Marketing with Agility Competency

Teams applying Agile marketing practices typically see benefits in the following five areas:

Ability to Adapt and Deliver Quickly 

Agile marketing empowers leaders and teams to embrace experimentation and innovation. By promoting iterative processes and rapid feedback loops, teams can refine their strategies based on real-time data and customer feedback. This leads to more informed decision-making and the ability to test and implement new ideas swiftly.

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“We’ve cut our average project production time in half, and our employee engagement metrics have all shown improvement… It didn’t take long for us to see the benefits to our production time, project volume, and team morale. We continue to see those improvements over time, so we only wish we would have done it sooner.”

— Darci Helbling, Executive Director, Global Marketing Operations at Charles River

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Collaboration Across Functions

Furthermore, this competency emphasizes collaboration across functions. Breaking down silos within marketing departments allows for increased transparency, improved communication, and a more cohesive approach to achieving shared goals. By encouraging cross-functional teamwork, SAFe organizations can leverage diverse skills and perspectives, enhancing the overall creativity and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Greater Organizational Alignment

For executives and transformation leaders, mastering Agile marketing equips them with the tools to drive meaningful change throughout their organizations. It enables them to align marketing strategies with broader business objectives, ensuring that every campaign and initiative contributes to the company’s success.

More Satisfied Customers

Agile marketing teams prioritize delivering value to stakeholders and customers without just assuming they understand what their customers value. Teams consistently get feedback, either from talking with customers directly or through data. The result is happier customers whose real needs and desires are consistently met. Those happy customers can transform a business.

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“Since our Agile marketing journey began, we have optimized our team structures to be able to prioritize our marketing campaigns based on the value that they truly bring to our customers.”

— Zach Meixner, Senior Digital Program Manager at M&T Bank Corporation

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Continuous Improvement

Aligning marketing departments to their organization’s SAFe implementation through the Agile Marketing for Teams & Leaders competency is vital for any organization seeking to thrive in a dynamic market. It enhances marketing efficiency and customer satisfaction while building a sustainable competitive advantage. This is achieved by fostering a culture of agility, innovation, and continuous growth in a highly customer-facing area of the organization.

Which roles would benefit from mastering the Marketing with Agility Competency?

While this competency is foundational for marketing professionals, many others benefit from understanding and supporting Agile marketing principles, including Leadership, Product roles, RTEs, SPCs, and others who are supporting the implementation of Lean and Agile across the business.

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Learning about Marketing with Agility

This competency provides foundational as well as advanced knowledge on applying Agile ways of work, specifically inside marketing departments. By enhancing your understanding through articles, videos, and workshops that explore the practical application of Agile methodologies in marketing contexts, you can delve into how Agile improves responsiveness and customer focus in your marketing efforts.

Agile marketing goes beyond standups, boards, and trains; it is a system that helps teams align on priorities, deliver continuous value, and confidently adapt to change. By adopting iterative processes, marketing teams can experiment more efficiently, use data-driven insights, and improve cross-functional collaboration. Agile marketing prioritizes continuous improvement, transparency, and adaptability. 

Agile marketing teams use frameworks like Scrum and Kanban to manage their work execution daily. Because marketers often work on a wide variety of activities, it’s common to mix and match practices to form hybrid frameworks that better accommodate their reality. 

Marketers often find that Agile frameworks have the most impact when marketing teams are not organized by specialty role but instead by customer-centric outcomes. As a result, experts from different disciplines end up working together towards common goals and have greater autonomy to move quickly instead of getting held back by dependencies on other groups.

While all Agile marketing teams have unique nuances, the most successful share fundamental traits. Their continuous improvement efforts encompass the what, who, and how of marketing processes, ensuring that agility is fully embedded, not just a new name for the same old activities.

Mindset & Culture: Agile marketers approach work with a new attitude, emphasizing respect, collaboration, continuous improvement, rapid value delivery, and adaptability to change. This mindset fosters high-performing teams that deliver outstanding customer value.

Practicing Experimentation & Iteration: In an Agile setting, fixed, long-term plans are replaced by frequent, small experiments. Teams then use these outcomes to inform their next steps, creating a virtuous PDCA (plan, do, check, act) cycle across all kinds of marketing activities.

People Leadership: Leadership in Agile marketing needs to evolve alongside planning and practices. An adaptive, empowering style is critical to ensure long-term Agile adoption and an effective transformation. 

Data & Metrics: Unlike traditional teams, Agile teams heavily rely on data to assess success, ensuring that every activity is measurable and supported by empirical evidence, not just gut feel.

Customer Centricity: Marketers should always be fixated on delivering customer value, but internal stakeholders are also customers for these teams. Agile marketing teams use prioritization tools to ensure value flows smoothly and continuously to the right customers, internal or external. 

Applying the Marketing with Agility Competency

Applying Agile marketing isn’t about installing a few new practices; it’s about redesigning how marketing works at every level: team, leadership, and organization. This progression breaks down into the following milestones:

Design: Your Agile transformation is unique to your marketing team

Explore your current state, and let insights and strategic recommendations build your path. Map your value streams and ensure that the plan fits your context. Your custom strategy, operating system, team structure, and a rollout plan become your blueprint and a way to reap Agile’s benefits without creating chaos. Leaders and Managers collaborate in change management and Agile culture topics

Pilot: Put your Agile transformation plan to work

Execution of the Agile transformation strategy and roadmap commences with special attention to organizational culture. Training and coaching align leaders and teams so they have a common understanding of the Agile mindset, values, and principles. According to the State of Agile Marketing Report 2024, 70% of teams found Agile certification courses helpful as they were adopting Agile practices. Pilot teams pave the way, testing and learning, so your Agile transformation plan’s success is assured. Seventy-four percent of teams found working with Agile marketing coaches helpful to their pilot team’s success.

Scale: This is where your practice pays off

Take what you have learned from the pilots and apply it to more teams. Implementing PI Planning changes the way strategy and goals are set and executed. To set a strategic course for team planning and encourage alignment, leaders lead the development of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), epic prioritization, and focus on Agile leadership. As your Agile transformation implementation grows, teams find a predictable rhythm, continuously working together to create measurable value for the customer. The execution of strategic recommendations and the transformation roadmap accelerates as feedback shapes the next iteration and drives systemic change.

Embed: It’s time to broaden and deepen the Agile way of working

Your teams are adaptable, dealing with uncertainty as it occurs by shifting priorities and driving speed to outpace the competition. Comparing pre- vs. post-Agile performance opens more opportunities, showing the impact of Agile ways of working. It’s time to identify and train internal Agile champions, establish communities of practice, and utilize a new or existing Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) to embed Agile practices so you can continue the journey from just doing Agile to being Agile.

Improve: Like a well-oiled machine, the marketing team is constantly moving forward

They’ve learned to experiment with positive results and regularly check in to improve their process. Leaders and Managers empower teams and focus on creating a nurturing culture. Marketing becomes a strategic partner to the business and a recognized growth driver. Teams are engaged, empowered, and connected to the organizational strategy. And your customers are more satisfied and loyal than ever.

Imagine your marketing department’s journey to ultimate agility as a climb. Below is an example of the actionable steps a team might take in order to move through the phases of applying Agile marketing, from designing their approach to sustaining it internally.

Mastering Marketing with Agility Competency

Mastery means that teams are not only delivering faster, they’re aligned on what matters, empowered in how they work, and focused on who they serve. The result is marketing that’s responsive, resilient, and relentlessly customer-centric. Leaders should see increased innovation, streamlined processes, and a culture of collaboration. A transformed team will consistently align marketing strategies with organizational goals and customer insights, driving greater value across the board.

According to the annual State of Agile Marketing Report, mastering Agile marketing enables organizations to:

• Increase campaign responsiveness by rapidly adapting to market changes through iterative processes, which has led 73% of marketers using Agile to experience an improvement in the quality of their marketing campaigns.
• Enhance customer engagement by prioritizing data-driven insights and continuous feedback loops. 76% of Agile marketers feel that they are prioritizing work more effectively.
• Streamline marketing operations through cross-functional collaboration and transparency
• Boost innovation by fostering a culture of experimentation and learning from real-time results. As a result, 71% of marketers using Agile report improvements in team morale.
• Improve alignment with business objectives by integrating customer needs into strategic planning. This alignment has led 58% of Agile marketing teams to observe better ability to align their team to business objectives, as well as with teams outside marketing.

The following resources will help you master this competency and deepen your knowledge in scaling your Agile marketing practice, connecting it to your organization’s SAFe implementation, and evaluating your Agile marketing maturity.

Globo InsureCo’s recharge of Marketing

Global InsureCo, a historic leader in the insurance industry, faced a new challenge: the need for rapid market adaptation in the digital age. Traditional marketing methods were sluggish, resulting in delayed product launches and waning customer engagement. Recognizing the need for transformation, CEO Alana Sharma, along with her VP of Marketing & Growth, embarked on a transformation of their marketing operating system, not just their workflows. Luckily, they had the right pillars in place to succeed – leadership support, dedicated teams, and access to experts who helped the leadership team design their approach. 

To kickstart the implementation, four cross-functional pilot teams were established, breaking down silos and fostering collaboration. Together, they represented the first value stream. Their structure created the perfect environment for trust and healthy communication to flourish. Each team had a fully trained, dedicated Product Owner and Scrum Master with very distinct responsibilities for the team’s forward progress. This means POs and Scrum Masters didn’t have to juggle doing their roles part-time and working on something else on the side of the desk. 

Furthermore, team members were also dedicated to persistent teams. This meant there were few instances of divided loyalties, where a single team member sits on multiple teams and needs to juggle between different backlogs, visual boards, and team meetings. This allowed team members to be focused on their own team and their objectives.

Each team customized its Agile practices based on its shared goals, capabilities, and feedback, reinforcing the idea that true agility is built where the how, what, and who of work come together. All four teams subscribed to a slightly different flavor of the Agile process because they had been given the latitude to adapt their processes based on their ability to share work, the types of projects they were receiving, and the feedback collected during their retrospectives. However, there were Agile practices that proved compelling for all four teams.

All four teams have been extremely consistent and successful in their use of the following Agile practices:

• Kanban boards for workflow visualization
• Retrospectives 
• Stakeholder Demos
• Estimation & Burndown

While all of the typical Scrum ceremonies were regularly scheduled for all four teams, retrospectives and sprint demos have been extremely impactful and were often referenced as being game-changing. Retrospectives happen at the end of every two-week iteration and represent a moment for reflection and improvement for the teams. Demos happen every other Wednesday and invite all members of adjacent teams and stakeholders to take a peek into each team’s progress and upcoming plans.

Estimating work using the Fibonacci sequence during Iteration Planning and tracking estimated velocity and actual velocity at the end of the sprint has been a powerful tool for teams to understand their capacity. As a result, teams now recognize when to limit their commitments for a given iteration and distribute incoming work across several iterations to prevent overburdening team members.

“There is now generally more experimentation and embracing innovation happening. A lot of the work before was done based on someone’s whim; now we focus on the right outputs that will lead to outcomes, not just what will please internal stakeholders. Agile is very inclusive, which is in alignment with our core values,” says the PO of one of the teams.

At scale, the POs and Scrum Masters of these four teams began their own ART Sync to make sure they were all on the same page strategically. The four teams represented the first official value stream within what would soon become the marketing ART, as new teams spun up around them, focused on marketing for different areas of the business. 

The results across the four pilot teams were transformative. Within six months, time-to-market for campaigns decreased by 50%, allowing Global InsureCo to respond quickly to market trends. A new mobile-first campaign targeting millennials resulted in a 30% increase in engagement within three months. Customer feedback loops were integrated, leading to tailored marketing efforts that resonated deeply with diverse demographics.

Internally, employees on the four Agile teams reported a 40% boost in job satisfaction, attributed to increased collaboration and the empowerment to experiment and innovate. The newfound flexibility enabled these marketing teams to pivot strategies rapidly, ensuring alignment with customer needs and organizational goals supported by adaptive leadership.

Based on the pilot team’s learning, new teams began to join in, and soon, the organization was applying Agile marketing at scale, collaborating during PI Planning with clear OKRs and prioritization. This enabled the marketing ART to fully integrate with Global InsureCo’s enterprise-wide SAFe implementation, proving that Agile marketing is not a parallel path—it’s a powerful contributor to scaled agility.

Global InsureCo’s Agile marketing transformation not only revitalized its brand image but also set a new industry standard for responsiveness and innovation. By adopting Agile methodologies, the company successfully navigated the complexities of a fast-paced digital market, proving that even traditional giants can adapt and thrive.

Continuing Your Journey through the SAFe Competencies

Last Update: 15 August 2025