Any marketing team knows the pain of constant context-switching. New priorities pop up, interrupting the people doing the actual work, and everything grinds to a halt. The single best thing you can do for your team's productivity is to protect them from these interruptions.

Of course, there are exceptions. We think of them as either "leprechauns" (rare opportunities you have to jump on now) or "fires" (urgent issues that need immediate attention to protect your reputation). Everything else, however, should go through a prioritization process that doesn't derail the individual contributors.

For most marketing teams, the fluid nature of Kanban is a natural starting point. But to really find what works, it’s worth exploring a couple of powerful project management methodologies to see how they can bring some much-needed agility to your marketing efforts.

Getting Started with Scrum

Jeff Sutherland, one of the co-creators of Scrum, put it bluntly: "Multitasking Makes You Stupid." It makes you slower and worse at everything you’re trying to do. Scrum is a system designed to combat this. It’s a project management framework built for complex problems where requirements are always changing—sound familiar, marketers? While it was born in the software world, a few adjustments make it perfect for managing marketing projects.

The Basics of the Scrum Cycle

The process kicks off with a backlog, which is essentially a prioritized to-do list. These are deliverables requested by stakeholders (like management or sales) or ideas the marketing team comes up with to hit its goals. In traditional Scrum, these are written as "user stories" to keep the focus on the audience: Who are we building this for? What do they need? Why does it matter to them?

Someone has to manage this list, and that person is the marketing owner. They represent the voice of the customer, ensuring every task delivers real value. If you don't have a dedicated person, the whole team shares this responsibility.

The team then holds a Sprint planning meeting to review the backlog and decide what they can realistically accomplish in the upcoming cycle, known as a Sprint. This selection of tasks becomes the Sprint backlog. Sprints are fixed periods, usually one to four weeks, where the team focuses solely on the work in their Sprint backlog. Starting with two-week Sprints is a common practice.

Each Sprint can have an organizing theme, or Sprint goal, which helps focus the team's efforts on a specific business priority, project, or customer need. This prevents Sprints from becoming just a random collection of tasks.

To keep things on track, the team has a short, daily stand-up meeting called the daily Scrum. Each person answers three simple questions:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• Are there any roadblocks in my way?

The goal isn't to solve problems in the meeting itself. The scrum master, who facilitates the process, addresses obstacles afterward, allowing the rest of the team to get back to work.

At the end of the Sprint, the team presents its completed work to stakeholders in a Sprint review. This is a crucial feedback loop that builds trust and transparency. Following that, the team holds a Sprint retrospective to discuss their process—what went well, what didn't, and how they can improve for the next Sprint.

To sum it up:

• Four Key Events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective.
• Three Key Roles: Marketing Owner, Scrum Master, Team Members.
• Key Tools: Marketing Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and a Burndown Chart (a visual that shows work progressing over time).

Making Scrum Work for Marketing

Classic Scrum needs a few tweaks for a marketing environment. This is especially true for anyone running a freelance business where the nature of the work is different from software development.

Rethinking the Marketing Backlog

While developers often choose one way to solve a user's problem, marketers usually tackle it from multiple angles. To address a user's need for information, we might create a blog post, a video, and a webinar.

Because of this, I recommend making the backlog about delivery increments and tasks, not user stories. A delivery increment is a tangible marketing deliverable: a blog post, a video, a webpage. If a project is too big for one Sprint (like writing an "Ultimate Guide"), you break it down into smaller increments, like delivering the introduction and first chapter in one Sprint. These larger projects are often called epics.

Writing User Stories for Marketers

Even though they aren't the core unit of work, user stories are still vital for keeping the customer at the center of your efforts. I suggest a slightly different format for marketers:

As a [role or persona], I want to [task to be done or need to be fulfilled], so that I can [benefit of accomplishing the task].

This structure forces you to think in terms of customer needs and benefits. For example, a weak user story is: "As a customer, I want a discount." A much stronger one is: "As a father of young children, I want to save money on a theme park visit so I can be a hero to my kids." The difference is the focus on the emotional benefit.

Key Roles: Scrum Master and Marketing Owner

The scrum master is the facilitator and protector of the team's process. They aren't a traditional manager; their job is to remove roadblocks, coach the team on Scrum principles, and organize the meetings. This is a great skill set for anyone in a project management side hustle.

The marketing owner understands the customer and business goals deeply. They set priorities and clarify what needs to be done. It's tough for one person to do both roles, as the scrum master is tactical and detail-oriented, while the marketing owner is strategic and big-picture focused. If you can't justify a dedicated scrum master, you might combine the roles or rotate the responsibility among team members.

The Simpler Alternative: Kanban

For some teams, especially those just starting a side business while employed, Scrum can feel a bit disruptive. Kanban offers a more gradual approach. Its core principles are to "Start with what you do now" and "Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change."

Kanban, which means "a card you can see," is a visual system for managing work. The simplest Kanban board has three columns: To Do, Doing, and Done. As work progresses, cards representing tasks move from left to right.

This system is incredibly flexible. A content marketing team might have columns for Outlining, Drafting, Editing, and Review. You can use different colored cards for different types of work (blog posts, videos) and add icons for priority or due dates.

Core Kanban Practices

1. Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits: This is Kanban's superpower. By limiting how many tasks can be in any single column (or assigned to a single person), you force the team to focus on finishing work before starting new things. It immediately exposes bottlenecks—like a pile-up in the "Review" column waiting on a busy manager. This is a game-changer for side hustle project managers trying to avoid burnout.
2. A Pull System: Instead of managers "pushing" work onto team members, team members "pull" the next task from the "To Do" column when they have capacity. This gives the team more control and creates a smoother, more predictable workflow.
3. Explicit Process Policies: Kanban encourages you to write down the unstated rules for how work gets done. What defines a task as "done" so it can move to the next column? What's the service-level agreement (SLA) for a legal review? Making these policies visible improves communication, quality, and consistency.

Finding the Sweet Spot with Scrumban

You don't have to choose one or the other. Many teams find success with Scrumban, a hybrid approach that blends the best of both worlds. It takes the structure of Scrum (like daily standups and retrospectives) and combines it with the flexibility and flow of Kanban (like WIP limits and a pull system).

Scrumban is less about rigid Sprints and more about just-in-time planning. Instead of a long planning meeting, the team might have a quick 30-minute meeting each week to pull a set number of high-priority tasks into a "Ready" queue. Team members then pull from that queue as they finish their current work.

This approach is perfect for teams that need some structure but also have to deal with a steady stream of unplanned work. It helps you measure and improve your flow—the speed at which work moves from start to finish—using tools like cumulative flow diagrams instead of Scrum's burndown charts.

Ultimately, whether you choose Scrum, Kanban, or Scrumban, the goal is the same: to create a system that protects your team from chaos, helps you focus on what matters, and allows you to deliver value consistently. For anyone running a freelance business or managing a marketing team, finding the right workflow isn't just an operational detail—it's the key to sustainable success.