Justin Zimmerman

How This Podcast Came To Be (video below)

What an amazing world we live in!

I was out on a hike and was thinking about the difference between frameworks, methods, and approaches.

That weekend I was on a “dopamine detox” and so it was “no screens and no caffeine”. So I asked my partner if she could record my thoughts and email me the audio.

A few days later when I plugged back in, I heard the audio snippet and decided to turn it into a tweet.

Over this weekend thought… Frameworks are interpretive. They provide principles. Methodologies are prescriptive and provide instructions.#agile #agiletransformation #managers #projectmanagement #marketing #remotework

— Justin Zimmerman (@justinzim) July 6, 2020

Little did I know Steve Tendon, creator of the agile approach known as TameFlow, would respond half way around the world (in Malta) and we’d put together this podcast for you.

What You’ll Learn From This Podcast

High performing businesses have high performance cultures. If you look close enough you’ll see two things at work.

1. Clear processes on how work gets done
2. A language that connects people in teams and teams to missions.

No matter what size business you’re in, this interview with Steve Tendon will help you improve both. We will help you identify which of the four flows inside of TameFlow will bring your team and company the most results.

Flow 1 – Financial

Flow 2 – Informational

Flow 3 – Operational

Flow 4 – Psychological

If you don’t know anything about agile, SCRUM, Kanban, lean, or any of the other popular frameworks, approaches, or methodologies, don’t worry.

We will share in simple terms new ways to transform yourself, your team, and company.

So here’s the outline I’m going to try and stick to during our 45-60 minutes together:

• Who is Steve and why should you care?
• How did he turn around an 8,000 person division?
• What exactly is TameFlow and the 4 Flows?
• What does every high performing team need?
• Who should consider TameFlow?
• How does it compare to other agile approaches?
• What is the difference between an approach and method?
• Why should anyone care about any of this?

Watch The Interview Here

If you enjoy conversations and content like this, find the “get new stuff” box on the right hand side of this page. Share you email with me and I’ll send you exciting and valuable things.

Also, if you wish to support this site (me) AND need an amazing project management tool, sign up for a free Wrike account using my affiliate link.

I have adapted my own Agile method into Wrike and run my teams on it!

And as bonus, if you sign up with my link, I’ll also give you access to my Wrike Training Series, which will skip you waaaaay head.

Instead spending a bunch of time tinkering with how to set up and use Wrike, I’ll help you set it up.

This include my dashboard setups, workflows, and template projects that make it easy to just start getting more done, faster.

1. Start With A Problem
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-get-anyones-attention/
   
2. Words You Are Overusing
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/two-words-youre-overusing-when-you-write/
   
3. How To Start A Paragraph
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/4-surefire-ways-to-start-a-paragraph/
   
4. How To Not Start An Email
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-not-to-start-an-email/
   
5. How To Write Email People Open
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-write-emails-that-people-actually-open/
   
6. How To Write An About Us Page That Make Money
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-write-an-about-us-page-that-makes-money/
   
7. How To Write Headlines That Work
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/why-your-website-isnt-working/
   
8. How To Write Offers That Work
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/what-all-great-marketing-has-in-common/
   
9. How To Write Calls To Action
   https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/this-one-button-will-make-you-more-money/
   
10. How To Make People Excited To Pay You
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/make-people-excited-to-pay-you/
    
11. How To Spot Jargon And Kill It
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/these-words-are-costing-you-money/
    
12. How To Turn Your Brand Into A Movement
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-turn-your-brand-into-a-movement/
    
13. Perfect Speech Formula
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/the-formula-for-a-perfect-speech/
    
14. Use The Word “You” To See More
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/this-one-word-will-sell-anything/
    
15. Why You Should Get People To Feel Good
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-get-someone-to-love-your-brand/
    
16. A Checklist For Your Emails Pitches And Sales Conversations
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/sales-conversation-checklist/
    
17. How To Breakthrough Creative Blocks Using “What If”
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-break-through-creative-block/
    
18. Focus On Peoples Pain To Gain Attention
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/making-your-product-relevant/
    
19. Win Against The Competition Even When They Are Better By Caring MORE
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/when-your-competition-is-better-than-you/
    
20. Close More Deals By Doing The Math For Them
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/how-to-close-any-deal/
    
21. Differentiate Yourself Or Company By Stating How You Solve The Problem
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/this-marketing-message-works-every-time/
    
22. Why You Should Create A Counter Attack
    https://www.businessmadesimple.com/video/why-your-company-should-be-against-something/
    
    I create trainings for my teams by curating content that says it better than I can. This list of vidoes comes from Donald Miller author of Storybrand. Great guy, great book. I get his daily emails and pull out the best ones for me team. Here’s the list for you! And yes, as I get more I’ll add more to this list. So come back every now and then.
    
    

Featured again on the Agile Marketing Podcast. I returned to share the developments we made over the last 16 months.

http://www.agilemarketingblog.com/2020/03/justin-zimmerman-returns-to-talk-scaling-agile-marketing/

Getting started with agile marketing? Want to know the two agile content marketing metrics that are transforming my team into a predictable, scalable, and deadline hitting machine? Then this article is for you…

Where my team is at in the agile journey

My content team is in the early stages of an agile marketing transformation. If you’re following the movement or applying it in your company, then you know there are many ways to do it.

But if you listen to any AgileMarketer podcast you’ll hear a common theme: roll it out slow and in steps. As my friend and fellow agile marketer Nicci Shaw said during our conversation today, “do it incrementally”.

An increment I’m working on

I’m working on discovering our initial agile content marketing metrics. I want to know how long it takes to complete common content-types  (emails, ebooks, blog posts) that comprise common content projects (webinars, launches, trainings) .

Despite what many agile content marketers say about using time based metrics, I see a way to reliably use it. My hypothesis is once we get these content production metrics, I’ll be able to:

(1) Estimate the amount of work my team can get done in 2-4 week period | SCRUM

(2) Establish how much load each stage in our workflow can handle before bottlenecking | Kanban

Right now it’s not entirely clear what flavor of agile content marketing our team will adopt, SCRUM or Kanban. But what is clear is once I know these numbers, I’ll have the primary agile content marketing metrics to predict what can and can’t get done in a given time or stage.

Here’s what we know so far

Our agile content marketing metrics are based on blogs. They are the pillar of our content program. We research the heck out of topics and often create 2,500-3,500 word posts our audience and Google love.

We have 6 primary workflow stages that go into creating all our content. This standardized workflow gave me the ability to calculate our first agile content marketing metric: published words-per-hour.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say a typical 3,000 word blog post takes us on average:

• 2 hours per 1,000 words to research
• 4 hours per 1,000 words to create
• 1 hour per 1,000 words to edit
• 15 minutes per 1,000 words to proof
• 7 minutes per 1,000 words to upload
• 7 minutes per 1,000 words to preview

Adding these numbers up gives me 7.5 hours per 1,000 words or 130 published words-per-hour. 

Knowing this metric helped me plan and predict our content calendar. But I soon realized it’s actually only building block for a much more useful metric.

“Good” and  “great” agile content marketing metrics

Knowing how long a single blog post takes was an exciting discovery at first. But I soon realized this metric is pretty limited. It’s good for one person to predict when one content-type can be completed.

However, when I started thinking in terms of team capacity, I needed to know how much total content we could produce. Andrew, a content producer on our team helped me come up with a solution.

We scaled published words-per-hour across the whole team and got a much more useful agile content marketing metric: total published words-per-sprint.

Here’s the “great” agile metric in action

There’s excitement around this agile content marketing metric when I explain it like this:

Think of words-per-sprint like credits. At the start of each sprint we have a bank account filled with “word credits” to spend. Our job will be to look at our marketing roadmap and spend them on the next best projects. We’ll know how much content we can afford now and how much we need to spend later.

As an example, if we need a new sales webinar, we’d look at the webinar as a project composed of different content types. I’ve set up dashboards in our project management software to display each content-type as an individual task.

With our metrics known for each content-type, we can add up all the tasks in the webinar project to know how many “words credits” this project costs.

If the project costs less than the word budget, we will do it all in one sprint. If the project costs more, we will break it up into multiple sprints.

How to figure out your “word budget”

Our agile content is blog based, but I have a hunch other content-types like ebooks, landing pages, and video scripts will hover around a similar delivered words-per-hour.

Even if they don’t, I can still come up with a delivered words-per-sprint. But for the sake of simplicity the example below assumes a similar words-per-hour across all content types.

Here’s how I’m figuring out my agile content marketing team’s word budget:

• Multiply the 6 productive (non-meeting) working hours available per team member by the 6 members to get 36 production hours per day.

• Multiple the 36 production hours per day by 10 working days per sprint to get 360 production hours per week.

• Divide the 360 production hours per week by the 7.5 hours per 1000 words to get total of 48,000 delivered words per sprint.

Using these numbers, we’d have “word budget” of 48,000 words.

Where I’m going from here

I’m sure my “word budget” concept will get reviewed and refined. But prior to conceptualizing this agile content marketing metric, I didn’t have a way to estimate how much or how fast we could get through our project backlog.

Now that I have a “word budget”, only execution will tell me if it’s truly the currency of content I think it is!

Today I listened to Simon Sinek’s What Game Theory Teaches Us About War  and later in the day I found a way to apply his “Values vs. Interests” concept to a debate I had with a colleague.

Simon illustrates this concept with a story that sounds something like this:

When America goes to war and shoots an enemy, we send in our medics, airlift injured enemy soldiers in our helicopters, and take care of them in our hospitals. We act against our own interests because somewhere in our values it says “because that is what America does”.

This lesson was timely. It gave me a framework to look at a decision we need to make and helped us get clearer on our values and interests as a content team.

The debate

The debate is over the decision to include or delete content in an article we are publishing. This content is the best resource relative to the topic. But sending our audience to this resource could expose them to a competitor’s promotion.

The resource in question is a Facebook group. Some would say the leaders in this group are hostile towards our company. I’m told they censor any comments in the group that talk favorably about our company or products. They go so far as removing members from their group who continually say good things about our products.

We know they have an affiliate relationship with a competitor. This explains why they do this. It’s in their interests to keep their members away from our products. I don’t know why they don’t create an affiliate relationship with our company too and allow the best products to win. But that is a conversation for another time.

My position is: deliver the best value to our audience and include this resource in the article. One of my missions as the Content Director is to get our audience thinking something like this:

Every time I read one of their articles I get the best answers and approaches to my challenges. I trust this company, they help me become better at my job, and feel they care about my success.

My concern is if we delete this resource, we’ll be withholding the best answer from our audience and even worse, we’ll be guilty of the same censorship they’re imposing on us.

What are our/my values

When I first joined this company one of the first things we did was create a Marketing Manifesto. It’s our Content Bill of Rights and outlines what we will and won’t do. This document helps us deliver customer experiences that aligns our company’s interests with our audiences’. We believe there’s an unspoken contract between us and our audience. If we create content experiences they want, they will pay us with a very valuable currency, their attention.

Somewhere in the manifesto we wrote:

We believe marketing is a contract between us and our audience. They pay us in attention and we fulfill the contract with great, trustworthy content. We believe attention from our audience and customers is the highest form of currency.

Underneath this is a strategic principle. I believe attention is the precursor to trust. The more attention we get our audience to pay, the more trust we can build. Organic Attention Retention is my long strategy to earning trust versus us paying for it with gimmicky promotions and discounts.

Unresolved conclusion

At the moment there’s nothing in our manifesto that covers this situation. We are in a grey area and the decision could go either way. Will we act from our values and deliver the greatest content experience possible or will we prudently act in our interests and replace the resource with something else?

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