Mediaboss Marketing

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. Within these categories, there are several sub-pieces for implementation.

Last week we shared how to conduct a greatTeam Showcaseas part of the multi-stepLaunch Cycle. Today were going to dive into the next part of the Launch Cycle journey the Team Improvement session.

Team Improvement is a collaborative session for team members to look at continuous improvement. The goal is to find a small action item that the team can implement in the coming cycle to improve how they work together. Reflecting back on their most recent Launch Cycle helps the team learn from actual events.

You may have heard this called the Retrospective in Scrum, and if youre already familiar with or practicing retros, keep it up. Were not changing the meaning of something that we already know works amazingly well, but weve given the name a slight facelift so let me tell you how that story unfolded.

After coaching many teams over nearly a decade, I noticed the missing piece that wasnt happening (although its supposed to happen by definition), which is actually improving how the team works together. Over time, these meetings often turned into b*tch sessions where Id hear things like, We dont have the right martech stack to do our jobs, but instead of coming up with solutions and solving problems, it was restating the same complaint week after week. And that felt counterproductive.

So even though Team Improvement and Retrospective are synonymous, the emphasis on the words Team Improvement was deliberate, to ensure that the focus remained on becoming a continuously improving team, not just retro-ing whats going well and whats not, over and over again.

Agile is all about continuous improvement. Youre never done with agile marketing because that would imply that learning the basics is good enough. High performing teams always reflect back on how they can improve, and teams that feel empowered really enjoy this session because they feel a sense of ownership and accomplishment.

A Team Improvement session should be conducted by the team, for the team. This is where Practice Leads and Stakeholders need to get out of the way and give the team space to solve its own problems without interference. When Ive seen a boss jump in and try to solve a problem for the team, it shuts down their power and theyll naturally defer to the boss. A team feels automatically more psychologically safe when among peers, so avoid any power dynamics here if possible.

Benefits to holding a Team Improvement session are:

All of this leads to a higher performing team.

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If you have an Agile Champion role on your team, that person should be the facilitator. If that role is absent, create a rotating facilitator responsibility. The facilitator needs to keep this fun and engaging, while also remaining a neutral party.

A website such as Tasty Cupcakes can spark some fun ideas for this session to keep it interesting, especially in a virtual setting. There are also several automated tools available heres a comprehensive list to check them out.

While its easy to fall into the trap of the same format for Team Improvement sessions each cycle, mix it up. Definitely have fun with it! The Sailboat is a classic agile theme. There are many resources online showing how to build a Sailboat template: Heres one example.

First, the team centers around a project or initiative. Next, a timebox is set for the team to fill out the virtual stickies in each category. Somewhere between five and 10 minutes is good, depending on the size and complexity of your team.

The categories that the team will reflect on are:

After everyones had a chance to silently submit sticky notes (you can even send out the template ahead of time if you have people in other time zones), a timeboxed discussion takes place and everyone should have an opportunity to share their thoughts.

The final take-away, and the biggie, is: What one actionable item are we going to commit to that will help us as a team drive forward? This is the Team Improvement piece, and really the golden nugget of it all.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator: Team Improvement - MarTech