Looking for ways to boost adoption of agile marketing methodology?

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Hackathons are great at accelerating the process of ensuring digital and agile transformation. An agile Marketing hackathon can help in breaking silos while delivering breakthrough innovation for startups and large-scale enterprises.

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In agile marketing, hackathons can catalyze organizational change by creating a solution-focused, customer-centric, and digital-oriented working culture.

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What are hackathons?

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In the digital marketing arena, hackathons have become an integral component for innovation.  A hackathon is an event in which software developers and other team members involved in the process of creating the software product collaborate for hours or even days to solve problems and innovate solutions.

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Right after its advent, hackathons became essential for startup organizations. However, recently, these collaborative events have become quite popular amongst large-scale enterprises as well. For large-scale organizations, hackathons serve to be lucrative tools for kicking-off digital transformation. Hackathons generate experimentation, collaboration, and a pathway for rapid innovation.

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Hackathon, in its literal sense, is derived out of the combination of terms ‘Hack’ and ‘Marathon.’ It also goes by the names as the codefest, hack day, and hackfest. These events are highly flexible. Their formats can be easily modified for addressing any given challenge. Hackathons can serve as platform-specific, product-specific, offline or in-person, platform-agnostic, external, online, or internal. Hackathons can also be focused on a specific demographic, framework, language, output, or a participant.

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An agile marketing hackathon is the ongoing evolution of the concept for use by marketing teams to leverage in their marketing process.

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Importance of Hackathons for Ensuring the Agile Experience

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For start-ups, hackathons can be a great way to profit from a high-end agile experience. Here are some ways:

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• Working in a Timebox: A hackathon is scheduled for a pre-defined start time and end time. Within the given period, participants are responsible for managing their overall time, planning out the entire set of work, and breaking down activities into manageable chunks. You are expected to develop and propose your marketing idea, determine the overall features, analyse the activities, develop the product, and deliver all of it within the given timeline. In Scrum, sprints serve to be fixed in the overall duration. These include analysis of the respective sprint goal. It also includes taking on the product backlog items, giving out work, executing work, and then, ensuring the delivery of a working product increment at the sprint’s end. In Scrum, agile marketing teams work over sprints. They are focused on the delivery of a specific sprint goal. Scrum teams are responsible for focusing on delivering the sprint backlog and not expanding the scope, that would disrupt sprint deliverables.

• Working towards a Sprint Goal or a Product Goal: At a marketing hackathon event, you are expected to identify the specific marketing solution or project that you are going to build. You are also responsible for determining the MVP or Minimal Viable (marketing) Project along with the features it will include.

This is exactly how a Scrum team in Agile Marketing is expected to work with a particular product/marketing project backlog emerging with the project. In every sprint, the team is responsible for determining the sprint goal for getting them one step closer to the final product goal.

• Focusing on the Deliverables: At the hackathon, you are expected to focus on the work for pitching and showcasing your solution hack at the end.

• Collaborating and Empathizing with Customers: At Agile Marketing Hackathons – especially local hackathons for some societal marketing cause, a specific problem statement is displayed about some social pain point or challenge. At the same time, you get to empathize with the users and observe how your solution will be addressing some real issues.

In Scrum, agile marketing teams continue regularly collaborating with customers and stakeholders for better understanding the respective needs, understanding their problems, and making sure that the product is viable enough to address the different needs of their target customers.

• Validating Your Ideas: At an Agile marketing hackathon, you will come up with an idea or marketing hack while receiving feedback. This will help you as well as the judges in deciding whether or not to pursue the idea or move on to something else.

In agile marketing, Scrum is based on the core pillars of adaptation, transparency, and inspection. In a typical sprint review, the scrum team, along with the stakeholders, will be inspecting the marketing deliverable or project, and then collaborating on what they are expected to work on next through the adaptation of the project backlog. It is all about receiving feedback while making sure that everything is on the right track before you move on to the next sprint.

• Pitching a Solution: As the Agile Marketing hackathon ends, you will be presenting and pitching the idea and the subsequent project deliverable. This offers you the opportunity to boost your presentation skills while working on the creation of the project elevator pitch, differentiating your project from other participants, and laying out the milestones of the project. These are critical skills needed for any Agile Marketing executive.

Conclusion

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Hackathons are responsible for bringing to life ideas instantly and showcasing potential solutions. Hackathons should be observed as an iterative tool for sustained innovation for modern businesses.

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