community. And it was on you, right? If you wanted to hear a kind of if you wanted to hear a band, you put the show up and you called the band and if you wanted to hear any kind of music, you made the band if you wanted certain kind of merch, you printed it right you put out records, you wrote scenes, it’s on you as a person in that kind of community. And it was really about you. There was no preeminence bands went on a pedestal. I remember, I was sharing a house with a friend who would put bands on in the area. And I get home from work and there would be a band like Darkest Hour, right, like just camped out in his living room because that’s where they were gonna stay and everyone’s just on the same level because we’re all part of the community. Then it started to grow. And it started to get really popular, which is awesome, because you want to see your friends do well, especially your artistic friends. And then at some point, it gets it changes. Right. So the term EMO starts to get used on the radio. And then it starts to describe bands that don’t, you don’t recognize right? Like Blink 182. And it starts to be kind of reappropriated and taken in a new and different direction that dissociates you from where you are.
Andrew Burrows 20:03
I think back to when I started getting into agile in like 2007-2008. And you guys were probably on it. You had the, the Yahoo scrum mailing list by you, and you’d have people like Ron Jeffries, rubbing shoulders with people like me who’d read Scrum and XP from the trenches, and we’re now doing this thing and thought you could do this, and you had this amazing community. And sometimes people would rap you on the head with the back of the hand to get you back into shape, right. And the way you try to contrast story points across teams, but you have this amazing kind of community and this ethic about doing it well, and it being about the person. And at some point, again, I think we shifted as an organization. And we started putting processes on pedestals and certifications on pedestals and things like that. But I think we’ve got to take it back as a community.
Andrew Burrows 20:11
The way in which we do Agile today, the way in which we think about it has not been designed to work in 2030 and 2035, with where marketing could potentially go. And it’s on us as a community to figure that out. And if we delegate responsibility of that, to existing frameworks, or organizations or something, then we’re not taking control of our own destiny and our own future, we’re not going to shape it the way we need to. So I’m a real believer in a true community of people like-minded people that want to make this really successful and push this industry where it wants to be, to be that kind of thought leadership, as we talked about. So when I heard you know, I have huge respect for Jim. Huge respect for Melissa, when I heard what they were doing, I wanted just to be involved in a little way to help because I anything that brings the community together and helps ameliorate what we do for the better future is something that I’d like to contribute to.
Andrew Burrows 20:52
What would you recommend to someone who’s getting started with agile marketing? Where do they start?
Andrew Burrows 21:10
That’s a great question. I think the first thing we should do is join the Agile Marketing Alliance community, right? Learn from everybody else and, and realize that other people are in the same boat as them and go over there to help him through. The second thing I would do is read everything you can follow as many people as you can on Twitter, right? Follow as many people as you can on LinkedIn, make those connections and see what other people are saying and doing and going through. And then the third one, would this just be to just start practicing, right? Look for something that works, or something that you think would work could be an existing framework like Scrum, maybe you say, we’re just going to do stand up, maybe you say, you know, here are 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, I’m gonna see if we can do three of them. And just stop and be open-minded about where we’re going to go right. And most importantly, in that bring people with you. Don’t point down to people don’t tell people what to do. Don’t mandate that we’re going to be agile. Ask people to go on a journey with you invite them to participate and learn together.
Frank Days 22:59
It’s always great to hear about the successes that people are having out there and the challenges and how people are trying to make it happen in the agile marketing space. I’d like to thank also our listeners for joining us today if you want to check out old episodes of The Marketing Agility Podcast, you can stop by Agilemarketingblog.com You can also, if you have a story to tell and want to share it with our audience, we have a form on the site fill it out. Reach out to me to find out if it makes sense. We are also still on iTunes. The feed is still feeding. Stop there. Subscribe, listen to it on your favorite mobile device. And finally, visit the Agile Marketing Alliance website. Jim Melissa and Andrew and others have done an amazing job of collating some really powerful array of assets. Finally, thank you for joining today and please stay agile.
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