After a month of being on an Agile team, I feel both calmer and more stressed about work at the same time. There have been quite a few ups and downs along the way that cause both emotions to surface, but the main focus for me has been transparency. Being completely open and honest about what I’m working on has held me responsible for my work. The positive side to transparency is that I’ve felt more comfortable communicating when I’ve had too much on my plate and have needed additional help from my colleagues. The negative side is that when I get held up on a project, either because of poor time estimation on my part or changes from other people, I fall behind in my work, and it affects my whole team. Being transparent that things aren’t going as planned is hard for me to admit to personally, so being on an agile team has forced me to solve things on time crunches that I usually wouldn’t feel as stressed over.
Agile marketing has taught me that it’s okay to ask for help. It’s beneficial to the team to task out items that I would’ve usually taken on myself, which benefits our company by playing to others’ strong suits and freeing up my time for other things. Having a scrum master to help me navigate each week has been a blessing in disguise because sometimes I need to take a step back and have a more realistic view of my capabilities. Working at a startup tends to mean that each person wears many hats, so knowing that my team has my back when I’ve got too much going on is refreshing. Agile marketing has also taught me to break down each task into sizable chunks to create tinier accomplishments over the week. This has been the biggest adjustment for me because I tend to see the bigger picture when thinking up campaigns and task items. This is why I would fall towards the side of disliking agile marketing, but it has to do with my work style and the desire to jump between projects without consulting others.
To say that I hate Agile marketing would be a disservice to a brilliant methodology. It’s hard for me to separate my feelings when I can’t tell if I’m used to working a certain way and just adjusting to change. I dislike “demo days” because I feel pressure for my work to be perfect and polished when sometimes parts of my week are just defining the what and how behind a project. Not feeling like I have enough to showcase is an adjustment because I enjoy showing off a job well done more than anything. Though I believe that agile is beneficial for dev teams to show product updates, there is so much riding on marketing to produce results when things take time to adjust and approve. I hope that my views on this change because I really do enjoy the collaboration that has been apparent since switching to Scrum.