1. Building Team Culture

a. Adam Grant’s Realizing Potential Framework

Realizing Potential has five key principles.

  • Discomfort accelerates growth. Learn fast by immersing yourselves in uncomfortable situations.
  • Daily joy beats daily grind. Practice via daily games not monotony.
  • Ask for ratings on a scale of one to ten but strive for high marks in priority areas with lower scores in other areas.
  • Seek diversity in guidance. Experts may not be the best teachers to their distance from the learning process.
  • Focus on potential and growth over credentials as past experience has little impact on future performance.

b. Small is good

Amazon's two pizza rule is sometimes discussed in terms of team size. Lean Teams can be as small as one cross skilled individual. 

c. Cross functionality is critical

The Team needs the skill to complete all aspects of the campaign.

d. Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map Framework

The scales address expectations surrounding communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and scheduling.

  • Communicating – Low-context (simple, clear), or high-context (deep meaning)?
  • Evaluating – Negative feedback direct, or indirect and discreet?
  • Leading – Egalitarian, or hierarchy?
  • Deciding – Consensus, or top-down?
  • Trusting – Trust based knowledge of each other, or working together experience?
  • Disagreeing – Disagreements directly addressed or preference to avoid confrontations?
  • Scheduling – Are time lines strict or flexible?
  • Persuading – Specific cases and examples, or prefer holistic detailed scenarios?

One direction on the scale is better or worse. The key is to agree where teams agree is most effective.

2. The Campaign Teams

A campaign team structure is flexible. Here are some examples.

a. Example: The Execution Team

Organizations with significant existing campaign assets may choose to use the Lean Campaign process to focus on campaign execution. This team takes existing content assets and repurposes to target a specific customer segment.
This team includes product marketing and marketing operations.

Product marketing’s role is to develop positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation for the campaign.

Marketing operations includes designers, photographers, videographers, copywriters and marketing specialists. Marketing operations’ role is to create and execute campaign elements that effectively communicate the agreed positioning / messaging via the targeted channels.

b. Example B: The All New Team

Some customer problems are entirely new. For these campaigns, the team needs to include product marketing, marketing operations, and content experts. The role of content producers is to re-purpose existing assets or create small low-resource assets. Large new assets should be handled in a content-specific team.

c. Example C: The Content Team

Execution campaigns and All New campaigns often require content assets that are can not be produced in a micro sprint. Content teams include product marketing, copywriters, designers, and SEO resources. Content producers can include domain experts from support or sales as well as content writers.

d. Example D: The Media Team

Media assets are also often too resource and time-intensive to be produced in a micro sprint. Media team includes product marketing, copywriters, designers, videographers, and talent. Domain experts from support or sales may also be involved.

3. Team's Roles

Here’s an overview of an Execution team.

a. Lean Campaigner Owner (Required)

Lean Campaign Owners are responsible for protecting key principles and continually improving the process. They coach the team, the product marketer, and overall business on the Lean Campaigner process. Owners are ultimately responsible for the effectiveness and efficiency of the process.

Responsibilities

  • facilitator for organizing resources and sprint planning, stand ups, critiques, and post sprint reviews.
  • protect the team from distraction and outside demands during the sprint
  • defends the scope of the sprint to keep work estimates and planning on track.
  • maintains a team-led commitment approach and protects the team from product marketers pushing work

b. Product Marketing (Required)

Responsibilities:

  • Setting and maintaining strategic focus including product, market, and revenues
  • Understanding the market
  • Framing the JTBD and problems the team is solving
  • Guiding Campaign Sprints
  • Close communication with customers and prospects to gain fact-based insight
  • Maintaining the campaign backlog and ensuring engagement and input from all stakeholders

c. Designer (Required)

Responsibilities:

  • Creative planning and preparation based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain a full range of cross-channel, high-converting media templates and assets that can be quickly configured within Sprint Campaign constraints.
  • Developing and executing strategies to meet production requirements over the Sprint

d. Marketing Operations (Required)

Responsibilities

  • Forward planning based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain a full range of cross channel, high converting content templates and assets that can be quickly configured within Sprint Campaign constraints.
  • Develop and maintain promotional and distribution strategies and tactics
  • Sprint analytics setup and reporting

4. Scaling Teams

Your first Product Marketer should be able full time on the project. It will take a while to build a create a plan and backlog. It is then a balance between researching, developing, and validating new campaign cards and participating in the sprint teams. For most teams, the bottleneck is likely to be the product marketer initially. Don’t let your product marketer get stretched too thin. Campaign card creation and validation is critical to the success of the framework. It is better to spend the time necessary to build a campaign concept built on solid research and fact-based insight than to rush to campaign sprints.

Ensure your first Product Marketer is full-time to build and validate campaign cards.

Avoid stretching them too thin. Campaign card creation based on solid research is critical for success.

5. Broader Team

Lean marketing campaigns cover more than lead generation. Sales and Customer Success form a key part of the backlog creation and campaign promotion.

a. Content

Responsibilities:

  • Forward planning based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain a full range of content templates
  • Develop and maintain content product process
  • Content analytics setup and reporting

b. Sales

Responsibilities:

  • Forward planning based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain top customer problems list
  • Collect artifacts (images / video / audio / notes)

c. Customer Success

Responsibilities:

  • Forward planning based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain top customer problems list
  • Collect artifacts (images / video / audio / notes)

d. Support

Responsibilities:

  • Forward planning based on the backlog
  • Develop and maintain top customer problems list
  • Collect artifacts (images / video / audio / notes)

6. Managing Performance

Use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to set and measure performance goals effectively.