Whether you are developing the brand and messaging from scratch for a start-up, or coordinating a new product launch - speed is king. These go-to-market launches are never simple, and usually involve a lot of eyes for coordination, review, planning, creating content, etc. With a seemingly endless to-do list you’ll likely need reinforcements and additional resources and you need them now.

Support with an Agile Framework

Using an agile framework can push your go-to-market strategy as fast as possible without compromising quality or pushing important items on your launch list to version 2. An agile approach to planning and management requires you to think about your strategy in terms of scalability and teams. Ask yourself:

1. What do I need now, vs what I will need next year?
2. What resources will I need?
3. What teams will own these tasks, and do I have the talent now?

The goal is to design and implement strategies that will help grow your company or create your project in a timely and sustainable way without straining your infrastructure to the breaking point.

External Resources

Using external resources lets you generate shared accountability and allows for transparency, collaboration and increased productivity for your internal teams. Let’s break this down.External resources could be anything from hiring developers to content writers, to a full marketing team to come in and execute tasks. As part of managing external resources, you set the tasks and define the scope - retaining full visibility into the work being done.With this collaborative approach your full-time internal teams can focus on meeting their own goals, reducing strain on your own team and resources without sacrificing your timeline.

Implementing Agile Frameworks

What started as a tool strictly for development quickly spread into the traditionally more non-technical aspects of business like marketing and HR.

SCRUM

While it’s not an acronym, if it were SCRUM might stand for something like Strategizing Core Responsibilities for Unifying (project) Management. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch but hopefully it drives home the intended purpose of this approach.Scrum is a product development framework focussed on teamwork and learning with each iteration of a plan or task. It is a management approach that plans meetings, lists out tools, and defines project leads and roles.

KANBAN

Kanban is a different style of agile framework centered mostly around development needs. It’s a popular solution that is built on real-time communication and transparency through the visual of an organized board, called a kanban board - you’ve probably come across these before as one of the most popular agile frameworks. Companies like trello and monday.com are well-used examples.

XP

XP, or Extreme Programming is a framework popular for software development projects and is built on a foundation of 3 main principles.

1. Test-First and often - Consistent testing is a staple of XP and this framework helps manage QA efforts and organize testing requirements and results for review.
2. Continuous Integration - Continuous integration is, in a way, it’s own mini framework with the goals of minimizing the duration and effort required by each integration episode and delivering a product version suitable for release at any moment.
3. Collective Ownership

You’ve probably picked up on the themes of collaboration and teamwork by now and XP is no different - collective ownerships of tasks and development helps support productivity, transparency, and accountabilityNo matter which type of framework (or combination) meets your needs - the bottom line is that these frameworks help execute Go-To Market timelines. The best teams take what they have learned from using these methods and apply that to their unique project and team. They can customize the go-to-market experience for the best results.

Go-To-Market Requirements

Go-to-market can require design, development, marketing, data analytics, etc. Frameworks help manage those different facets while allowing you to plot the steps to make it happen. More importantly, utilizing frameworks helps you plan ahead and map out not only the plan, but the people you will need to get everything done.Here’s what you could be looking at:

• Identifying your product as it relates to the marketplace. Is there a need? Who is your target buyer?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition?
• What is your distribution strategy?
• Which internal teams is your product launch (or relaunch/rebrand) going to require work from?
• Will you need external contractors?
• What is your marketing campaign strategy?
• What is your plan for sales enablement?

And that’s just some of the “front of house” tasks. Without even listing out dev tasks and QA, it’s easy to see how you might get lost in executing a launch without agile tools and additional human resources.

Seamlessly Integrate Teams with Agile Tools

With an agile strategy, outsourcing work becomes easy to manage and simple to blend into your existing infrastructure. Or vice versa, externally generated Agile frameworks (through a service or consultant) make it a snap to implement smart strategies (generated externally) with your internal teams. Set yourself up for success and do more in less time. Launch your latest go-to-market strategies and support them with the best people for the right jobs. Contact us today to learn more about how agile frameworks can help you.