Why and how we do sprint planning

Unless you’ve spent time in proximity to software development, you might wonder why a marketing consultancy is talking about athletics. If you’re a prospective client, you’ll be relieved to hear that a sub-20 minute 5k isn’t a prerequisite for working with us. When we talk about sprints, we’re referring to the way we produce work, based on an approach developers use.

In this article we’ll share what a sprint is, why we work in sprints to benefit our teams and our clients and how we do sprint planning with a step-by-step guide.

What’s a sprint?

The concept of sprints originated with the Scrum approach to software development. A sprint is a fixed period of time—in our case, one week—in which a team or individual aims to get a specified amount of work done.

We’ve adapted the sprint system to fit the typical cadence of our projects and retainers, but the core principles remain the same: transparency, adaptation and inspection.

(You might also hear us talking about SEO sprints, which use a similar approach to identify, prioritise and work through issues and opportunities to optimise a client’s website.)

Why work in sprints?

As a marketing consultancy that creates signature websites, brand strategy and thought leadership, we don’t have the typical profile for sprints. But in 20+ years of operation, we’ve found sprints to be the most effective and efficient way of producing work that makes clients happy and protects our teams’ wellbeing.

There are four key reasons sprint work benefits us and our clients, from greater focus to more space for strategic thinking.

Focus and flow

By committing to a clear set of priorities at the start of every sprint, our teams know when and how to give each task their full attention.

A Stanford University study showed that frequent task switching—previously known under the misnomer of ‘multi-tasking’—significantly impairs productivity as we’re more easily distracted. When we’re more reliably productive, we can charge prices that reflect that efficiency, so everyone wins.

Collaboration and clarity

Sprint planning brings our teams together and gets us talking. We discuss priorities and share information that might influence those priorities, such as an upcoming website launch or a corporate event.

We also get the opportunity to clarify scope and responsibility instead of second-guessing at every step, so work flows smoothly.

Sustainable pace

Ironically, sprints allow us to take a marathon approach to work—measured and steady. We can, and do, move things around for truly urgent requests from trusted clients. But we also know that our people do their best work that meets our high standards when they feel autonomous and avoid burnout.

This sustainable pace also creates predictability and reliability for clients. You know when you’re getting work and you can expect great things, consistently.

Strategic headspace

We’re all used to getting the things we want faster now, whether it’s Amazon orders or our next five LinkedIn posts written by ChatGPT. By applying the same expectations to your marketing partner, you’ll get an order-taker. What you really need is a strategic partner.

By slowing down and interrogating why work is needed and what it needs to be great, instead of executing every request on demand, you get the full value of our expertise (and more from your marketing efforts.)

What about urgent requests?

We know that sometimes things just can’t wait. If it’s urgent, or if the delay came from our side, we’ll take swift action to get the work done. Sprint planning is about saying yes to the right things at the right time for clients and our teams, not making an arbitrary point.

How we do sprint planning: step-by-step

We’re transparent with clients about our way of working as it has some bearing on how we work with them.

Clients with experience of software development will be familiar with sprints and sprint planning, but for those who don’t, we break down our process into four key steps.

1. Log the work: Typically, when a project or brief comes in, it goes into a prioritised backlog. But we always define the work and log it straight away in Ada—our Notion-based project management system. We break down the work into milestones, deliverables and tasks. Tasks represent the key steps to create the deliverable, like writing, pair editing and revisions.
2. Add tasks to sprint plans: Everyone in Articulate is responsible for their own weekly sprint plan. They might add tasks themselves for clients they manage. Others might add tasks on their behalf. But it’s up to the individual to make sure they have a full plan for the week ahead. Tasks get picked up from the backlog in Ada in priority order, based on deadlines agreed upfront and available briefs, in that order.
3. Meet and review sprint plans: Our Studio teams meet on different days of the week to do sprint planning—writers on Mondays and designers and developers on Thursdays. Each member of the team will share their sprint plan for the week with their peers and team leader. Then anyone can provide input that might influence those priorities.
4. Agree sprint plans (with updates where needed): Sprint plans might change slightly based on new information or late-breaking priorities. This happens during the meeting, then sprint plans are agreed and set for the week and the work commences.
5. Review the sprint: The following week, at the start of the weekly meeting, the teams gather again to review how the sprint went. This is an invaluable opportunity to learn and adapt our approach, particularly where we might have experienced blockers or work overruns.

The process itself isn’t complex, but it requires up-to-date and nuanced knowledge across our client base, which is why our sprint planning is always a team sport.

Your marketing partner for the long run

Sprint planning is how we balance urgency with strategy and discipline with creativity. It’s how we protect our culture and deliver the best results for our clients. If that sounds like the kind of marketing partner you need, we’d love to chat. Book a meeting with one of our consultants to discuss how we can help you build your Difference Engine®️ for growth.