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Releasing - who should communicate with marketing?

Last post 05:17 am January 25, 2016 by Tjeerd Raijmakers
4 replies
05:17 am January 8, 2016

Currently we are planning to release a patch, but there is a discussion within our team.

Idea 1:
The PO signals: I want that patched. The dev team emails marketing: we want to release functionality X on date Y, could you please send an email to our customers about the downtime?

Idea 2:
The PO signals: I want that patched, he emails marketing: we want to release functionality X on date Y, could you please send an email to our customers about the downtime?

Both could work, just curious to hear what fits best with Scrum's ideaology.

About our organization: small, informal, well suited to Scrum. We have lunch at the same table as marketing, they work in the cubicles next to us.


08:42 am January 10, 2016

One of the main ideas of Scrum, and agile in general, is to make things transparent and allow self-service to all stakeholders.

In practical terms this could probably mean having a wiki page updated with the details of each patch and have the marketing team subscribe to these updates.

Having said that, nothing can replace a real face to face interaction, so someone should go and talk to the marketing team about the patch, and it could either be a developer or a PO or maybe someone from the marketing team will initiate the discussion, it really doesn't matter as the team should self-organize when dealing with such action items (for example - decide on a Daily Scrum who is going to talk to the Marketing team), the important things is to make sure they DO self-organize :)


11:53 am January 10, 2016

Since the Product Owner is accountable for the release of value, and for managing product stakeholder relationships, which of the ideas 1 and 2 you have suggested would seem to be more appropriate?


10:20 pm January 11, 2016

I would opt for idea # 2. The PO should be communicating with stakeholders and coordinating contact actions based on communication with the Scrum Team.


05:17 am January 25, 2016

#2 Letting the PO/PM do the coordination work seems the way to go in traditional companies, however I lean towards #1:

As I understand it, the Dev team* should have the capabilities and is responsible for making and releasing the software. Making sure users are informed beforehand, to me, is a part of releasing, so the dev team should make sure it gets done.

While marketing is also a stakeholder (and should know what functionality is coming up, and accept it), in this case they need to do a task (send an email about downtime and new functionality), I would say they are a 'subcontractor' in this case (and arguably should be part of the dev team).

Boris, I really like your self-service idea, and the pragmatic attitude of your post. Just make sure it gets done!


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