The Agile Process
From September to December of 2024, I've had the pleasure of being a Product Manager in my Integrated Marketing Communications Class at Western Washinton University (WWU). What I did during that time, was lead a team of other students who took the role of content creators. The content creators made short form video content promoting and uplifting WWU's Merriman Finanicial Literacy Program. This program is dedicated into helping students gain financial literacy. While it was my first time leading a group, it was made easier with the Agile Process.
Before understanding Agile, I had to understand the WHAT, in what I was doing. Knowing what you're doing makes leading a team easier, and what I was did was help facilitate the creation of multiple videos featuring different aspects of the Financial Literacy program. Moving on to HOW is where Agile comes in. The Agile Process, is in project management is breaking down a large project into smaller phases. For my class we called them Sprints, and each lasted 2 weeks. For every sprint, we launched a new version of our product with improvements based on Analytics, Analysis, and Recommedations (AAR) from the previous version. This ultimately lead us to the WHY, to help students feel empowered in their financial literacy.
Leading a Team Using Agile
On paper, implementing the Agile Process, seems very simple. All you have to do is tasks, for a 2 weeks and repeat the cycle. What proved difficult as the quarter went, was that you simply can't recycle the same production schedule over and over again. Within those 2 weeks, I had to help lead my squad, with completing a Preproduction Package, Reaching out to interviewees, Filming, editing, creating promotions, evaluating our past videos.
What made the content creation process simpler, is understanding that in those 2 weeks you don't have a lot of time, but what matters most is that you have a plan. You can't just create a video in a day, there's so much work that goes into creating even 90 seconds of content. What matters most as product manager, is making sure you stick to the plan, and check everything off to make sure you don't miss anything. Doing this effectively was such a great feeling, because it was rewarding seeing how my team started off with a storyboard on a whiteboard, and by using agile, at the end of the sprint we had full videos posted on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Running a Marketing Campaign is about Improvement
Besides using the Agile Process, using the end of a sprint to do a retrospective meeting, was most effective in helping us run our 10 week marketing campaign. This being my first team leading a team, working with a client (The financial literacy program) that I was new to, this was a good method in growing as a leader. In these retrospective meetings, my squad would review our video and look at feedback I gave them, as well as our executive. They, then would review both the content we made and the process on how we completed them using sticky notes. As simple as it may seem, writing down on a sticky note 3 things, "What Can we 1. Start Doing, 2. Stop Doing, and 3. Do more of," helped visualize to the team what they could improve upon.
As a Leader, making my squad write on sticky notes, and then stand up and share what they wrote, helped them improve their content, as taking time to pick apart their work let them discover things they often overlooked. This also is a great tool in helping those who aren't as talkative during meeting, get a chance to bring in their perspectives. However, all this falls out the window unless you actually implement these improvements. The biggest lesson I learned, is to make sure my squad at the end of the sprint, goes back and looks at what they said they could improve on during our retrospective meeting. The easiest way I could make sure they did, was to use our KanBan, (a planner for our tasks) and cross check that they actually looked at past improvements, so they aren't forgotten. The image you see next to this, is an example of what our KanBan looked like, and how we used it to keep track of tasks.
To Conclude
To keep things short and sweet, overall I learned so much in the 10 weeks, I was a product manager. I went from having to prepare for an hour what I was going to say to lead a team, to being able to walk in when a meeting starts and having the confidence to explain my agenda without the need to look at my notes every 3 seconds. I wouldn't have been able to have done it without the agile process and effectively utilizing retrospective meetings, as well as my great squad who put in the effort which made leading them much easier.
