I recently participated in a leadership event hosted by the Atlanta Tech Village where a group of startup company leaders along with leaders from fortune 500 companies met to discuss how they use Agile Methodology  in their organizations. At this event I got a chance to speak with Tami McQueen, Marketing Director at Salesloft.

Tami spoke to the group about how she used an Agile Methodology to manage her marketing team. This came as  surprise to me because I was familiar with using Agile only in product development.  I later met with her to go in detail about how she managed her team.

Each week, her marketing team organizes a Sprint. They use a tool called, Trello to manage this process. Each unit of work gets a card created to track it where a point value and owner is assigned. The point value is based on the amount of time estimated to complete the task. They assign cards with point values of 1 being about an hour or less of work, 3 being a couple hours task, and a 5 being a mini project requiring approx. a half day of work.

Each week there is a Sprint planning meeting where all the work for that week is organized into cards and assigned points and a team member who takes ownership to compete the task. Each team member is given a specific number of points for their workload. They use 30 points per team member but this is something that may vary by the team and type of work. Each morning there is a short Scrum meeting to check-in on the tasks and communicate priorities for the day. There are goals set for the team to be able to successfully complete consecutive Sprints, meaning all work that the team committed to getting done was completed.

The success that Tami had with using an Agile Methodology for her marketing team inspired me to adopt this process for our team at Cooleaf. I decided to impelment this process for our team to manage the Account Management work that we do on a weekly basis. Our Sprint is summarized in the picture below. We just started using this process so I will write a post in the future about our results and lessons learned. I do believe that Agile can be used beyond development teams and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do.