Have you heard of the Agile framework but assumed it was only for software engineering teams? You’re not alone. Scrum and other Agile methodologies gained popularity in the software development industry in the early 2000s. But across industries, the Agile framework has helped teams develop more efficient workflows. For creative teams, this efficiency is vital.
Scrum is a project management framework designed to help teams collaborate and get more done together. In industries with complex deliverables, Scrum breaks projects down into smaller, more manageable components, then delivers them in short cycles called sprints.
Marketing is a mixed bag of projects that range from simple to complex — much like other industries where Scrum works well, like engineering and product development. In an average week, a marketing team may be tasked with something as complex as a complete website redesign, down to something as simple as a banner ad!
Here, we’ll take a look at the Scrum framework and how it can benefit creative teams. We’ll also drop some step-by-step guidance on how to incorporate Scrum into your creative workflows.
What we'll cover
Table of contents
The 6 principles of Scrum
When teams adopt the Agile framework and fail, it’s often because they don’t fully embrace the practices. Scrum principles complement the Agile approach to project management. We’ve identified six principles that are critical to making the Scrum framework work for you and your team:
- Empirical process control: Hard evidence and experimentation always outrank theory in the empirical process. Rather than crafting a detailed plan, this principle encourages teams to make decisions and reiterate based on their observations and experience.
Based on this principle, marketing teams may use A/B testing to refine an advertising strategy over time, rather than spending weeks building the perfect ad. As marketing author and entrepreneur Seth Godin said, “Waiting for ‘perfect’ is never as smart as making progress.” - Self-organization: When teams organize themselves and their work independently, they add more value. This principle promotes shared ownership, team buy-in, and creativity. When creatives are asked to estimate a delivery timeline for the next iteration of an asset, they’re exercising self-organization.
- Collaboration: Creatives know the magic happens when team members work together toward a common goal. Scrum encourages team members to communicate and collaborate. A single team member can produce great work, but when teams work together, projects have a greater impact.
In a creative environment, this might look like a graphic designer sharing designs with a copywriter to spark creativity and come up with a more cohesive deliverable. - Value-based prioritization: Creative and marketing teams have endless to-do lists. This Scrum principle allows teams to prioritize tasks and features based on their business value and importance. They don’t just focus on the urgent emails in their inbox but on the tasks that deliver maximum business value in the shortest amount of time.
- Time-boxing: Scrum helps teams protect their time, and no one values this more than marketers and creatives. Every task is completed in a sprint, even rituals like sprint planning and daily Scrum meetings.
- Iterative development: Know the feeling when a stakeholder makes changes to a project in the eleventh hour? This Scrum principle aims to make it easier for stakeholders to request adjustments throughout the process. It embraces change as part of every project.
Benefits of using Scrum in creative environments
Creative teams have piles of tasks on their plates beyond just designing and creating. At Ziflow, we evaluate the complexity of a creative workflow based on the 4 Cs: content, collaborators, compliance, and connectivity. The more Cs a creative or marketing team deals with, the harder it is for teams to keep up.
Implementing Scrum can help remove the pressure and expand your team’s capacity to do more work. Here are a few of the benefits:
Prioritization and focus
Does your blood pressure rise every time you get a meeting request from a certain demanding stakeholder? Scrum can help shield teams from the onslaught of urgent priorities.
During each sprint, teams decide what to work on based on the highest-priority items from their project backlog. Plus, each sprint has a clear sprint goal that aligns the team’s efforts, so everyone can focus on the most important objectives.
Flexibility and adaptability
The creative team pivot is real. Whether a key stakeholder asks to shift the direction of a campaign or the team brainstorms a new idea during an ideation session, change is constant. But it’s not all bad: A pivot can lead to an even better idea or a breakthrough, and Scrum allows this to happen seamlessly. Because of its iterative nature, Scrum allows creative teams to adapt to changing needs and feedback.
Empowerment and ownership
There are no islands or silos within Scrum. It creates a culture of shared responsibility where team members must work together to reach a common goal.
When they feel a sense of ownership in their roles, team members can excel and help their fellow teammates (and the organization) succeed. Through regular sprint reviews and retrospectives, teams celebrate their wins and address challenges. This is a great way to boost morale, helping team members feel appreciated, valued, and recognized.
Reduced risk and faster feedback
From daily Scrum meetings to retrospectives, Scrum teams are in a continuous feedback loop. They deliver work in sprints, which allows for early and frequent feedback.
If a project or deliverable isn’t on the right track, this feedback helps teams make course corrections. This can save a lot of time and prevent projects from going completely off the rails.
Practical applications of Scrum in marketing and creative operations
The creative workflow naturally aligns with the Scrum framework, as it’s collaborative and often includes many moving pieces. These are just a few of the instances when Scum can be valuable for creative and marketing teams:
Campaign planning and execution
Campaigns equip marketers with treasure troves of data. However, most traditional workflows follow a linear timeline.
Marketers plan a campaign, follow the plan, and report on the results. There are often few opportunities to make real-time adjustments to the campaign based on performance data, even though this flexibility could positively impact the campaign results.
Let’s say a company is launching a new product. In their planning phase, the team might create a product backlog of their potential ideas and tasks. They could then map out tasks on their Kanban-style Scrum board during a sprint planning session.
Among planning tasks, the sprint backlog could also include A/B testing and optimization tasks, so those real-time adjustments are included in sprints.
Content creation
Content workflows typically include three core milestones: ideation, production, and publishing. Scrum's focus on incremental delivery makes it beneficial for content teams.
A piece of content may include multiple rounds of reviews and revisions following ideation. Without regular check-ins, a copywriter may start producing content, not knowing stakeholders have had conversations that impact the initial idea.
Daily Scrum meetings give copywriters a space to discuss what they’re working on. If changes or bottlenecks pop up, the team can come up with a way to resolve them together. While this won’t eliminate the need for edits, it can help reduce the time content teams spend handling revisions.
Design and creative projects
Traditional roles like product owner and Scrum Master may seem more suitable for a development team, but Scrum methodologies can bring a sense of organization to the team and allow designers to make a greater impact.
Many companies and agencies find that their designers complete work solo. They can all be working on similar projects, but each team member may not know what others are working on and how those tasks connect.
Scrum encourages collaboration, and the Scrum retrospective gives designers a space to reflect on what went well and what they can improve for the next sprint. Led by the team’s Scrum master or product owner, retrospectives help the team identify ways they can improve communication and grow as individual designers.
How to integrate Scrum principles into creative workflows
Are the Scrum applications above getting your gears turning? We hope so! The steps we’ve included below will help you make the Scrum methodology part of your creative workflows.
1. Define roles and responsibilities
Create Scrum roles based on the roles of your creative team. For example, your creative director might become your product owner and lead the vision and priorities for design projects.
You’ll also want to assign a Scrum master who can help the team overcome obstacles and keep the process moving. In a creative Scrum environment, you can align your project owner with the departments requesting creative work.
2. Create epics and user stories
An epic is a large project broken down into smaller projects (stories). User stories are the smallest unit of work in the Agile framework.
First, you’ll want to identify your high-level creative goals or initiatives. These are initiatives that will take multiple sprints to complete. Then, you’ll want to create small, actionable user stories the team can complete in a single sprint.
For example, if your epic is a new product launch, your user stories might include:
- Conducting market research to fine-tune the product
- Updating the website to reflect the new product
- Creating a press release to announce the launch
3. Plan and execute sprints
Before each sprint planning session, refine your project backlog. The project backlog should include incomplete tasks and projects. For instance, your creative operations manager (or a similar role) should collect all of our stakeholder requests and organize each request into a task in your project management platform. Each task should then have a brief that describes in detail exactly what the stakeholders are requesting and what they hope to achieve.
You’ll want to create a goal for your sprint and begin breaking down tasks, estimating how much time each task will take to complete. Sprint planning meetings are time-boxed events that take anywhere from one to four hours.
Some tasks will be small, such as updating a display ad, while others will be larger projects like redesigning the company website. The important thing is to budget the appropriate amount of time for each task so that the creative has plenty of time to execute the task well.
At Ziflow, we use two-week sprints for both our engineering and creative teams (independently, of course). Sprints kickoff on Tuesdays. Why? Because you want your team fresh, available, and engaged during sprint planning. We’ve found that on Mondays, there’s often a “case of the Mondays” from the team, and engagement and availability suffer.
During the sprint kickoff meeting, the Scrum master reviews each task and clearly understands the request. This is a critical part of the process because often, the devil is in the details. If this part of the process is skipped, stakeholders often receive version 1 of a creative asset that completely misses the mark, causing significant rework and frustration from both sides.
However, clarity can be provided on any one of the tasks that saves time, money, energy, and frustration that makes the meeting well worth it.
4. Conduct daily standups
Once the sprint tasks have been refined and the assigned creative is clear on the task being asked of them, the Scrum master executes the sprint. Daily standups are the next step in the process. They’re short check-ins where the person orchestrating the sprint can clarify and remove blockers for the team members doing the work.
Daily standup meetings should be 15 minutes or less. The agenda is simple:
- What did each team member do yesterday?
- What will they do today?
- Are there any roadblocks preventing them from completing their tasks?
5. Hold sprint reviews and retrospectives
The sprint review occurs at the end of every sprint. The product owner and stakeholders meet, showcasing their completed work and gathering feedback from the team. Teams discuss any pivots from the original sprint plan and areas of improvement.
After the sprint review, teams should hold a separate retrospective meeting. In this meeting, teams discuss what went well, what they can improve for future sprints, and what roadblocks they encountered.
Keep at it until you find a process that works well for you and your team. The goal is to get to a place where every sprint is full, yet achievable, and the quality of work executed exceeds the company’s standards. It takes time, but once your company’s sprint process is solid, the process operates like a watch and your output dramatically increases.
6. Embrace flexibility and iteration
The Scrum methodology is made to flex. Short sprints allow team members to test out new ideas. If they fail, they can learn from their mistakes. Unlike project cycles, where teams get no feedback until the end of a project, Scrum embraces rapid feedback loops, giving stakeholders regular opportunities to provide input.
“Moving to Scrum has completely transformed how our creative team works. The short sprints and instant feedback have seriously changed the game and drastically reduced the risk of burnout.
Our creative folks no longer have to guess which project is the top priority because we set clear priorities during sprint planning. They’re not stressed about constantly grooming our backlog since we focus mainly on projects selected for each sprint.”~ Milena Orlowska, Creative Operations Manager at Ziflow
7. Incorporate the right collaboration tools
The right tools help creative teams reach the checkpoints on their project roadmaps. Without collaboration tools, it’s difficult for teams (especially those that are remote) to work together on a particular task or project.
The reviews and approval process is one of the biggest checkpoints in the creative lifecycle and a collaborative proofing tool simplifies this workflow. It streamlines feedback so the creative process runs smoothly and projects stay on schedule. Without a collaborative proofing tool, stakeholders are forced to provide feedback to an asset using patchwork methods like email, chat tools, or marked up printouts.
When integrated with creative project management software, collaboration tools help teams make their creative workflows seamless.
Learn how to optimize your creative workflows with Ziflow
Creative teams encounter many of the same challenges as software development teams do in managing their workflows: unclear projects, communication mishaps, tight deadlines, constant distractions, and insufficient feedback.
With the right tools on their side, creative teams can have great success with creative Scrum planning. Ziflow is an online proofing platform that can help creative teams improve teamwork and streamline their workflows — two goals that align perfectly with Scrum’s flexible and collaborative framework!
