How to keep a productive Marketing Team in the bigger picture

If you haven't read the story's begging, check out the previous article: From Team of 30 to Team of 140+. Now What?

 

In the last paragraph, I mentioned how important it is to have a proper workflow for managing distributed teams and recently adopted companies. The constant struggle in every marketing team in the world is to find the right tool for keeping everyone on track. Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Jira, Trello, Confluence, Asana; are all terms and tools that we have, have used, or tried using. 

Now, 3 months of hands-on experience in the larger structure led us to the following questions:

 

What is the best solution for our teams?

How to keep everybody in the loop when we have so many tools?

How to communicate well when we have teams and people all over the place?

How to track progress when our tasks are scattered between several instances?

 

After taking a few steps back, we took the only obvious decision - Think Simple💡

 

The primary goal of our company is to keep its marketing voice, face, and vision. Starting from there, we decided to continue using our favorite internal tooling: Jira & Confluence. With a little twist: to Roadmap like a boss. Giving enough visibility in our process naturally simplified the need for constant communication and updates. Our flow consisted of only three completely linked processes:

Roadmap â†’ Activity Page â†’ Jira Story

 

I. Roadmap

botron-marketing-roadmap-planning-01.png

Using Confluence's road mapping planner macro, we developed a structured 1-year plan for our marketing initiatives, plans, and opportunities. Lanes, bars and markers were enough tools to create a well-structured picture of building blocks to share with the entire marketing family and keep them in the loop at any given moment.

 

II. Activity Page

botron-marketing-roadmap-planning-02.png

Our carefully established marketing Confluence contains enough pages and spaces to allow each initiative and activity to have their dedicated progress pages. The innovation there was creating a few simple status tables: activity description, activity item matrix, and its related Jira stories where you can easily see the tasks and overall progress.

Saved as a Confluence Template, it let us create and fill new pages in a blink of an eye.

 

III. Jira story

botron-marketing-roadmap-planning-03.png

 

Focused only per Sprint, we are creating the Jira stories, tasks and sub-tasks, then link them in the Activity Pages.

 

Once we've done with the "paperwork," each team member can handle its assigned tasks and start making progress. Still, the only mission left is not to forget moving them on the active sprint board. (smile)

 

Not to brag that I feel like the queen of Confluence, but this tool is again saving lives. ðŸ’™

TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events