By Ross Robinson, Director of Transformation at Optima Partners
Agile promised marketing teams speed, empowerment, and flexibility. And for a while, it delivered. Siloes were challenged, teams felt energised, and “ways of working” shot to the top of the transformation agenda.
But over time, something changed.
Agile became the default answer to almost every operational problem. Struggling to keep up with campaign volume? Go agile. Can’t get content out the door fast enough? More sprints. Teams working in siloes? Squads and stand-ups will sort it.
The result? Many marketing teams are now caught in a cycle of chronic reactivity – constantly sprinting, constantly shifting, constantly busy – but unable to scale. Everything is urgent. Everyone is working hard. But few are confident that what they’re doing is really moving the dial.
And it’s not for lack of effort.
The real problem is this: the system beneath the sprint is broken.
Most marketing and customer engagement teams today are trying to deliver personalised, real-time experiences across 5, 10, even 15 channels. They’re expected to orchestrate journeys, activate decisioning engines, automate content, deploy GenAI tools, integrate DAMs, track performance – and do it all faster than ever before.
But they’re still working with:
- Fragmented and clunky workflows
- Overlapping roles and politics
- Legacy content operations
- Disconnected platforms
- And rituals borrowed from agile software teams, applied to deeply un-engineered environments
Agile in these conditions doesn’t create clarity. It creates speed without direction.
That’s where engineering comes in.
Not in the technical sense. But in the design sense – systems thinking, structured workflows, well-defined roles, modular architecture, content supply chains built for reuse and automation, operating models with governance baked in.
The kind of precision that lets teams move fast because they’re clear. Not instead of being clear.
At Optima, agility is a core part of how we help clients deliver meaningful change. We’re proud to have some of the best agile practitioners in the game – Gez Smith, Natalie McLellan & Katerina Triantos among them – working inside complex organisations to unlock pace, purpose, and collaboration.
And we’re not alone in this view. Thinkers like Dr Graham Hill have long made the case that real marketing transformation isn’t about adopting agile rituals – it’s about building outcome-oriented systems from the ground up. Marketing, in his words, needs to be architected as much as it’s delivered.
Agile, as Graham often reminds us, is the delivery mechanism – but without the right system design behind it, all you’re doing is delivering dysfunction, faster.
Don’t get me wrong – we believe agile ways of working are essential – but only when they’re underpinned by engineered systems that can support them at scale. Agile is brilliant at accelerating delivery. But it assumes you’ve already designed what’s worth delivering. And in too many organisations, that design never happens. We confuse movement with momentum. We celebrate shipping over solving. We measure velocity, not value.
If personalisation is the goal – engineered marketing and how it operates is the foundation.
That means building a content supply chain that can flex across channels without duplicating effort. It means aligning creative, data, and tech teams around a single source of operational truth. It means treating marketing like a system – not just a series of projects.
And yes, it means applying the right kind of agile – the kind that empowers small teams to thrive within a well-designed structure. Not the kind that papers over structural cracks with post-it notes and productivity hacks.
Agile isn’t broken. But it’s only half the equation… to unlock the real value of decisioning, AI, and scalable content, we need to engineer our way there.
The future of marketing and customer engagement won’t be won by the team that sprints the fastest. It’ll be won by the team that engineers the right system.
Contact Optima Partners today to discuss further.
