Why Marketing Teams Need Retrospectives Too (And How to Run Them)
"Do more with less" has become a sort of half-hearted rallying cry for marketing teams. But whether you were one of the teams whose budget fell by about 30% in 2024 or not, you need to know the impact your campaigns are having. That requires strong self-awareness and a commitment to consistently improving the way you work.
That’s where the retrospective comes in.
Typically used by product teams, retrospectives can be a huge asset for marketers, too. Here’s your primer on running retrospectives in marketing.
In this article, we’ll tackle the following topics:
What is a retrospective?
A retrospective is a structured session that brings a team together to review their performance over a past period in hopes of making improvements for the future.
'A retrospective is a chance for a team to reflect and learn from the past within a structured meeting. The main aim is to inspect the situation and adapt to the reality.'
- Aino Vonge Corry, Retrospectives Antipatterns
There are tons of ways to actually run a retrospective, from the Genie in a Bottle model to The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.
No matter which format you use, you’ll usually be answering these questions:
“What did we do well?”
“What didn’t we do so well?”
“How can we improve?”
While marketing teams usually meet semi-regularly to review the performance of specific campaigns or marketing channels, they rarely run retrospectives the way a product team might.
Who usually runs retrospectives?
Agile teams usually trust one of two people to run retrospectives:
The Scrum Master, who also actively contributes to the success of all other Scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily scrums, and sprint reviews for agile teams.
The project lead, who’s also responsible for managing the project and ensuring important work gets done.
Scum Masters usually have the most experience running retrospectives, but not all teams have access to them. That’s why the project lead is often responsible for running a retrospective. In marketing, you could have whoever’s in charge of a specific campaign or project manage your retrospective. You could also rely on a marketing manager for this.
But you don’t have to be one of these leaders to run a retrospective. If you care about helping your team improve, run the idea of having retrospectives by your manager. You can even lead them yourself, especially if you use a dedicated tool like Neatro to do the heavy lifting.
Why marketing teams need retrospectives
Retrospectives aren’t just for product teams, and even marketers could benefit from a little bit more agility. Here are just a few reasons why, and how retrospectives can help.
Marketers aren’t aligned
From the outside looking in, a marketing team can look like a single, coordinated unit. They’re all doing the same kind of work, right?
Marketers know better.
Between product marketers, marketing copywriters, partner marketers, content marketers, social media managers, and more, there are tons of marketing roles and opportunities for misunderstandings.
“The marketing team” is usually split up into sub-teams, like product marketing, content, and social media management. These sub-teams might never get together to discuss common goals, meaning there’s a lot of doubled-up work and inefficiency.
Retrospectives keep the team aligned
Think of a retrospective as part check-in and part coaching session. The marketing team can get together, bring up any issues they've run into, and decide which ones they need to tackle together. How's that for alignment?
Monthly reviews aren’t cutting it
Most marketing teams have some kind of meeting that involves looking back over how their campaigns performed. Usually, it's some sort of monthly review and doesn't involve the entire team. You might just have a few high-level managers discussing reports and numbers, with the occasional subject matter expert or two. The people doing the front-line work on these campaigns are rarely in these meetings.
Monthly reviews and similar meetings often have a strong focus on marketing metrics and looking for ways to improve them. They rarely cover internal processes, meaning it's tough to find easy ways to improve how the team works.
Retrospectives can be done more frequently
Because monthly reviews and similar meetings typically focus on metrics and numbers, there's rarely much of a need to meet more often. With a retrospective, the goal is to find opportunities for continuous improvement within the team. Even a single workweek can bring up tons of these. Problems get spotted earlier, but improvements are made sooner, too.
Few marketing teams have a culture of constant improvement
Marketers tend to focus on improving metrics rather than the way they work. They’ll talk about 3x-ing their website traffic or doubling their conversion rates but rarely look at the actions and processes behind these results.
Some marketing leaders will actively look for knowledge they can use to improve how their teams do things, but implementing it usually happens in one big burst. Finding opportunities for small, continuous improvement isn’t the norm.
Retrospectives make improvement a priority
The goal of a retrospective is to find room for improvement in just about everything a team does. And because they’re done regularly, there’s a constant urge to do better every single time. Nothing lights a fire under your team more than two retrospectives in a row highlighting the exact same problems with no improvement.
Too many voices
Like product teams, marketers have to manage multiple stakeholders with every campaign. Team leads, department heads, and even the CEO might have a voice in a marketing initiative. When you have all these stakeholders involved, it can be tough to move forward with a unified vision.
Imagine a marketing review with the CEO and multiple leaders in attendance, each with their own goals and understanding of what marketing should accomplish. How can you get a clear understanding of what you’ve done and what you need to do with that many voices in the room?
Retrospectives limit stakeholder involvement
Retrospectives are VIP events instead of an open invitation. To keep sessions focused, you'll usually just have your team and a facilitator join in, meaning those multiple stakeholders pulling your project in multiple directions won't be there. You can focus on the team’s feedback, and not sift through everything other stakeholders have to say.
Scope creep kills projects
Scope creep describes the tendency for a project’s requirements to grow over time. You start out building an email campaign for users with expired free trials, and next thing you know you're creating emails, social posts, and videos for current users, too. That’s scope creep, and it’s frustrating.
Scope creep often happens when someone in charge looks at a project and thinks something like “Well we’re already doing X, might as well do Y, too.” Marketing teams rarely have systems in place to deal with scope creep proactively.
Retrospectives nip scope creep in the bud
It's so easy to fall into the scope creep trap that it almost happens by default. Regular retrospectives allow the team to check in on a project's progress, highlight issues they've noticed, and focus on solving the issues and improving together. Requests for extra deliverables or growing requirements get spotted earlier and dealt with.
When can a marketing team run a retrospective?
So you know the impact a retrospective can have on your marketing projects. You know they need to happen regularly. But just how regularly?
After a sprint
Agile product teams work in sprints, which are two-week-long blocks of work. They plan the work they’re going to get done ahead of those two weeks and cap off each sprint with a retrospective. Having a retrospective every few weeks is a great way to inject some agility into your marketing teams.
Once a quarter
Having retrospectives once a quarter might not allow you to pick up on issues as quickly, but it does have one significant advantage: you can time them with the rest of the organization’s reporting. That gives the team the ability to look back on their work within the context of what the rest of the organization achieved that quarter.
After a campaign
If you want to turn every marketing campaign into a learning opportunity, have a retrospective when it's done. Your team will get incrementally better with every campaign, which will lead to outsized results by the end of the year.
After a significant incident
When a serious issue comes up—like a key team member leaving or a project going wrong—a retrospective can help you figure out what happened. Encourage your teams to look back farther than the incident itself and you might be surprised with what you learn, especially with a dedicated incident investigation template.
During an important project (as needed)
High-value projects might benefit from their own retrospectives, at a cadence that allows the team to make continuous adjustments and keep the project on track. You might have to change this cadence—and the retrospective format you use—for each project, but it’ll help you achieve a lot more.
At the start of an important project
For those big projects that’ll move the needle, you might want to flip the retrospective on its head. Instead of reflecting on the past, you project into the future with a futurespective. That way, you can anticipate potential problems and find opportunities your team can capitalize on to reach their objective.
Ready to implement retrospectives? Try Neatro!
Neatro is an agile retrospective platform built for teams who are passionate about continuous improvement. It’s got built-in templates so even someone who’s never run a retrospective can hit the ground running and bring a team together for their first retrospective. Focus on what matters and let Neatro do the heavy lifting.
Try Neatro for free or get a personalized demo from Andy, Neatro’s co-founder.