Squads, scrums and agile: what they are for marketing

Agile, scrum, sprints and squads all come from software, and a marketing team can take the useful habits out of them without adopting the system they came in. This piece is for people running an in-house marketing team, one of the four readers this site is written for, because the question comes up constantly and the honest answer is hard to find: the loudest case studies are sold by the people who run the training.

The words, in plain English

Agile is a set of four preferences published in 2001 as the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development", the first of which is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". It's a statement of values, not a method, and its authors were writing about software.

Scrum is one method built on those values, and the clearest description of it is the Scrum Guide, which calls it "a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems".

A sprint is a fixed working period. The Scrum Guide calls sprints "the heartbeat of Scrum" and says they are "fixed length events of one month or less to create consistency". Two weeks is the common choice.

A standup, properly the Daily Scrum, is a short daily meeting. The guide puts it at "a 15-minute event" held "at the same time and place every working day".

Squads, tribes, chapters and guilds come from one company, in one document, which is where the trouble starts.

The Spotify model, and why it's the cautionary tale

In October 2012, two people at Spotify, Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson, published a fourteen-page article describing how the company organised about 30 teams. A squad is "similar to a Scrum team, and is designed to feel like a mini-startup". A tribe is a group of squads in related areas. A chapter is "your small family of people having similar skills" within a tribe, and a guild is "a more organic and wide-reaching community of interest" that cuts across the whole company.

It became the most copied operating model in the industry. Read the second page of it, though, and the authors tell you not to:

"Disclaimer: We didn't invent this model. Spotify is (like any good agile company) evolving fast. This article is only a snapshot of our current way of working, a journey in progress, not a journey completed. By the time you read this, things have already changed."

Since then the people who were there have been blunter. Joakim Sundén, an agile coach at Spotify from 2011 to 2017, said in a 2017 talk: "Even at the time we wrote it, we weren't doing it. It was part ambition, part approximation. People have really struggled to copy something that didn't really exist." Jeremiah Lee, who joined Spotify in 2017 and later published his own account, writes that "the famed squad model was only ever aspirational and never fully implemented", and that the article was meant to be the first of several parts: "Autonomy made the first cut, but the parts on alignment and accountability were never completed."

That last detail is the one worth keeping. The half everybody copied was the fun half. The half about who decides and who's accountable was never written down, and that's the half that breaks a team.

"Agile 2" is one group's proposal, not a new standard

If someone offers you Agile 2, here's what it is. In 2020 a group of fifteen people published a set of values and principles under that name, and they say so themselves: "For Agile 2, we assembled a global team of 15 people." The material is published under a Creative Commons licence, and the Agile 2 Academy, which sells training, describes the initiative as "an independent non-commercial undertaking".

So it's a considered proposal by named people, and worth a read. It is not an industry standard, nothing has replaced the 2001 manifesto, and nobody needs to be certified in it.

Who writes the case studies

Be careful with the evidence here, because most published accounts of agile marketing come from consultancies, training companies and certification bodies that sell agile training, and a case study is a sales document. That doesn't make it false. It does mean the failures are missing, and the ones you most want to read about are the failures.

The accounts worth more are the ones an organisation publishes about itself, with nothing to sell you:

Basecamp publishes its own method as a free book. It doesn't use sprints: it works in six-week cycles, because "six weeks is long enough to build something meaningful start-to-finish and short enough that everyone can feel the deadline looming". It also replaces estimates with what it calls appetite: "Instead of asking how much time it will take to do some work, we ask: How much time do we want to spend?"
Buffer published how its own product process runs and why it rejected the orthodoxy: "All the detailed estimating of story points and the very short 1-3 week SCRUM style sprint didn't feel right", so it moved to six-week cycles "with two weeks in between to plan".
GitLab publishes its whole company handbook, including how its marketing team works. Note the wording on its weekly milestones: "some teams use plan a weekly sprint cadence". Even there, it isn't everybody.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, publishes how it works as a fully distributed company across 83 countries, which is a different answer again to the same question.

Four organisations, four different systems, all of them working. That is the actual lesson.

So does your marketing team need any of it?

Ask what you're trying to fix. These are the problems the habits genuinely solve:

Nobody knows what anyone else is doing. A short, same-time daily or twice-weekly meeting fixes this cheaply.
Work never finishes because the brief keeps changing. A fixed working period with an agreed scope fixes this. The length matters less than the fact that it ends.
Everything is a priority. Deciding what gets done in the next two or six weeks, out loud, forces the choice someone has been avoiding.
The same problems keep happening. A short review at the end of each cycle, writing down what to stop and start, is the habit most teams drop first and miss most.

And these are the problems it does not solve: an unclear strategy, a team without the skills it needs, a budget that doesn't match the ambition, or a boss who changes direction every fortnight. A ceremony on top of any of those makes the chaos tidier, not smaller. If what you're missing is the plan rather than the process, our one-page marketing plan is a better place to start, and whether you need a digital marketing strategy at all is the question underneath that.

I've seen the good version. At King the way of working was the most efficient I've seen anywhere: a newer business that had grown up as these ideas themselves grew, so the company and the idea arrived together rather than one being imposed on the other. At PlayStation we set up agile squads with an agile coach, across experiment marketing, CRM and engineering, with people in the US, Japan, Europe and the UK, and it worked really well. Neither of those was a team that read an article and rearranged itself.

The second part of this guide covers how to set it up, and what to do when you already have it and it isn't working.

If you'd rather borrow the judgement than hire it, ask for a free call: fractional and part-time marketing leadership is what that arrangement looks like, and if the first need is a diagnosis, our 90-day marketing plan is that.