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.
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:
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.
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.
What started as a tool strictly for development quickly spread into the traditionally more non-technical aspects of business like marketing and HR.
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 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, or Extreme Programming is a framework popular for software development projects and is built on a foundation of 3 main principles.
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 accountability
No 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 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:
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.
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.