History of the Agile Marketing Manifesto
On June 11th of 2012, a group of 35 marketers came together at Mindjet's offices in San Francisco for an event called SprintZero. The purpose was to review various individual attempts to modify the Agile Manifesto for Software Developers for marketers and write our own manifesto. The first version of the Agile Marketing Manifesto was born with 7 values and 10 principles. This was always considered to be a draft. Little did we know that it would take almost ten years and a global pandemic before we were able to finalize that draft.
On May 12th, 2017, we met again in San Francisco, this time at Mozilla's offices, for SprintOne. Our purpose at this event was to create an ecosystem to support the adoption of Agile marketing. We brainstormed many ideas and then used the well-known dots voting technique to prioritize the most important activities. Perhaps the biggest contribution to Agile adoption in marketing that was inspired by that event was the Agility in Marketing certification we co-created with IC-Agile.
The planning for SprintTwo began in April 2021. Our goal was to finalize and rewrite the values and principles on day one and brainstorm activities that we could do to increase the adoption of Agile in Marketing on day two of the conference.
The survey and data team (Andrea Fryrear, Rachel Chapman, and Jayson Gehri) produced a survey and sent it out via social media and various email lists. Approximately 150 people responded. The core planning team used their feedback to propose a new set of five values and 10 principles.
At the SprintTwo conference held virtually on September 8th and 9th, 2021, we finalized the five values. Attendees voted on the values and debated the final version before coming to an agreement. The 10 principles were finalized on a later call in October of 2021.
On September 9th, we broke into interest groups to discuss ways to increase the adoption of Agile in marketing. You can see the main interest groups below: Forming a foundation or association (which eventually became the Agile Marketing Alliance), Analysts, Thought leadership, higher education, tooling, global translation, events, consultancies, publicity, case studies, Agile agencies, and other ideas.
Thanks to all the great volunteers involved in the project:
- Stacey Ackerman
- Travis Arnold
- Pam Ashby
- Scott Brinker
- Andrew Burrows
- Rachel Chapman
- Frank Days
- Jim Ewel
- Andrea Fryrear
- Jayson Gehri
- Cathy Grimes
- Thomas Hormaza
- Lydia Kirby
- Amy Luethmers
- Christophe Martinot
- Femi Olajiga
- Micheleigh Perez
- Giannina Rachetta
- Melissa Reeve
- Nadine Rochester
- Marielle Roozemond
- Michael Seaton
- Melissa Pickering
- Roland Smart
- Elizabeth Stepp
- Elizabeth Venter
If we've left anyone out, our apologies. Please contact us so that we can recognize your contribution.