Lessons Learned from Managing a Marketing Team

This winter I had the opportunity to lead a team of 3 people for the first time. I continuously learned and grew my expertise during this process and gained a lot of insight on how to be a good team lead and a product owner. I will break my experience into two categories: Leading a team in running a marketing campaign, and leading a team in using the Agile process.

Leading a Team in Running a Marketing Campaign

During my time as Product Owner, I led a Spotify Ad campaign using Spotify Ad Studio. Our client wanted to promote their website managing service and increase engagement and awareness of their SitePilot website. This was my first time using Spotify Ad Studio so I learned along with my squad.
 

Making ads on a programmatic platform like Ad Studio has brought a couple challenges and benefits. A big challenge was not having communication with a representative from Spotify. This slowed down everyone’s execution process because when our ad scripts were finalized, our clients name was mispronounced and instead of communicating with a representative and fixing the mistake quickly, we had to input a request and wait a couple days for the system to fix the mistake.
 

As a team lead, I let my team get hands-on experience using the software as I guided them through the process. In a couple instances, we were all confused and I needed to ask other PM’s for clarification. Understanding how to maximize our reach was challenging for my group and I did not know a clear cut way to do so. Being communicative with other teams helped my group succeed in areas that were confusing to us. 

Leading a Team in using the Agile process

Throughout my time as Product Manager I learned the basics of Agile Scrum and practiced it by implementing Sprint cycles, lean meetings, and Kanbans. Our sprint cycles were every two weeks and we created a backlog at the beginning of each sprint using sticky notes. On top of that, every time our team met, be it online or in person, we did standup meetings where we all took turns explaining what we did previously, what we’re doing now, and addressing any blockers. This was highly beneficial for me as a team lead because I was able to see where we were in the sprint cycle and also understand and help people with what's blocking them from completing tasks.

 A mistake that I made but learned from was when my team wasn't able to finish everything we needed to do in that sprint, instead of adding the incomplete tasks to the next sprint, I would extend that sprint until we were able to accomplish all the tasks in our backlog. There was a gap in my knowledge of sprint cycles which affected the last 2 sprints but the good thing is that I learned from my mistake and that my group was understanding and helped power through the last week.      

I learned a lot while managing a Marketing team. I grew my knowledge of Agile and also led a group of amazing Content Creators for the first time. It was a great experience and really taught me how to be a good team lead. It is one thing to read and conceptualize, and its another to be able to practice it in the real world. 

Here is an example of a product we just made on our last sprint: https://cbe.wwu.edu/highlighting-black-history-month-rebecca-drew