As I mentioned in my last post, one of our biggest challenges in transitioning our marketing team to agile was changing the idea of ownership. As with most agile processes, the concept isn’t difficult to understand, but making the behavioral changes it requires can be complicated.

It’s not my idea, my work, my deliverable. It’s not your typo, your missed deadline, your mistake. It’s our commitment, our failure, our success. It’s a little let’s hold hands and sing kumbaya but it’s the only way to become a successful agile team. 

Who are we?
We are the individual contributors that make up the team. If you have a larger marketing department (typical teams are between 5-9 people in size), you’ll probably have multiple agile teams -- and in that case, the "we" can include the entire marketing department. The Product Owner is not a member of the team (they don’t work on stories or commit to work on behalf of the team), but they do play the critical role of prioritizing and defining stories for the team(s).

What is ours?
The commitment, the quality and the timeliness of the work is ours. This is often where marketing teams struggle when transitioning to agile methods. The story owner doesn’t own the story. They own the responsibility of getting the story done (more to come on the definition of done).  Story owners, in most cases, shouldn’t own all of the tasks – it’s much better if they don’t. The only way we can achieve a genuine sense of shared ownership is to actually share the work.

Two of the biggest reasons this is so hard on marketing teams is because marketers tend to get emotionally attached to their work, and they are used to receiving individual praise - often outside of the department. It’s hard to let other people work on “your baby” and it’s even harder for other people to share the glory with others on highly visible projects. For team members who have a hard time letting go (I’m including myself in this one), the first step is to have them teach the team about their area of expertise. When they don’t own a story/work they might have owned in the past, encourage them to share ideas and give feedback. Even though agile methods focus on the team, it’s still important for the team and the Product Owner (who is often the "boss") to recognize individuals who go above and beyond.

In successful agile adoption, behavioral changes are the hardest, but they also have the biggest impact on creating a high functioning agile team. What behavioral changes are your marketing teams struggling with? What are you doing that’s working?