Team Showcase: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator

We recently introduced you to Agile Marketing Navigator, a flexible framework for navigating agile marketing for marketers, by marketers in the article A new way to navigate agile marketing. The navigator has four major components: Collaborative Planning Workshop, Launch Cycle, Key Practices and Roles.

Last week we shared how to conduct a great Daily Huddle as part of the multi-step Launch Cycle. Today we’re going to dive into the next part of the Launch Cycle journey — the Team Showcase.

Holding a Team Showcase

This is an event where the team showcases work done in the Launch Cycle and gets feedback from stakeholders. Additionally, the team shares any relevant performance metrics in order to learn through experiments and data rather than opinions and conventions. The group reviews the Blueprint to see if priorities for future work have changed. If feedback is valuable, the team re-prioritizes and adds or removes items from the Marketing Backlog (after the meeting).

Benefits to holding a Team Showcase are that it:

• Eliminates the need for “static” status reports.
• Shifts the focus to data and metrics rather than opinions and conventions.
• Gives Stakeholders a “real-time” opportunity to provide feedback.
• Empowers the team to share what they’ve been working on to all levels in the company.
• Allows for flexible planning and the ability to pivot what happens next based on feedback.
• Celebrates accomplishments!

The Team Showcase should be held at a consistent day and time at the end of each Cycle, either every one or two weeks. The Product Owner invites any relevant Stakeholders based on what work is being showcased. For some companies, the audience may change from Cycle to Cycle, depending on the nature of the work. 

Team members rotate sharing the work that has been done recently, giving everyone an opportunity to be proud of their accomplishments. Unlike Scrum’s Sprint Review, the work showcased may or may not have been fully completed during the Cycle. Instead, it’s live in the market, and there are learnings based on data and analytics that can be discussed.

An opportunity for constructive feedback

Stakeholders offer constructive feedback on any work showcased. The goal isn’t to hear comments like “I want the image to be blue,” but rather, “Have we thought about other uses for this ad? Maybe we can test how it would perform on Instagram?” The Marketing Owner has the “power” to decide what to do with the feedback and how it may alter work.

The Team Showcase is real-time, so status reports that once took hours to produce — obsolete before they hit the manager’s inbox — get replaced with impactful live conversations.

Marketers have access to plenty of data, but too often they’ve moved on to the next project or campaign before anything is done with that data. The Team Showcase is a wonderful opportunity to share data regularly with the team and the Stakeholders: plans should change based on learning by doing.

Showcasing work and how it’s performing is a great way to get team members to share their work with stakeholders and leaders. However, not all results are favorable, and it can be scary to share negative results. It’s important for the team to feel psychologically safe to share the good, bad and the ugly. Agile is all about fast failures and quick pivots, but it takes some time to get to a place where most people are comfortable being vulnerable.

Leaders should underline the importance of what was learned, not what went wrong. This allows the team to be open and honest about what’s really going on. Pivoting is a natural part of an agile marketing team, as well as putting more emphasis on what’s high-performing. This “nail it and scale it” approach will help turn a team from a static one that simply delivers into an innovative one that is really agile.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholder