Stack Moxie’s Scrum Transformation: Two Week Sprints

As the Stack Moxie marketing team gets comfortable being Agile, changes are being made to help them maximize their success and minimize their scrum challenges. After a few weeks completing two-week Sprint cycles instead of one-week, we asked the team to respond to this prompt:

How has moving from one-week to two-week sprints made me not hate scrum?

Also, check out the form out Scrum Master designed to ensure that the tasks added to the Marketing Backlog have all of the information needed to set the team up for success.

Shea (Scrum Master)

“I could see a change almost immediately.  The team seemed more relaxed, upbeat and eager.  I think that the pressure of finishing massive projects was just too much.  The short sprint was setting the team up for a failure each week.  

Lesson learned, just because the system is working for me, the scrum process needs to work for everyone.  So for now, all is well in my scrum world…that is, until the next retrospective.”

Bria (Marketing Manager)

“Instead of stressing out about how to plan the separation of tasks within a week’s worth of time, we could set an overall goal for each sprint. What I thought was “teamwork” before was redefined entirely with our new system! Instead of each of us working on various small tasks, we now come together to complete one or two full campaigns and pull in additional backlog items that are achievable based on our confidence that we can fulfill them.”

Mike (Demand Generation)

“Marketing takes time and there are always more cooks in the kitchen and approvals to acquire. Trying to navigate busy calendars, an abundance of tasks and unforeseen scope creep on sprints means a one-week sprint is often difficult to accomplish. 

Two-week sprints have dramatically improved our time management, particularly when working with other team members that are busy and cannot always prioritize feedback or involvement in the project the marketing team is working on.”

Veronica (Content Marketing)

“So far, I’ve been much more satisfied with the work we’re putting out and the pace that we can work at. There’s no longer a need to panic when something unexpected happens that requires us to turn away from our projects and help. Instead, we can fully focus on whatever is needed at the moment, and know that there’s enough time to cover what we’re missing. I feel like we’ve doubled our productivity and, more importantly, doubled the quality of our deliverables. There’s time now to really flesh out tasks and get input from the whole team, which leads to a better result.”

Scrum: Marketing Backlog Form

Scrum Transformation - Marketing Backlog Request form

When internal departments request a project, we ask them to fill out our Marketing Backlog Request Form to obtain all information needed for it to be successful. This is especially helpful when planning a sprint, because the marketing team is provided:

  • Project scope
  • Required deliverables (email, social media, PDF, etc.)
  • Stakeholder
  • Due Date
  • Additional info

There has been a significant increase in deliverability due to the implementation of this request form. When planning for upcoming sprints, our marketing team is able to see what is needed for each request, thus removing the need to track down additional information. By removing these blockers, our team can collectively decide on what is achievable based on the due dates and individual stakeholder availability. There are no overlooked tasks and everyone is happy at the end of each sprint.

Both the two week sprint cycle change and form implementation have improved our team’s perspective on agile marketing. We recommend that anyone looking to make this change read about our transformation process and always check in with your team’s overall satisfaction!