Stack Moxie’s Scrum Transformation: First Month

Stack Moxie: Scrum Transformation - First Month

One month into becoming an agile scrum marketing team, everyone is reflecting on their journey so far and its highs and lows. We asked everyone to respond to this prompt:

One month of Agile—What did I learn? What did I hate?

Shea (Scrum Master)

“As Stack Moxie’s Scrum Transformation continues, I now realize that, even though we are getting the hang of the meeting cadence and communication, the system will always be evolving.  Unfortunately, this realization is going to be the thing I hate the most about this process.  

I do believe that my personality fits perfectly into the Scrum Master responsibilities—I love a good system and predictability.  I love to find a problem and fix it.  But we will always find items that can be improved on…if we don’t, then it defeats the purpose of this process. The constant optimization is both satisfying and frustrating when it feels like you’re still having issues even after making so many improvements.”

Bria (Marketing Manager)

“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. 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.”

Mike (Demand Generation)

“I sort of dislike the finality of a sprint and the pressure it creates. Sprints often feel like they are either overwhelmingly difficult to complete or underwhelmingly fun once the items have been delivered. I’m proud of all my work, but sometimes chunking the work down into small bites means the big feature/campaign that is launched is lost because all that was launched was one small aspect of the overall project.”

Veronica (Content Marketing)

“If there’s one thing I hate about Agile so far, it’s the mixture of flexibility and inflexibility that it requires from everything to make it work. On one hand, a one-week sprint cycle calls for real commitment to your assigned tasks and hard work to ensure you’re completing everything before the sprint demo. But on the other hand, a lot of our projects have stakeholders outside of our team, which means we’re dealing with their priorities being elsewhere and the delays that come with that. That means that there are times when things just aren’t going to get done, and there’s no “fault” to be had by anyone, marketing team or not.”