As layoffs continue to impact the workforce and staff augmentation becomes the norm, building an agile marketing workforce is becoming essential for effective work management in marketing.
Whether you’re working with individual freelancers, coordinating across different time zones, or bringing together multiple functions for collaboration, an agile marketing workforce requires a shared system that everyone can follow.
According to Nick Faulkner, ex-Vice President of Services and Solutions/Sales Engineering at Influitive, “the key with agile is the visibility that the internal team gets on the work they are doing.”
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Applying Agile Frameworks to Modern Marketing Teams
Agile methodology is a project management framework that breaks work into phases and emphasizes continuous collaboration and improvement. No matter the project management software you use, it is this framework itself that will keep the work on track. Initially utilized for managing engineering teams, you’ll find that modulating the framework to your team requirements can achieve similar success.
Here are three agile techniques to consider for your marketing team to offset the impact of staff augmentation.
Kanban: Showcasing Progress and Work Visibility
As an agile expert and leader who introduced agile to multiple teams at Influitive, Nick shares that if you’re new to agile, Kanban is the first framework you’ll want to adopt for creating work visibility. “With Kanban you can at a glance see what they are currently working on and how their work is progressing to completion.”
Based on the framework of “pulling” tasks from backlog for continuous work, Kanban is ideal for showcasing the progress in real-time for large teams — especially when working with individual freelancer members.
Kanban helps manage work tasks and their allocation across team members, making it ideal for teams with multi-disciplinary functions, clients, and projects.
In essence, your Kanban Board is the accumulation of all work assigned for ongoing and future projects across different stakeholders. In one glance, you can view what is currently in progress and what is blocked. As a manager, this allows for increased efficiency for problem-solving as you go.
Daily Standups: Creating Alignment Across Teams
An agile technique that’s part of SCRUM, daily standups are great for teams with full-time members working remotely across the globe.
If your team includes part-time/contract employees, keep in mind that the daily commitment may not work for them.
At the start of their workday, each member identifies their key task/focus for the day, current blockers, and what they worked on the day before. This five-minute activity, whilst originally done through morning meetings, can just as easily be deployed through a Slack automated message. With a full view of all blockers in one place, you can prioritize problem-solving in order of importance and impact.
“With standups you get that regular check in each day that helps align everyone on priorities, what they are working on and highlights any blockers that the external staff may have that requires someone internal to unblock,” shares Nick talking about why daily standups should be the second framework you adapt as part of agile introduction to your team.
Retrospectives: Problem-Solving Together
You just finished a big campaign. Congratulations!
Project completions are a moment of celebration, but with agile retrospectives, these are also a moment of learning and an opportunity for improvement — individually and collectively.
While retrospectives are typically associated with sprints, they can also be applied to specific marketing projects, such as campaign completion. Aiming to determine what went well, what was an issue, and what could be improved, all without naming or calling out anyone specific, it offers a safe space for feedback and voicing opinions.
“Adding in regular retros will help identify what issues are being faced by the team, and will help them work together to resolve these problems — making the external team more effective. Ideally you’d like to include them in as much of the process as possible to remove redundant work and questions that could lead to blockers, especially if the team is in different time zones,” adds Nick talking about how you can leverage retrospectives to improve productivity and team harmony.
Before You Start: The Mindset That Makes Agile Work
Nick Faulkner’s pro-tip for leaders introducing agile to their team:
“I always like to start with some basic overall agile training, focusing on the history, where it came from and how it has evolved into what it is today. Often people hear agile and have an opinion already about what it is, good or bad. What most don’t understand is that agile is an umbrella term that describes different types of processes in how to approach team management and structure. It can take many forms and is extremely flexible.
I describe agile as a toolbox that one has where you can pull out one or more tools to help address issues a team is having. Something as simple as adding regular retros as a feedback loop can be enough to help drive improvement within a team.”
Summary: How to Build an Agile Marketing Workforce During Disruption
An agile marketing workforce thrives on visibility, alignment, and continuous improvement — especially when teams are stretched across freelancers, contractors, and time zones. By adopting practical agile techniques like Kanban boards, daily standups, and retrospectives, marketing leaders can maintain momentum, reduce friction, and turn workforce disruption into operational resilience. Agile isn’t about rigid frameworks — it’s about choosing the right tools to keep work moving, visible, and aligned.
FAQ 1: What is an agile marketing workforce?
An agile marketing workforce is a team structure that adapts quickly to change using flexible processes, shared visibility, and continuous collaboration. It often includes a mix of full-time employees, freelancers, and remote contributors working within agile frameworks.
FAQ 2: How does agile help marketing teams manage staff augmentation?
Agile practices like Kanban and daily standups create transparency across workstreams, making it easier to coordinate external contributors, identify blockers early, and keep priorities aligned despite changing team composition.
FAQ 3: Which agile techniques work best for marketing teams?
Kanban, daily standups, and retrospectives are especially effective for marketing teams because they emphasize work visibility, alignment, and feedback without requiring heavy process overhead.
This is a guest blog by Srishty Khullar, member of the Advocacy Mavens Coalition.
The Advocacy Mavens Coalition is an association of open for contracting customer-led professionals, each with extensive industry experience. We’re experts in building advocacy and community programs, designing experiences, running advisory boards, creating content, managing and migrating platforms, and more.
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