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rather than the problem Another breakthrough moment for agile teams was when we stopped seeing our work as a set of deliverables and started thinking about our work as a set of problems to be solved. your team: developers, copywriters, designers, and other similar implementation roles. How often are they asked to "design this slide" or "write this e-book" with little context as to why they're doing it Simply assigning tasks to your to-do list without helping your team understand the real purpose behind the project will lead to boring work without personal investment from your team. evacjackson says assigning tasks without helping your team understand the purpose will result in poor work.
Click to Tweet In fact, a lack of purpose-driven work can have more profound effects than marketing tactics. In a survey of LinkedIn members, more than 60 of respondents without a purpose-driven job planned to leave their company within Special Database three years. More than 60 of those surveyed who were not in a purpose-driven job planned to retire within three years. LinkedIn ImperativeClick to Tweet Our team has a strong rule against starting a project with a predetermined deliverable in mind. Let's face it, stakeholders don't always know what they want. Problem solving helps foster collaboration for better results. Instead, start every project with a problem statement. This follows a format commonly called user stories in the development agile world. Its format is as follows: Here is an example of this type of problem statement or user story from a hypothetical project. Agile marketing mistakes_2 Each project's problem owner determines the problems that the team will work on for that project.

For example, if your website isn't ranking for certain keywords or you need to update your messaging for an upcoming trade show, the owner may see that as a problem. No matter what the problem is, the problem description never includes the solution. After deciding to prioritize specific issues, the team analyzes the issues together and ultimately investigates solutions that can be implemented in the next sprint. Solving problems as a team allows everyone to have a stake in the outcome. Additionally, this approach forces teams to uncover the pain points behind surface-level problems and arrive at solutions that address core needs rather than vanity demands. For example, the sales team reported that some prospects did not show up to scheduled demo meetings and did not respond to requests to reschedule. The VP of Sales wanted the marketing team to create an animated explainer video to better prime prospects for meetings. After asking some questions about the sales process, we learned that improving the email message before the demo meeting could solve a major pain point for the sales team.
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