If your development and operations teams are moving to DevOps or already use it, then you may find yourself having to bring your marketing team along for the ride. While some people talk about bringing agile and DevOps to marketing tasks, this post focuses on how you can bring your marketing team into a DevOps state of mind.
Provide DevOps 101 Training to Marketing
The higher delivery velocity of DevOps might prove troublesome for some marketing people to understand if they only have experience supporting products and services released under waterfall or just plain slower models.
Providing DevOps 101 training is an important step to teaching marketing staff how continuous delivery changes their job. Take, for example, content marketing managers who are used to writing about a product when it’s 100 percent complete and ready to launch. They may need to learn to collaborate better with subject matter experts in a different manner. The processes they are used to following to produce content are going to have to adapt to a DevOps practice.
Include Marketing in Your DevOps Cultural Transformation
DevOps culture transformation shouldn’t be just about your development, operations, and security teams. Product and services companies need to account for their marketing team as part of their cultural transformation. This level of inclusion could mean you need some executive support from both your technology and marketing teams, such as the following:
- Marketing needs a share in the collective responsibility to ensure that the software your organization delivers meets expectations and is a market fit for the business customer you’re pursuing.
- Marketing, development, and operations can be natural enemies in the wild. Even so, it’s important that marketing owns their work and that mistakes and miscommunications don’t fall on the blame of one marketing person.
- Marketing team members who are supporting a development project need constant visibility into what the developers are doing. Likewise, developers earn a view into marketing activities. The days of surprises in marketing collateral should be no more in a DevOps culture.
- Automation is a priority in DevOps, and the development team may need to introduce their marketing counterparts into the role of automation in their development cycle.
- Collaboration and shared roles with marketing in areas such as user story development, product definitions, user documentation, and marketing collateral take on a new meaning with the project scheduling to support such activities.
Put a DevOps Team over Your Martech Stack
As your marketing team marches toward the cloud and more automation, it’s a perfect time to bring DevOps practices to the development and operations of your marketing technology (martech) stack.
Having the martech stack under IT management can be a luxury in some organizations because of shadow IT or just where IT priorities land. Moving your martech stack under IT management is something to consider as part of your DevOps journey.
DevOps and Marketing Together
DevOps and marketing are as odd of a grouping as you make them. Bringing marketing into your DevOps teams and overall culture can only help boost collaboration and communications during product launch and go-to-market activities.
