Pragmatic Roadmapping, a methodology that then helps teams sort through scored projects to create the ideal sequencing. How to Use Pragmatic Marketing Pragmatic Marketing asks that you score projects on a scale of 0 to 5 across three dimensions: The sum of these three scores is the Total Evidence, which is then multiplied by an Impact score. This now represents an ordered list of marketing projects based on impact to the organization. As you go down the list, understand that the items at the bottom may never get done. It’s not important to be overly detailed at this stage and estimated ranges will work fine. You now have a sequence and estimated time to completion for each project, which means you can start mapping projects to a calendar. The idea is it to create opportunities for quick check-ins throughout the project as opposed to driving for approval and feedback against a finished project. Scrum teams use sprints to timebox their work, and that’s the approach I’ll be detailing here. Then work with the team to make cards for each near-term task and put them in the Parked list. Pragmatic, Agile Marketing Just Makes Sense By combining two proven methodologies it’s possible to make sense of all of your digital marketing to-dos, improve team communication, be more effective at prioritization, and increase the production velocity of your team.
In many ways, we’re living in the golden age of marketing. We can reach customers in real-time on their preferred channel at the moment they’re prepared to make a purchase. Opportunities abound, but they bring with them huge to-do lists.
When we add in the breakneck speed of innovation, long term planning becomes virtually pointless. At the same time, marketing teams are continually pushed to deliver greater results from these emerging touchpoints, often with little improvement in the number resources available.
Marketers are expected to have an immediate impact, while still being supremely adaptable to changes in the marketplace and technology. The only way to meet these demands is to improve the sophistication with which we manage our marketing programs.
Three interrelated methodologies can be used together to focus your marketing team on the right priorities so you can boost bottom line results for your business:
- Pragmatic Marketing, which uses a scoring methodology to determine which projects are most important.
- Pragmatic Roadmapping, a methodology that then helps teams sort through scored projects to create the ideal sequencing.
- Agile Marketing, an approach that helps teams break their roadmap of prioritized initiatives into bite-sized chunks so progress happens quickly.
Getting all three to work together seamlessly will bring structure to marketing priorities while ensuring the most impactful work gets done first. Here’s how to make them work in harmony.
How to Use Pragmatic Marketing
Pragmatic Marketing asks that you score projects on a scale of 0 to 5 across three dimensions:
The sum of these three scores is the Total Evidence, which is then multiplied by an Impact score.
Impact is based on the audience impacted by the proposed marketing initiative, which falls into one of the following categories:
- Evaluators are the highest value audience and are actively comparing options to solve their problem. They receive a score of 5.
- Potentials are the second highest valued and get scored a 4. They actively have problems that your product or service can solve, but are not yet in the market.
- Customers addressing a primary goal receive a score of 3. An example could be a repeat purchase.
- Customers trying to solve a non-primary goal would receive a score of 2. This designation can be tricky, and could loosely be defined as non-revenue generating. For example, maybe they’re looking for an instruction manual or have a quick question that could be addressed with an FAQ.
- Non-Targets would receive a score of 1. This audience includes job seekers, the press, and current employees.
The formulas are:
Pervasive + Strategic + Revenue = Total Evidence
Total Evidence * Impact = Priority
It’s not necessary to get overly precise with the scoring. The goal is to get some relative quantification around project importance to better understand which ones the marketing team should be focusing on.
Pragmatic Scoring With the Team
The scoring can be done exclusively by the manager, but collaboration will go a long way to getting buy-in and getting necessary support to keep projects on track. At a minimum, find another key stakeholder or two and go through the list, discussing an appropriate score for each dimension.
A highly inclusive way to do this is through a simple survey. Ask each team member to do the scoring exercise and then take an average of the results. The survey technique can also be used with senior leadership; this is an effective way to manage-up and get buy-in from the top.
Doing this exercise in a spreadsheet makes it easy to do a quick sort from high-to-low. Go through the list with your team or stakeholders and ensure that it makes sense, that nothing seems out of place. This now represents an ordered list of marketing projects based on impact to the organization.
As you go down the list, understand that the items at the bottom may never get done. That’s totally fine.
One of the axioms of productivity management is to never complete your to-do list.
The low priority items are low for a reason, and often completely disappear. Be proactive, go talk to the project sponsors and see if the low-ranking projects can be removed entirely, or rescoped to be either smaller or have more organizational impact.
Creating a Pragmatic Roadmap
In the real world, actual project sequencing rarely follows a strict ranking of the Priority Scores. Instead, we use Pragmatic Roadmapping to create the actual sequencing.
There are three main constraints that you’ll need to balance against the Priority Scores:
- Project dependencies. Invariably some projects will have to be completed prior to starting other ones.
- Resource availability. You may be nearing the end of your fiscal year, or out of budget earlier than anticipated, and a high-priority items needs to be deferred until new budgets are set.
- Project clarity. At this stage projects will have varying degrees of fuzziness. It may be necessary to spend time to gathering more details around the project’s requirements in order to fully understand timing and costs.
To help you prioritize effectively, high-level time-to-completion estimates need to be applied to each project.
This should be highly collaborative as the actual “doers” will need to weigh in on what the completion time would look like. It’s not important…
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