Most of what I have read about agility at an organizational level emphasizes transforming the way software teams work. Yet, in enterprises not concerned with selling software products, the agility created in development teams is only a tiny part of the agility story.
We know that Agile organizations need input from customers to offer adaptive solutions. However, we often overlook the source of that customer feedback: marketing.
In most business models, marketing acts as the enterprise’s eyes, ears, and mouthpiece. This post will explore how the marking function is the pivot for enterprise agility.
Key definitions: Agility, products, and empiricism
Consider these standard industry definitions:
- Enterprise agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market threats and opportunities, thereby increasing growth and profitability. Therefore, it has a dual focus externally on markets and customers and internally on business operations and efficiency.
- A product is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need. It can be a physical item, service, digital good, or idea. Products are designed to provide value to customers and can be tangible, like a smartphone, or intangible, like a software application or consulting service.
- Empiricism: Scrum is based on empirical process control, which means decisions are made based on observation, experience, and evidence. Customer feedback is a vital part of this empirical approach, helping teams understand what works and what needs improvement.
Notice that all three definitions stress the importance of customer feedback. Yet where does that feedback originate?
Marketing is the role that interprets strategy into action and establishes the brand. It is also the function that seeks and evaluates feedback on customer experience. It analyses the performance of existing products and service levels so that the organization may improve.
Marketing as the driver of organizational adaptation
Marketing evaluates the marketplace to identify strategic threats and opportunities. It provides the essential input to initiate change and operational adaptation, key elements of enterprise agility.
As a core responsibility, marketing is the function that identifies the need for an enterprise to adapt based on its market evaluation. Marketing also recognizes the need for new products, features, or services.
The limits of developer access to customers
Despite what the Agile frameworks indicate, software engineers are unlikely to have direct access to customers in most enterprises. Few organizations will fund software engineers while they have professional marketers to do a market analysis and speak to large numbers of customers.
Developers may see a few selected customers, but marketing will provide the big-picture strategic analysis, the identification of the potential need for new products, and evaluate threats from competitors.
The question is how the data needed from the market analysis gets to the product development teams, and the answer is through product owners.
Product owners: Translators of market insight
Product owners provide the bridge between the marketing data and the engineers. In an Agile enterprise, product owners will likely showcase any product improvements they suggest and present product analysis data such as customer satisfaction, churn rate, user engagement, and aborted transactions.
A product showcase is an essential element that garners developer commitment and stimulates product innovation. The frequency of a product showcase depends upon the volatility of the enterprise’s market and is a precursor to the backlog refinement sessions.
The expanded role of product owners in Agile enterprises
Yet the product owner role is far broader than the Agile frameworks define.
For example, in addition to suggesting product improvements, the market analysis may show that an adjustment in commercial terms is needed. Or perhaps an additional service element is required. Or maybe profit margins are not on par with the competition, provoking operational cost reduction activities, organizational change, or process automation.
Given the above, the product owner’s role in an Agile enterprise is more likely to be a business function responsible for strategy fulfillment than one in technology.
Strategy, brand, and marketing alignment
The marketing function translates the enterprise strategy into action. Therefore, the market evaluation must be grounded in a clear definition of the corporate strategy.
The alignment of strategy and brand is critical. The marketing brand is a unique identity that an enterprise product establishes in the minds of consumers. It is the product of long-term and consistent communications. It encompasses elements such as the name, logo, tagline, design, and overall image that differentiate the organization from its competitors.
The challenges of brand perception and agility
Having an established brand creates some degree of consumer intolerance to rapid changes in strategy. For instance, an established aircraft manufacturer won’t suddenly pivot to cars, nor will an established cheese manufacturer start creating hard liquor. Their customers’ brand expectations likely wouldn’t allow it.
It has been shown that people take longer to adjust their brand perceptions than it takes some enterprises to pivot. Attempting changes in brand perceptions sometimes causes marketing missteps.
Historical examples of brand and strategy misalignment
Microsoft
An example of a marketing misstep is Microsoft’s first tablet. The Microsoft Tablet PC, launched in 2001, was a pen-enabled personal computer running the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. It aimed to offer a more intuitive way of interacting with computers through handwriting recognition and touch capabilities.
Despite its innovative design, the Tablet PC faced obstacles such as high costs and limited software support, preventing widespread adoption. The engineers delivered what marketing believed was needed, but the market rejected the product.
Saatchi & Saatchi
As a further example of a poor brand pivot, in 1987, Saatchi & Saatchi, the renowned UK advertising agency, attempted to venture into banking. The Saatchi brothers, Maurice and Charles, made an audacious bid to acquire Midland Bank, one of the largest banks in Britain at the time. However, the bid was ultimately unsuccessful as it was deemed to lack commercial or strategic logic. Saachi & Saachi’s brand was known for advertising, not banking.
Strategic constancy in a volatile world
This focus on brand and strategy is known as “strategic constancy,” a concept identified by Jian Wen Liao and Feng Zhu. They describe it as an approach where companies in volatile environments concentrate their strategy on a few enduring elements of their business model, such as core values, customer relationships, brand identity, and key products.
Instead of chasing every fleeting trend, organizations prioritize depth over breadth, enhancing their competitive advantage in core areas. This dedication to the essential strategic aspects provides a stable foundation, allowing the company to navigate change effectively without losing its identity or diluting its efforts.
Reconciling strategic constancy with Agile engineering
Strategic constancy contradicts Agile engineering wisdom, which indicates an almost superficial approach to strategy, brand, and consumers. However, it is essential that engineering teams understand, support, and engineer products consistent with the organization’s strategic intent.
At a fairly trivial level, UX style guides, language, and operating principles will all be determined by collaboration between engineering and marketing to support the consumer’s experience of the brand.
Grounding market evaluations in strategy
Market evaluations must be conducted within the organization’s purpose, brand, and strategy. By understanding these strategic elements, marketing teams can develop strategies that enable an enterprise to seize opportunities and mitigate potential threats.
How do they achieve this?
Traditional feedback systems vs. rapid market response
Businesses across various industries have invested heavily in tools and technologies to understand customers better and enhance their experience. Despite these advancements, many marketing functions still rely on traditional survey-based measurement systems.
These systems use brand or relationship surveys to gather customer feedback via post-transaction surveys. The theory is that these surveys inform strategic decisions by analyzing input over time.
Dedicated teams circulate questionnaires and analyze the results. This may be fine if the company is in a capital-intensive industry, but this is far too slow for volatile markets like consumer products, where there is a greater need for rapid adaptation.
Technology for speed and market insight
An organization needs to be concerned with how quickly it adapts based on market analysis. In volatile market sectors, enterprises have invested in big data and artificial intelligence to analyze customer interactions and forecast future activity rapidly.
These tools can also be used with different data sets to examine the effect of placing new products or product features into existing markets or existing products into new markets.
In the case of new products or features, this would involve product owners working with engineers to define requirements. However, taking an existing product and introducing it as is to another geographic marketplace would likely not involve engineering but marketing and sales.
Enterprise agility in different flavors
I have a favorite microbrewery in Suffolk, England. Each quarter, they regularly produce two or three new beverages. The latest is a low-alcohol pale ale in tins and bottles.
When I last spoke to their CEO about agility, he told me they regularly change the website content to sell their new products or make new customer offers. Users made the changes in their content management software rather than engineers engineering new features or products. To illustrate this point, the CEO stated that it had been “at least six months” since its last significant software upgrade.
In this brewery, enterprise agility is created by the heads of marketing and brewing and their teams rather than software engineering.
Agility as a leadership function, not a technical one
In many industries, agility is created by leaders’ attitudes and the data they use for their analysis, not by software engineers. You may have heard the phrase, “Every business is a software business.” This feels incorrect to me.
What is true is that nearly every business is now software-enabled. In other words, the enterprise doesn’t sell software but uses software to enhance its brand or operational efficiency.
For example, McDonald’s now has an in-store kiosk for ordering. This product’s objective is to improve customer experience by reducing queuing. However, it also increases operational efficiency by freeing staff from taking orders.
Of course, data is produced as a byproduct of ordering, and guess where that data goes—you are right, straight back to marketing.
Marketing as the pivot for enterprise agility
Many organizations treat their marketing as an outward, client-facing function. To enable the organization to rapidly adapt to market threats and opportunities, marketing also needs to have an inward focus.
While market analysis needs to be acted upon, not all actions impact software engineers. The necessary action might involve organizational change, process reengineering, or automation aimed at reducing operational costs and enhancing customer experience. These changes may occur alongside, or even instead of, developing new products or features.
Enterprise agility isn’t optional in today’s digital world. It’s how businesses grow, adapt, and stay competitive.
