We talk with Andrew Burrows about the adoption and evolution of Agile Marketing at IBM. He also shares his point of viewon the future of the movement and his involvement in the AgileMarketing Alliance. Highlights include:

* What led him to Agile Marketing
* The challenges of spreading Agile Marketing like IBM
* Real-world success stories
* His vision for what is next for Agile in marketing

 
 




























Transcript
Frank Days  00:29
In this episode, we're going to talk about the adoption and evolution of the use of agile marketing at IBM, along with Andrew's point of view on the future of the movement, and his finally his involvement in the Agile Marketing Alliance.

Jim Ewel  00:45
Thanks, Frank. Andrew, can you share with us how you got started with Agile marketing? Where did you Where did you begin?

Andrew Burrows  00:53
So I should open with the caveat that I do not speak on behalf of IBM, know my opinions on my own. Agile marketing. So it's quite serendipitous. I'm an accidental marketer. I used to play video games. And that's how I actually got my approach into Agile. And through doing that pretty badly in the 2007-2008 time, I started to get involved with lots of user groups in the area and building connections that led to an opportunity at IBM and I'll be honest, I was very naive. I had never worked at a company that size before. The idea that you could have a sub-organization of 5000 people was not really something that even entered my head. So I dived in to solve a problem and found myself in the marketing org.
 
Frank Days  01:40
At IBM, your colleague, Anthony Coppedge, credited you with quote, "single handedly building the construct for agile marketing at IBM." Pretty bold statement. What inspired you to lead this initiative?
 
Andrew Burrows  01:54
You can tell he's from marketing, right? Nobody at IBM does anything single handedly? I'd say that's the same for any kind of big organization here. So he's very, very, very generous with his praise, or his comment. You know, we had the opportunity within IBM, when Michelle Paluso became CMO to really try to do things differently. And to really drive an agile way of working. And we made a few decisions really early on this is this would have been in 2016 or 2017. A few decisions really early on about how we were going to do this that he's probably alluding to. We said we were not going to be framework first, right?  That the people who would discover the best way of doing agile marketing will be the marketers who do it day in and day out. 
 
Andrew Burrows  02:49
An agile organization is one where people, in our case marketers, are exhibiting agile behaviors more frequently. And for us agile behaviors were the 12 principles, the Agile Manifesto, right? Can you see and hear those things actually happening? So our role would be, you know, stewards for that kind of behavior change. So all of our approach, the way that we set about the teams, the way we set about enabling the organization, fundamentally came down to: What is the difference between a marketing organization and an agile marketing organization? And how do we help the organization grow into that way of being? 
 
Andrew Burrows  03:33
Another way we looked at it was to say,