Beginner's Guide to Kanban for Agile Marketing

Key Takeaways

• Kanban in marketing is all about limiting Work In Progress (WIP) to optimize the amount of meaningful work that gets done and minimizе waste.
• Kanban offers marketers better alignment, awareness, collaboration, and efficiency, and is particularly well-suited for remote or distributed teams.
• Kanban operates on 5 principles: visualize workflow, limit WIP, measure and manage flow, make policies explicit, and use models to recognize opportunities for improvement.
• Kanban is very flexible and often includes elements of Scrum like sprints, standups, and retrospectives.
• It’s important to track key metrics like cycle time, throughput, and efficiency to understand how your team is performing.

At the core of Kanban lies a paradox: by limiting the amount of work we do, we become more productive. That’s one of the things that make Kanban one of the most preferred Agile frameworks.

Fundamentally, Kanban in marketing is all about optimizing a continuous flow of work through process visualization, limiting Work In Progress (WIP), and generally measuring and optimizing the way you work. It’s great for creating super-efficient teams, but also ideal for remote or distributed teams as working off a Kanban board helps ensure everyone always has access to information they need to get work done.

Why is this approach such a game-changer? When you consider how much time we lose to multitasking (or, more accurately, task switching, since no one can truly multitask), you can see why this seemingly paradoxical methodology is so useful.

David J. Anderson best articulated its application to software development, in 2013, in the foundational book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, and its adoption hasn’t been as universal as Scrum’s during the early days of Agile software development. But, for teams that chafe under the strictures of the Scrum process, Kanban can be a freeing alternative.

Before moving on to learn the origins of Kanban, why don't you take a second to grab our Agile Trailhead Guide?

Origins of Kanban

Although it was adapted to knowledge work like marketing only a few years ago, the concept of kanban (lowercase k) has been around for decades.

The Japanese term “kanban” translates to “signal card,” and was originally developed by Toyota in the 1940s. Inspired by grocery stores, which stock only as many products as people need, Toyota’s manufacturing teams began using cards, or kanbans, to signal to other parts of the production line that they needed more parts.

The use of kanban was part of a JIT (Just in Time) approach that enabled plants to create only as many parts as were needed at the time and to conserve resources by not making extra. So instead of storing huge numbers of parts at each station of an assembly line, wasting a lot of time, energy, and space, parts could be quickly shifted around where they’re needed. That last part is key, everything is done based on current needs, not assumptions about future ones.

This production system created the foundations of Lean by setting the goal of creating value without wasting resources. And it did just that. After implementing it, automakers found they could produce more cars with fewer defects. Since then, the idea of JIT logistics and manufacturing has created a global revolution in how products are produced, shipped, and stored.

But at some point, people began to wonder how these same principles could apply to the production of non-physical items. Early experiments quickly showed that it was just as revolutionary. By visualizing and quantifying the systems we use to create anything, we could get a big picture of what’s going on and really understand what needs to change.

Avoiding Waste on the Assembly Line

Let’s say my job is to put tires on a car. It’s wasteful for me to have hundreds of tires that I don’t yet need piled up behind me.

It’s efficient for the team that makes tires to produce them just in time for me to install them on a car. So once my stock reaches an agreed-upon point, say a dozen tires on hand, I put out a kanban card to spur the tire-making team to action. Throughout the assembly line, “workers at each step in the process are not allowed to do work unless they are signaled with a kanban from a downstream step.”

When applied to software development and marketing, a Kanban implementation doesn’t typically include physical signal cards that cause another worker to begin work.

Instead, the signal to pull new work is inferred from the visual quantity of work-in-progress in any given state.

For example, if I’m responsible for editing content on my HLS marketing team, I infer from the amount of work in the “Edit ready” column that it is or isn’t time to pull a new project into my own workload. (This assumes that the number of items in progress in the “editing” column falls below the set WIP limit, enabling me to pull in additional work; more on that shortly.)

Benefits of Kanban for Marketing Organizations

How much of an impact can a work method that comes from Japanese companies making cars in the 1940s really have on marketing functions in the 2020s? Turns out, the benefits it brings are transformative.

Improved Awareness and Collaboration

The first thing that tends to really stand out to people who use Kanban is the visualization. Suddenly, they have a tremendous amount of information at their fingertips. They can see what everyone is working on, the status of each work item, information about each item, etc.

Being able to actually see your work processes in action for the first time is a game-changer in and of itself. Suddenly you can see where bottlenecks are, spot a task that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks, and prevent people from getting blocked because they don’t have key information or know what they should work on next.

This in turn minimizes time wasted asking “what’s next?” or “what is this task even about?” and waiting for a response (a particularly insidious problem when colleagues are on opposite ends of the globe).

Metrics to Drive Improvement

Another benefit of the visualization that Kanban boards offer is the ability to track key metrics. We’ll explore the specific metrics later in this article, but the huge advantage this offers marketers is a clear way to quantify their processes. When you can track a series of metrics based on how items move through your Kanban board, you can spot problems and test ideas for improvement.

So, let’s say you want to try adding a review step early in your content production process to catch issues earlier on. These metrics can tell you whether that actually improves your process overall or makes it worse. So instead of guessing or going on vibes around whether a change is actually beneficial, you can precisely quantify the impact it has.

Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency

Combining the value provided by visualization and metrics, you end up with the biggest impact of Kanban in marketing: efficiency. Too many marketing teams end up moving from crisis to crisis and never stopping to look at the processes that are actually failing them. Kanban makes it far easier to identify bad processes, test ideas for improvement, and then implement those ideas.

The result is a work method that drives continuous improvement. Problems don’t get ignored because, for example, everyone can see the cards piling up in the review column. The process metrics clearly show that the team’s performance is getting worse, etc. Kanban in marketing helps drive a more proactive rather than reactive approach to process improvement.

Kanban vs. kanban

Like Scrum, a Kanban marketing implementation requires a prioritized Backlog of work-to-be-done, from which the team pulls their work.

Business owners and stakeholders are responsible for religiously maintaining and prioritizing that list, because it is the sole source of work for the marketing team.

You’ve probably seen kanban tracking boards used on all kinds of teams, but simply having a Backlog and moving work from one side of a whiteboard to another doesn’t mean you’re using Kanban. Anderson reminds us that “card walls are not inherently kanban systems. They are merely visual control systems. They allow teams to visually observe work-in-progress and self-organize, assign their own tasks, and move work from a backlog to complete without direction from a project or line manager.

However, if there is no explicit limit to work-in-progress and no signaling to pull new work through the system, it is not a kanban system.”

So, putting a bunch of cards on a wall doesn’t mean you’re using Kanban.

In fact, many Scrum teams use this type of visualization to manage their work. The primary piece that sets Kanban apart is the commitment to limiting work-in-progress (WIP).

Why WIP Limits Are So Powerful

Instead of using timeboxes to govern their work, as a Scrum team does, a Kanban team uses WIP limits. Each state of work has an upper limit of productive work that it can contain.

After the team exceeds that limit, waste enters the system. That upper limit then becomes a formalized piece of the Kanban process.

Team capacity can be optimized by limiting WIP. It feels counterintuitive at first, but team members embark on new work only when the previous task is finished, preventing them from getting overwhelmed by their workload.

This limit is one of the core practices of Kanban. It allows the team to be efficient, fluid, and focused on the workflow. But WIP limits aren't constant; they vary from team to team and from one state of work to another.

For example, your team of 5 might have a WIP limit of 10 on their “Doing” column, enabling each person to work on 2 things at once. The limit on work being reviewed, however, might be different, depending on how long this piece of the workflow takes, how many people are assigned to review work, and other factors.

Routinely experiment with your WIP limits and document the outcomes, to ensure that your Kanban system functions at its highest possible level.

Five Core Principles of Kanban in Marketing

WIP limits may be Kanban’s core defining feature, but it’s not all you need. Anderson defines five core properties that make for a successful implementation:

1. Visualize Workflow
2. Limit Work-in-Progress
3. Measure and Manage Flow
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
5. Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities

Unlike Scrum, Kanban doesn’t prescribe a way of managing work; it doesn’t dictate regular meetings or create unique roles within the team.

Kanban enables you to boost the flexibility of already established workflows. With that being said, Kanban assumes that you already have some form of work-management process in place, and that you want to continuously improve it. This makes Kanban easier than Scrum for marketing teams to implement, because you can start Kanban with little educational overhead.

The good thing about Kanban is that you can start with what you do now. The method easily points out the problematic areas of the workflow, so you can address them and plan their improvement.

Kanban also adapts readily to changing contexts. No two teams -- even within the same department -- implement it in exactly the same way. This makes sense: the bottlenecks in each team’s workflow are distinct, so each team’s improvement strategy is distinct. For Anderson, this approach is freeing:

"Kanban is giving permission in the market to create a tailored process optimized to a specific context. Kanban is giving people permission to think for themselves...You have permission to try Kanban. You have permission to modify your process. You have permission to be different. Your situation is unique and you deserve to develop a unique process definition tailored and optimized to your domain, your value stream, the risks that you manage, the skills of your team, and the demands of your customers."

If you’re new to Agility and aren’t yet ready to think for yourself, this may sound terrifying rather than freeing; you might start with a Scrum implementation before moving toward Kanban.

Visualize Your Workflow

Without the visualization element, Kanban just doesn’t work. The board acts as your single source of truth, the place everyone knows they can go to for information about their work. From planning and building a backlog all the way until work is done, the board is the nexus of a team’s activities.

Limit Work-in-Progress

If the Kanban board is the foundation of Kanban as a working method, the most basic principle you apply to that board is limiting the work on it. From its start, Kanban has focused on “pulling” work or parts only when they are needed. That still applies to Kanban in marketing today.

Work shouldn’t go on the board just because it’s always been that way. The only way for Kanban to properly function is by consciously prioritizing to ensure you’re doing the right work at the right time. Often, visualizing work enables teams to realize just how much they’re actually doing, and it’s a great opportunity to trim down and become more efficient in the process. 

Measure and Manage Flow

We’ve mentioned the importance and value of Agile metrics in marketing Kanban. One of the things they enable teams to do is really optimize the flow of work across their board. Teams can think of their mission as moving cards representing valuable work items across the board. That requires focusing on removing impediments so that flow can happen more efficiently.

That may mean identifying and removing bottlenecks, tightening up WIP limits, or just being more careful about what goes into your backlog to begin with.

Make Process Policies Explicit

One of the big advantages of Kanban is the ability to perform tests to find ways to improve. However, getting reliable data from such tests requires ensuring that all other variables remain relatively constant. This is one reason why it’s so important to have explicit policies around how work gets done in Kanban.

Put another way, you can’t improve your processes if you’re not sure what they are. If a team member thinks things should be done differently, this can be discussed and tested. But everyone doing their own thing, by contrast, is just a recipe for chaos.

Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities

Kanban, like all Agile ways of working, is all about continuous improvement. There is no single perfect way to do Kanban. It’s always going to be customized for your team’s needs. From there, evolution will always be necessary simply because the world we operate in as marketers is always changing. Maybe your team grows or shrinks, maybe you get access to some new tools or technology, or maybe people’s behaviors are gradually shifting.

All of these changes can require adjustments to how you use Kanban in marketing. The point is to never rest on your laurels. Always keep a close eye on your metrics and regularly take time to think about what can be improved.

Practices of Kanban in Marketing

When thinking about starting with Kanban, it’s useful to break down the common practices you’ll want to follow.

Strategic Planning

You can be so staggeringly good at Kanban that your team is reaching previously unknown levels of efficiency. But if all that effort isn’t heading in the right strategic direction, then it’s probably not going to move the needle much. So while strategic planning isn’t necessarily a Kanban practice, it’s an essential foundation for Kanban success.

Backlog Building and Refinement

One of the reasons strategic planning is so vital for Kanban in marketing is that it guides your backlog building and refinement. This is the process of creating a prioritized list of work that needs to get done. So, whenever a team member finishes a piece of work and can’t assist with anything else that’s in progress, they simply start on the top of the backlog.

That being said, it’s not enough to simply have a backlog. The word “prioritized” is key. You need to regularly look at your backlog and remove work that’s no longer needed and reorganize what’s there to reflect current realities. All this work ensures that when your team does pull cards into its streamlined Kanban processes, they’re the right cards at the right time.

In place of Review and Retrospectives, Kanban teams use queue-replenishment meetings to keep their backlog prioritized and refined. They must happen at regular intervals, but their cadence doesn’t need to be tied to any other cycle of Kanban.

So, even if you release new content every week, your queue replenishment might need to occur only once a month. Whatever timing you choose, make sure that it’s consistent, because “a steady cadence for queue replenishment reduces the coordination cost of holding the meeting and provides certainty and reliability over the relationship between the business” and the marketing team.

Whenever possible, include a wide variety of decision-makers from the most senior management position available in queue replenishment.

These attendees can often provide more contextual detail and make decisions where lower-level attendees would have to defer. The goal is to produce a Backlog from which the marketing team can work with the utmost confidence, so you need attendees who can make that happen during the meeting.

Daily Standups

While not traditionally part of Kanban, our experience applying Kanban to marketing at AgileSherpas has taught us that daily standups bring a lot of value. But it does differ a bit from the traditional Scrum standup.

The Kanban board accurately represents all work in progress and eliminates the need for team members to give daily status updates. Instead, the meeting centers on how work is flowing (or not flowing) through the system. A facilitator of some kind walks the board, usually from right to left, reviewing the cards and, when the need arises, querying team members for a status update or information that the team does not already have.

A Kanban standup focuses on blocked items (a status that is indicated on the card with a flag) or on cards that haven’t changed status in several days.

This condensed style of standup is one reason that Kanban teams can be considerably larger than Scrum teams. Teams as large as 50 can complete these kinds of standups in under 15 minutes, a rate not feasible using the Scrum standup format.

Retrospectives or After Meetings

Many Kanban teams also engage in what’s known as an After Meeting, an informal gathering of team members who are collaborating on their own projects.

Anderson reports that this ceremony “emerged as spontaneous behavior because team members wanted to discuss something on their minds: perhaps a blocking issue, perhaps a technical design or architecture issue, but more often, a process-related issue.” As a result, After Meetings tend to be fertile ground for ideas to improve processes and generate innovations.

Experiments

Once you’ve determined elements to improve about your marketing processes, it’s time to test ideas. That means well-structured experiments. Often, teams simply try making a particular change for a while and then decide whether to keep it based on vibes. But with marketing in Kanban, you really want to make data-driven decisions.

That requires brushing up on experimental design and using regular marketing data like ROAS or CTRs as well as Agile metrics like lead time (more on those below). Your experiments should begin with baseline data, have a specific goal, last a predetermined amount of time, and focus on testing one variable at a time. This enables you to make real improvements that add up over time.

Visualizing Flow with Your Kanban Board

The Kanban board is a core element of the Kanban framework. The board contains columns, and each one symbolizes a stage of the work process (e.g. To Do, Doing, Done). The cards in the columns show the progress of each task; the board helps the team to visualize the workflow and commit to the right amount of work. 

The first rule of your first Kanban board is that it reflects reality rather than the official or ideal process for completing work on your marketing team.

Your first task is to identify the start and end points for your team. Where do you take over complete control of work, and where do you hand it off to another team or department? These mark the beginning and end of your workflow visualization.

Next, fill in what happens on the team between those two points.

One way to visualize how work makes its way through the team.

Think of any significant gates or gatekeepers in your workflow -- such as approvals, reviews, handoffs from one person to another, or releases out into the world -- and use those to define the columns of your board. Another approach is to think of parts of your workflow that have limits as to how many tasks can be in the same stage at the same time before your effectiveness in getting them all done begins to degrade.

At its simplest, a marketing Kanban board can start with five columns: To Do, Create, Review, Test, and Done.

A content team might start with one like this:

Creating Your First Kanban Board

You may find it useful to sketch the flow organically, without trying to fit it into the vertical column view, before translating it into this format.

The first few weeks are likely to see lots of changes to your board layout, so don’t stress about getting it perfect the first time. You're free to create as many columns as you need and experiment with the visualization. Use a format that can easily be changed, such as dry-erase markers and sticky notes on a whiteboard.

Once you’re confident that the flow reflects your team’s flow, you can create a more permanent version with tape or Kanban software.

Depending on the type of work that your team typically does, columns just for work that has left one state and is waiting to be pulled into the next may be useful. Known as buffers, these columns can help some teams visualize bottlenecks.

This sample content marketing board, for example, includes columns for content that is ready to be reviewed and ready to be published.

When first setting up your Kanban board, don’t be too restrictive with the WIP limits you place on each column; make them a little higher than you need. Your workflow will be plagued by variability, waste, and bottlenecks early on, and you don’t want those problems to interfere with the introduction of a pull-based mentality.

The Kanban board is great for facilitating workflow transparency and for applying positive reinforcement. As opportunities for improvement become clear, you can reduce WIP limits and add buffers accordingly.

Key Metrics in Kanban

When using Kanban in marketing, there are a few key Agile metrics you’ll want to employ to track how well your team is executing its work. They can be calculated manually, but ideally, you’ll use Kanban software that will track them for you automatically.

Cycle Time

This marketing Kanban metric is all about estimating how long work takes to get done. Importantly, that doesn’t mean how much time you actively spend working on it, but the gap between when work begins and when it completes. So to calculate it you take the day the task was finished, subtract the date at which work began, and add 1 to account for tasks that are completed within one day.

Cycle time helps you keep track of how well work is flowing through your Kanban board. If it begins to increase, you may need to address a bottleneck or try limiting your WIP further.

Throughput

This one is nice and easy. Your throughput is the number of cards completed in a set period. That might be a week, a two-week sprint, or even a month depending on how your work tends to function. Of course, this metric assumes tasks are relatively equal, but more on that in a moment.

Efficiency

This is perhaps the most important metric for marketing in Kanban. Efficiency is the ratio between the time tasks spent being worked on and waiting to be worked on. If you have tons of work in progress that sits around waiting to be worked on, you’re going to have a poor efficiency score. In other words, this metric is a good indicator of whether you need to cap your WIP.

The Question of Task Size

In a perfect world, every task your team has will be represented by a card and be equal. This would make all these metrics extra easy to calculate and use. But that’s sadly not the world we marketers live in. So what should you do?

One approach is just to ignore task size and assume that they will average out. Some bigger tasks will skew your metrics one way, but smaller tasks will balance them and skew the other way. Some Kanban tools will offer ways to estimate the size of cards and factor that into the calculation of metrics. In the end though, this isn’t a huge deal for most teams and your metrics will still be able to give you a general idea of how you’re doing.

7 Steps for Succeeding With Kanban

If you choose Kanban as your first Agile marketing method, keep in mind that the “essence of starting with Kanban is to change as little as possible,” and that you want to map your existing workflow and processes before you begin the ongoing improvement efforts.

This recipe for success comes from David Anderson, who crafted it based on his experience as a new manager adopting an existing team. For marketing teams looking to adopt this methodology, these steps serve you equally well:

1. Find the Right Тool

While some teams prefer working with a physical board for Kanban in marketing, they are certainly a minority. Digital Kanban boards are amazingly effective at ensuring everyone can easily work together no matter where they are. As mentioned, some Kanban tools also help you track Agile metrics. Take some time to explore here, there are excellent free and paid options available.

2. Focus on Quality 

Anderson focused on this step first to cut down on the amount of time a development team spends on dealing with software defects; marketers would do well to start here too. Without a commitment to producing the highest possible quality of marketing work, it doesn’t really matter if you can enhance your productivity. After all, if you stopped caring about quality you could surely put out far more work!

3. Reduce Work-in-Progress 

There is a direct correlation between a lower WIP limit and an increase in quality, so this second step must be implemented along with, or immediately after, Step 1. Reducing the amount of work that the team and its members do at any given time lowers the time it takes to complete work and improves its quality. Keep your WIP as low as possible. Period. That said, finding the right WIP limit for your team takes some trial and error. Use the metrics we listed above to find what works for your team.

4. Deliver Often

Frequent releases of content, email, social media posts, and pretty much any other marketing collateral that you can think of builds trust with audiences and stakeholders. They also increase the number of learning opportunities for your Agile team. If you find your team is delaying work to get it perfect, you might need to try and implement a bit of a culture shift around that.

5. Balance Demand Against Throughput 

In this step, you’re focused on finding a rate for accepting new work into the marketing Backlog that corresponds with the rate you can deliver high-quality marketing work. This is effectively limiting the WIP for your Backlog, and it means that discussions about priorities and commitments to completing new work can happen only after some work has been released. 

This balance produces some slack in the team’s capacity; only those working in the bottleneck areas are constantly busy, and even they must not be given cause to feel overwhelmed. Slack is powerful, because it enables team members to focus on doing their jobs with precision and quality and gives them time to apply themselves to improving the team and its workflow. 

This step can be difficult, because we tend to want to optimize our workflow to use up everyone’s available time; but Kanban’s continuous improvement demands a system with some slack, which can only be achieved by balancing demand against throughput. At the end of the day, if you’re working at 100% capacity all the time, you’re going to get burned out and won’t be able to quickly adapt or adjust to incoming crises or opportunities.

6. Prioritize 

When you have no predictability in your team, prioritization doesn’t matter much, which is why it’s down here at Step 5. But when high-quality work is going out steadily and the team has some slack in their days, management can begin to ensure that the most valuable work is being done. Additionally, for marketing teams that lack political capital in an organization, building up confidence by showing an improved workflow may need to precede any attempt to change strategy or priorities.  

7. Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability 

Variability is undesirable because it results in more WIP and longer release cycles. But understanding its effects and how to reduce it are advanced and difficult topics. When you’ve reached a high level of Agile maturity, you can tackle this final step by experimenting with your existing process policies.

Kanban for Marketing FAQs

What Is Kanban Marketing?

Kanban marketing is the application of the Kanban system for marketers. This involves using cards to represent tasks that move across a Kanban board with columns representing phases of work. In Kanban, limiting your work in progress and optimizing your processes enables teams to process work quickly and efficiently.

What Are the 5 Rules of Kanban?

The 5 rules (AKA 5 principles) of Kanban are:

• Visualize Workflow
• Limit Work-in-Progress
• Measure and Manage Flow
• Make Process Policies Explicit
• Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities

What Are the 4 Pillars of Kanban?

Another way to think about Kanban is via 4 pillars: visualizing working, optimizing the flow of work, managing your Work In Progress (WIP), and continuously improving.

What Is the Basic Kanban Formula?

At its most basic, Kanban is all about using the 4 pillars of Kanban (visualizing working, optimizing the flow of work, managing your Work In Progress (WIP), and continuously improving) to optimize your team’s ability to deliver meaningful work.

Is Kanban Lean or Agile?

Both! Kanban is a methodology that can fit neatly within either Lean or Agile ways of working. It may need to be modified slightly to fit one or the other, but the basics apply to both just as well.

Discovering the Agile System That’s Right For Your Team

Teams who don’t take well to the rigidity of Scrum may find freedom in a Kanban system, while those who need additional insulation from upper management may need the buffer of a Scrum master and Product Owner.

For teams completely unused to Аgile methodologies, the ritual and constancy of Scrum may offer them a sense of security. Kanban is more often adopted when Scrum begins to break down, and so may be a good second iteration of Agile marketing for some teams. In either case, Agile marketing training is useful to develop a foundation in Agile fundamentals you can then use to choose the right methodology.

The important thing is not to try and force your marketing team into a system that isn’t right for them. You can't assume that just because another team that does BFSI marketing like you uses Kanban that it's ideal for your needs as well.

Agile is about constant improvement, and that goes for your processes as well as your products. Whether you're embarking on something as big as an Agile transformation or just implementing Kanban for the first time, you'll never be 100% "finished."