The Agile Marketer by Roland Smart

Author:Roland Smart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119223030
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Putting It All Together

Is it really marketing's job to support product management in diversifying its innovation practice? Is it product management's job to understand the overall customer experience from presales to support? The answer to both questions is “yes.”

The structure of the human brain provides a good metaphor for conceiving how marketing and product management should function together. The human brain contains overlapping and partially redundant systems; take, for example, the rods and cones in the vision system. If you removed one or the other, humans would still be able to see, although with diminished ability in many circumstances (e.g., low-light situations). Further, behind the actual receptors are a number of parallel systems for interpreting incoming data. Some serve to recognize and interpret faces, while others interpret the boundaries between objects. In much the same way, marketing and product management should complement each other. In companies, as in biological evolution, overlapping systems have proven to be valuable, and well worth some additional overhead expense associated with maintaining some redundancy.

For marketing, it's not a question of whether to do this work; it's a question of recognizing the unique value that marketing has to offer in various circumstances. While marketing establishes the platform that supports the collection of practitioner feedback, it traditionally has stronger capabilities on the strategic side. When it comes to surveying and understanding the overall landscape, marketers are the experts. No matter how you divide things up, there will be overlap, but, as with the vision system and other brain functions, more overlap leads to more flexibility and agility.

There is no one right way to integrate the approaches that I've outlined here. Nor are these methods necessarily the exact ones that you'll want to implement. But you will need to supplement your Agile practice with strategy practices. Furthermore, there is no right way to define the interfaces between your innovation methods and your Agile methods, but such interfaces must exist.

Smart companies are increasingly emphasizing the importance of linking these approaches. The blended culture that results will allow marketing to transition from a world of high-risk annual releases and Big-Bang marketing campaigns to one in which services are released frequently and at a steady cadence. In the future, no release would be able to fall so flat that it couldn't be rolled back with relative ease. At the same time, marketers will be able to tell just as many compelling stories about what's being released today as they will be able to tell about where things are headed. In fact, they'll be in a better position to establish better ways of selling, amplifying customer satisfaction, and tapping into latent demand from inside the product or service itself.

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