How to Successfully Run a Marketing Team with the Hybrid Approach

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*shoutout to Christopher Berry, who helped me put my distracted thoughts in place. Bear with me, and you'll find more about that. 

If you have regular touchpoints with your coworkers from the Marketing team, you probably already know they are in a constant organizational struggle for finding the right fit. Like, yeah...

 

In one of my previous articles, I mentioned how hard it is to find the right toolkit for your marketing team. Here, I am looking at another perspective: how hard it may be to find the correct methodology.

If your entire company is counting on Agile & Scrum to fully function, your marketing team is somehow obliged to try to adopt it one way or another. But Marketing is not an exact science, you know. Frequently, I'm unable to estimate my content-producing productivity in Story Points or leave that important social post for the next week because of my indestructible Sprint's integrity. 

What is the Hybrid Approach, and how it's suitable for our use case?

Here is the place where Mr. Berry enters the conversation. When I accidentally became part of his team, Christopher was quietly working on his content piece, focused on Agile, Waterfall, and Hybrid approaches to work.

I have never seen someone willingly putting so much effort into untangling the thick knots of project management methodologies.

Teodora: "But... why?"

Christopher: "Well, people are struggling, and I wanted to find why."

Fair enough!

He helped me understand in more detail what I was already trying to adopt: the hybrid way of running a marketing project.

Traditionally, marketing teams always preferred a waterfall-like structure for their initiatives. But it feels a little lonely when all other teams are running on two-week sprints, sharing their progress and success, while we were moving blocks through our timeless endless board.

With the latest Atlassian additions like Jira Work Management and Advanced Roadmaps, business teams like HR and Marketing can find coziness in the previously scary Jira world. My recipe for improved workflow?

• Get familiar with Agile & Scrum's essentials. Knowledge is what builds our most significant ideas, and customizing an already existing methodology is not wrong.
• Use Jira's core functionality, such as epics, stories, and boards. I know you are tempted to use Trello or an external tool like Asana, but believe me, Jira is perfect enough.
• Connect your tools. Link your Confluence projects to your Jira issues and stay on track with each change.
• Create Sprints and enjoy the company of your dev teams on their Sprint Reviews (worths it!)

Even though Jira was designed to be an agile tool, it comes with a lot of functionality for managing projects that is entirely suitable for teams using other methodologies. And even if your team is known for its hard-core old-school approach, it doesn't mean a little agility will destroy it :).

If you want to dig deep into Christopher's thoughts on The Perfect Blend, feel free to take a closer look, and enjoy it with a cup of coffee. 

PS: He launched his second sci-fi novel last week. I have no clue how his brain works in such tremendously different directions, but I'll be happy to see an X-Ray.