How to Plan a Sprint with Your Agile Marketing Team Fast

With more businesses embracing hybrid work, Agile methodology has undoubtedly been a great help to all of us, making agile project management a piece of cake.🍰

However, we’ve all been here before and you’re not alone. As a marketing team, once you begin using Agile methodology, you will wonder how to begin with your first or most important sprint.🤔

Why sprints?

Sprints are an effective way to better manage your tasks and progress with your project for a set period of time that you decide to complete some specific work on. So, if it’s this beneficial, why did we say it can be difficult to get started at times?🧐Let’s just say that sometimes the agile methods designed to simplify your process and make it easier to manage your projects require detailed planning in order to work, and detail planning can sometimes mean overthinking everything.🤷‍♀️

Even if you believe your marketing team is agile enough because you follow every step and “rule,” it is natural to feel disoriented at times. That’s why sprints are designed to help you get back on track and not leave important work behind when you are overwhelmed with a large number of projects.🤯

How to start with your first marketing sprint?🤔

You must communicate your plan with your team as one of the most important steps in embracing Agile. But what if there isn’t a plan in place yet? You get together and brainstorm to begin planning one. So it’s a meeting.

During this meeting, your marketing leader can begin to think about, and even work on prioritizing the backlog (backlog in this case includes tasks that your team will be responsible for)

After the initial meeting and prioritization of the backlog, you can begin planning the sprint on a deeper level.

Here’s a hypothetical example to help you understand all of the steps:

You don’t have enough time to plan a website redesign, so you want to make just a few basic SEO changes to your website.

Discussing pain points📌

You can start discussing the pain points in your first meeting if you already have started planning during the meeting, but we recommend taking that day to fully put a detailed plan and gather your team again to discuss all points. In this second meeting you want to make sure everyone is on the same page and understand what is expected of them as well as the main points you will focus on and how you will do it. This could include these examples for our hypothetical case:

• What will we sound like?
• What headlines represent our brand better?
• What visuals (color scheme, mood board, and images) will be changed? etc

Timeframe ⏰

Planning the time frame can be difficult; it cannot be 1 month because it is basic SEO changes, and that is certainly not a perfect agile team example to follow; on the other hand, it cannot be 1 week because you also have other things to focus on (including client work) and a million projects in pipeline; so you decide on a two-week sprint, which is known for producing better results in all teams.

Finally, after a nice overthinking process you’ve decided on your time frame… Now what?

Description ✍️

This is the section where you should be as practical as possible. The most important thing is to be able to quickly inform your team of what is expected of them in detail. We understand that quickly informing someone in detail can be challenging, especially if you enjoy telling long stories like us, but you’ll get the hang of it in no time.😉

For our hypothetical example, here’s how you’d go about it:

“The goal of this sprint is to test basic SEO changes in light of some improvements we could make for the final version. As part of this goal, we will concentrate on:

1. Altering the headings
2. Improving the title and meta description.
3. Including less heading tags in our content.
4. Adding new keywords.
5. Our content should contain at least 850 words.”

Picking your teammates and assigning tasks🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

If you have a large marketing team, you can simply do the usual and decide who has more free time and works better under deadlines to be a part of this sprint. If it is something in which the entire team should be involved, or if you have a small marketing team, reconsider whether a sprint is necessary right now because, like it or not, you will have to focus on it primarily during this period.

Start assigning tasks for each section based on your five detailed goals listed above, and try to keep it to one person per section. While teamwork is enjoyable, keeping one task per person will only make it more authentic (use this for any kind of sprint you will work on).

This was the simplest process that allows you to focus on what you will deliver rather than spending more time planning than working on it.

Choosing an easy to use tool💛

Using a simple task management tool may appear to be an afterthought, but it isn’t. Our marketing team uses Ambra for all tasks and especially enjoys the sprint option. As a team that has tried other tools to see the difference, we can clearly say that some can be very torturous with their learning curve, especially if you’re just getting started with something new like sprints.

All you have to do on Ambra is create tags in the same order that you use to create daily tasks and keep track of them.

You choose the name of the sprint, which can be part of your daily tasks project (you don’t have to start a new one), you continue with the description (which can be short or long, depends from your goals), and you assign tasks to your teammates for that sprint; everything is easily accessible and changeable.

Check out this short video to see how we create a sprint fast🤗

Give Ambra a shot and you’ll thank us later 👉 www.ambra.app; IT’S FREE!