Agile Champion: Getting Started with the Agile Marketing Navigator | Online Sales Guide Tips

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Marketing is a lean machine and might benefit more from an Agile Champion than from a traditional Scrum Master.

Today we’ll dive into the role of Agile Champion. This role is similar to a Scrum Master in Scrum, but with a greater emphasis on the part about “championing agile.”

In the early days of my agile career (and even once recently) I worked as a Scrum Master, so I can speak from a lot of personal experience about this role. This is the most confusing role for hiring managers because it’s so unlike any other typical job description at a company. Because of the lack of understanding of this role, we’ve seen a lot of bad Scrum Mastering. This has led to some misunderstandings around the value of this role, and in marketing it’s a tough sell.

What is a Scrum Master?

Before we dive into the Agile Champion role, I want to ground you in what a Scrum Master role is (and was meant to be).

A Scrum Master owns the agile process on a team. According to Scrum, this is a fully dedicated role that doesn’t perform any work on the team, but helps to unblock the team, teach Scrum to the team and the organization, facilitate meetings and help to make organizational change happen.

Why is the Scrum Master role a tough sell?

I think the meaning of Scrum Master was well intended, but over the years companies have watered down this role. In many large companies, project managers aren’t needed as much, so they get converted to the role of Scrum Master. While this works for some people, many people are great project managers, but terrible Scrum Masters.

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of problems with the execution of this role including:

From those three anti-patterns alone, you can see why this role is a tough sell. However, in software development, it’s so common that hiring for this role is pretty standard. Meanwhile, marketing runs like a lean machine, and asking for a full time dedicated role that doesn’t deliver — well, you can see where that’s going.

How is the Agile Champion different from a Scrum Master?

Because of all the baggage around the role of Scrum Master, even though I think it’s a valuable role if done well, it’s not one that marketers are buying into very often. So, how do we deliver the good parts of that role and get rid of the baggage? That’s where the Agile Champion comes in.

First of all, we chose the name carefully. When working with clients, we heard a lot of push back about being called a Scrum Master. We also wanted to really emphasize that this role is about championing agile ways of working, and not about project management.

In the Agile Marketing Navigator framework, the Agile Champion doesn’t have to be a full time dedicated role. It can be, but it’s not a requirement. Why? Because we’d rather see someone who’s excited about agile marketing lead this, even if they have another role on the team, than to try and force a full time position for someone who doesn’t fit the bill.

The Agile Champion helps the agile marketing team:

I’ve seen a lot of success in this role with people that you wouldn’t expect to take it on. I had a team graphic designer that volunteered for this position and loved it so much that her company did make it a full time role.

A great Agile Champion is someone who wants to learn about agile marketing and can build excitement around it for the organization.

Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”

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