Hannah Bink's guest appearances

Hannah Bink

Marketing Agility Podcast

Women in Agile

Jason Lee

David Karp

David Meerman Scott

Mike Volpe

Scott Wilder

Brian Singer

Jon Miller

David Quinn

Justin Zimmerman

Bill Cushard

Dan Marks

Elissa Fink

Denise Grey

Mathew Sweezey

Mahesh Singh

OwlTail

 This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (https://agilemarketingalliance.com/). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches.   TranscriptWelcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah. Hannah Bink Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much. Melissa So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale. Hannah Bink I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool. Melissa Tell me more. Hannah Bink So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility. Hannah Bink They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust. Hannah Bink If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market. Melissa So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here? Hannah Bink Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution. Melissa Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis. Hannah Bink Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore. Melissa (30:27.526)Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that? Hannah Bink Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information. Hannah Bink What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really. Melissa Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches? Hannah Bink So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise.  And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster. Melissa Well, it reminds me of something we talked about in the first part of our conversation where we were talking about the shift in participatory budgeting being from one where somebody pitches something. You know, you’re in sell mode. You know, I think we should do this initiative and I think it should be funded and this is how we should sell the, or set the budget. And the same thing with these giant presentations, it’s like, you’re in sell mode. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve invested a lot in research. I’ve done pretty slides and I’ll be rejected if you don’t accept my idea. We’re shifting that into a conversation. The conversation goes more like, hey, I have an idea, I have an hypothesis. Here’s what I’m expecting to happen. We could probably have a whole other conversation about leading indicators and guardrails. But the idea here is that we’re in an ongoing conversation around ideas and anything can happen at any time to say, we need to fund this more or less. And I feel like therein lies the power of a lean business case. Hannah Bink Absolutely. And I have to say, I feel like my executive team remembers more and they digest more because it’s iterative, one, so they’re on this journey, they’re part of this conversation as we’re going. But also when we’re talking about at scale, agile at scale, these executives have 400 things bouncing around their heads at all times. So the value of getting to the point, if you’re trying to affect change inside an organization, cannot be understated. And it gives you a tool to do that. Melissa It gives you a tool and it gives you a tool to remain flexible so that it doesn’t feel like careers are on the line. You know, like, oh, my thing, this case that I pitched didn’t work. That’s OK. It allows more room for failure, too. Hannah Bink Absolutely. Melissa So Hannah, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve got one last question for you that’s been burning on my mind, which is this whole notion of lean business cases and participatory budgeting, especially in SAFe, applies to technology portfolios, which I think are very product-centric. And I feel like marketing views things differently. We don’t necessarily have these product portfolios that they do in technology. Melissa So how do you think these practices need to be adapted for use in marketing? Hannah Bink So at the end of the day, it’s back to the principles, right? We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as… We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as we both well know, there’s a lot of technology in marketing that can easily be your first step to using Lean Business Case as you’re trying to adapt it in your organization. Hannah Bink I’ve actually done that recently. I’m trying to get some more investment in our website. I’d like to translate it into seven languages. So I’m working on the lean business case as part of safe lean portfolio management approach, and I’ve found it’s really, really helpful. There’s a, there’s a standard step-by-step process that allows me that exploration time to better understand the business impact. What am I actually proposing here? And the approach of having a portfolio Kanban offers me that visibility into all of the strategic investments my company is making. To understand one, as someone already discussed this, that would be wonderful. Two, what are the other strategic investments our company is making? And as a marketer, how did those investments affect what we do every day? And it just gives me more context to understand when my leadership comes back to me and says, we’re a little overwhelmed on WIP here. I have that level of visibility to understand fully the impact of what I’m bringing to the business. But in marketing, whether it’s technology or maybe we’re investing in a new research area, or maybe we’re investing in a new channel mix or event strategy. There’s a lot of high cost things that we do on a day-to-day basis, or we’re thinking about doing. It just, it gives you that tool once again, where you can explore safely with that visibility and that iterative approach that Agile is truly core to the way Agile operates every day. Melissa So Hannah, I feel like you and I have been talking a little bit, geeking out on lean business cases and participatory budgeting. And I’m thinking about some of our listeners who might be brand new to Agile. And I could see this feeling a little bit overwhelming. So for those of you who are at the end of this show and feeling like, “oh my gosh, I could never do that,” what are a couple of first steps that people could take in this direction without having to jump all the way into the deep end? Hannah Bink Choose something that is key to your leadership, but they’re a little stuck on. Maybe you could introduce one of these activities, maybe both of these activities as a way to start thinking about investment differently. I’ll give you an example. Maybe your CMO is thinking about targeting a new segment. Hannah Bink Well, a new segment targeting strategy takes a lot of investment, right? There might be systems that have to be stood up. There might be education that needs to happen. You might have to hire new sales reps. Who knows? Starting to break down some of those long-term or strategic things that are still a little murky and using this as a pilot could be a really effective way to do that. Hannah Bink Another approach is if you find yourself as a marketing organization truly overwhelmed with all the competing priorities coming your way, not that would ever happen in any company, this might be a tool to help focus the new requests that are coming in, the new investment proposals that are coming in, or the new staffing strategies, or the new product investments that are coming in as a way to either bring the customer closer or get a clearer view of what the proposer is actually pitching you. Just a few ways to pilot it early and learn. Melissa Yeah, I’m hearing you really articulate the Agile principles, right? Which is break things down, experiment, adapt and learn, and apply that to this as well. You know, pick a starting point and continue to iterate. So, you know, Hannah, you’re just a wealth of knowledge around this. If people are interested in connecting with you, how can you be reached? Hannah Bink I am available on the interwebs on LinkedIn under Hannah Howard Bink. They can also reach me through Scaled Agile. I love a good email and I usually do respond. Melissa Sounds great. I appreciate your being here with us today.

<blockquote> This is part two of the conversation between Hannah Bink, Senior Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile and Melissa Reeve of the Agile Marketing Alliance (<a href="https://agilemarketingalliance.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://agilemarketingalliance.com/</a>). They continue to explore participatory budgeting and Lean portfolio management approaches. </blockquote> TranscriptWelcome to the Marketing Agility Podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of Agile Marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. We have the pleasure of welcoming back Hannah Bink, who is the Senior Director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile. And Hannah shared her wisdom with us on part one of this conversation around participatory budgeting and lean business cases. She has over 15 years experience in B2B marketing, most recently with Scaled Agile, although she has a background in telecommunications and health care sectors. We are so excited to have you back on the show, Hannah. Hannah Bink Oh, I’m so excited to be back. Thank you so much. Melissa So we left off and we were talking about participatory budgeting. We talked about the history of it, how it was rooted in the public sector. We started to dive into some examples of how you’ve used it. So if anybody wants to get that background, be sure and go back to episode one or part one. And now let’s jump in and talk about what makes participatory budgeting so effective when implementing Agilent Scale. Hannah Bink I actually think participatory budgeting works especially well in large organizations where you’re trying to scale agile ways of working such as SAFe and need to apply lean principles to long-term investments. It’s really where I think participatory budgeting is an absolutely critical tool. Melissa Tell me more. Hannah Bink So there’s a few things that it allows large organizations to do that is frankly very, very difficult, especially when those organizations are trying to implement something like lean portfolio management. It allows you to align your priorities. It allows for empowerment and ownership, transparency. I’ll just talk about a few of these. Participatory budgeting ensures that budget allocation actually aligns with business priorities, and it needs the teams and stakeholders involved. SAFe emphasizes the alignment of work with business goals and customer value. And by involving those diverse viewpoints, we talked a little bit about this in part one, those diverse viewpoints in the budgeting process. It enables that there’s direct alignment of resources to the highest priority themes, the highest priority initiatives. And this allows decision-making and resources to be just spent better. It also gives people just a sense of ownership. When employees have a voice in budget allocation, they feel a greater sense of responsibility. Hannah Bink They feel more ownership over what comes out of it. And ultimately, that leads to better motivation, better engagement, and honestly, better outcomes. It gives them a chance to see how decisions are made and understand the logic behind them. And then it also feeds into this iterative adaptive approach that is critical to Agile at scale, which is built on iterative and adaptable practices. I think of iterations or sprints, continuous feedback loops. Participatory budgeting aligns with this iterative approach because it allows you to adjust budget allocation. It allows you to adjust to changing markets. Suddenly AI is a big deal. Suddenly cars drive themselves and you have to adjust. Hannah Bink If you’re stuck in these three, five, eight year budget cycles, it’s insane. How do you address a changing market? Participatory budgeting, along with lean portfolio management gives you the tools to adjust faster to the market. Melissa So let’s break that down and try and blow that out and for our listeners, because I’m getting parts of it and I wanna flesh it out. So you are doing this budgetary processing at scale. And so is the idea here that you’ve got a high level group. So there is still a little bit of a hierarchy. You’ve got a higher level group who’s saying, here’s our strategic initiatives. We’ve all aligned from a leadership perspective on what the big buckets are. And then now you take that bucket and you bring it down to another layer of the organization. And you say, okay, here are those big buckets. Now you figure out how to break it down even further. And so you have another layer of participatory budget. Is that the thought process here? Hannah Bink Yeah, so when we’re starting to talk about teams of teams, you’re talking about a hundred or so people. But major brands, the marketing department alone could have thousands of people. We haven’t even gotten into IT and product and sales. They all have an idea for how to take these large multi-year strategies and break that down into things to build, campaigns to run, initiatives to invest in. And there are multiple layers within any organization that have to look at that with more and more granularity. Lean portfolio management allows you to hit that right level of the portfolio that budgets are being allocated based off strategic themes, based off those strategic decisions, but make that feasible, make it understandable for the people doing the work. And ultimately that would get broken down even further into feature backlogs and roadmaps or from a marketing standpoint, we’re talking about campaign investment, maybe event marketing investment, things that align directly to the strategy. So it’s really about connecting strategy to execution. Melissa Absolutely. And the other thing that’s coming to mind to me is, is the frequency really changes depending on the level you’re talking about in the organization. You know, you’re probably not going to be changing your strategic themes more than quarterly. I’m going to just throw that out there because that gets really disruptive. You know, unless there’s something huge that takes place, you know, we all know about AI or COVID or whatever, but in general, you don’t want to be disrupting your teams that much. But if you’re down and you’re executing and you are doing social media and you’re seeing that you need to shift some budget because you’re running experiments and you’re seeing the results of those experiments shift, you should be empowered to shift some budget in collaboration with your colleagues on a pretty quick basis. Hannah Bink Yeah, I experienced that myself. We were running four different ad campaigns. We saw one channel performed an like 17x better than the other three combined. Now, if we were in traditional budget cycles, that budget would have been broken down by channel or maybe, you know, this particular team has to invest here and there, but this idea of iterative approach to budgeting at all layers, all levels of the company allows you to make those decisions that frankly everybody realize are reasonable. But when you’re stuck in these three and five year budget cycles, it’s ridiculous. You can’t adjust and react. I’m so happy I don’t live in that world anymore. Melissa (30:27.526)Yeah, it’s hard to go back once you’ve experienced Agile and some of these new techniques. So I think this is a nice segue into lean business cases. You know, that’s another technique that organizations at scale use to allocate funds. Can you talk a little bit about that? Hannah Bink Yeah. So we’ve all sat through business case presentations that were at least 40 slides. It took every bit of that to explain what they were talking about. A Lean Business Case asks the question, what if you could do it in one or two sheets of paper? That’s it. Just get to the point. So a Lean Business Case is a document. It aims to provide the essential information. Hannah Bink What do you need to actually make decisions while minimizing all of this unnecessary detail? We’re getting lost in the detail. It focuses on what really matters, like the problem that we’re solving and the solution that we’re proposing and what are the actual benefits we’re probably gonna see or the potential risks. Just get to the point, really. Melissa Yeah, and that accomplishes a couple of things when I hear you talk about it. One is when you think about those 40 slide presentations, like it probably took a long time to put that together and people get really invested in those 40 slides because oftentimes they’re being pitched to senior leaders. And so you kind of feel like your career is on the line. You kind of feel like you better have it “right.” And so I’m wondering if that dynamic shifts when you’re dealing with a lean business case. And what advantages do lean business cases open up to organizations versus these more traditional approaches? Hannah Bink So in the context of lean portfolio management, the lean business case is kind of the beginning. So we’ve identified an opportunity or we’ve identified a problem, and we want to invest in looking at it. You don’t need to have all the answers on day one, and you’re not going to. So what a lean portfolio management allows you to do is build that business case iteratively the way you would do anything else. And I got to say, in my own experience, I’ve been able to deliver business cases six times faster than I ever did before because I don’t have to have all of the answers up front. I’m given the runway to do the exploration. It’s the focus on the necessary information. It’s clear. It’s concise.  And it allows business leaders to make swifter evaluation, to validate whether or not this is worth investing faster. Melissa Well, it reminds me of something we talked about in the first part of our conversation where we were talking about the shift in participatory budgeting being from one where somebody pitches something. You know, you’re in sell mode. You know, I think we should do this initiative and I think it should be funded and this is how we should sell the, or set the budget. And the same thing with these giant presentations, it’s like, you’re in sell mode. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve invested a lot in research. I’ve done pretty slides and I’ll be rejected if you don’t accept my idea. We’re shifting that into a conversation. The conversation goes more like, hey, I have an idea, I have an hypothesis. Here’s what I’m expecting to happen. We could probably have a whole other conversation about leading indicators and guardrails. But the idea here is that we’re in an ongoing conversation around ideas and anything can happen at any time to say, we need to fund this more or less. And I feel like therein lies the power of a lean business case. Hannah Bink Absolutely. And I have to say, I feel like my executive team remembers more and they digest more because it’s iterative, one, so they’re on this journey, they’re part of this conversation as we’re going. But also when we’re talking about at scale, agile at scale, these executives have 400 things bouncing around their heads at all times. So the value of getting to the point, if you’re trying to affect change inside an organization, cannot be understated. And it gives you a tool to do that. Melissa It gives you a tool and it gives you a tool to remain flexible so that it doesn’t feel like careers are on the line. You know, like, oh, my thing, this case that I pitched didn’t work. That’s OK. It allows more room for failure, too. Hannah Bink Absolutely. Melissa So Hannah, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve got one last question for you that’s been burning on my mind, which is this whole notion of lean business cases and participatory budgeting, especially in SAFe, applies to technology portfolios, which I think are very product-centric. And I feel like marketing views things differently. We don’t necessarily have these product portfolios that they do in technology. Melissa So how do you think these practices need to be adapted for use in marketing? Hannah Bink So at the end of the day, it’s back to the principles, right? We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as… We’re applying agile principles to a marketing context. But I would say, as we both well know, there’s a lot of technology in marketing that can easily be your first step to using Lean Business Case as you’re trying to adapt it in your organization. Hannah Bink I’ve actually done that recently. I’m trying to get some more investment in our website. I’d like to translate it into seven languages. So I’m working on the lean business case as part of safe lean portfolio management approach, and I’ve found it’s really, really helpful. There’s a, there’s a standard step-by-step process that allows me that exploration time to better understand the business impact. What am I actually proposing here? And the approach of having a portfolio Kanban offers me that visibility into all of the strategic investments my company is making. To understand one, as someone already discussed this, that would be wonderful. Two, what are the other strategic investments our company is making? And as a marketer, how did those investments affect what we do every day? And it just gives me more context to understand when my leadership comes back to me and says, we’re a little overwhelmed on WIP here. I have that level of visibility to understand fully the impact of what I’m bringing to the business. But in marketing, whether it’s technology or maybe we’re investing in a new research area, or maybe we’re investing in a new channel mix or event strategy. There’s a lot of high cost things that we do on a day-to-day basis, or we’re thinking about doing. It just, it gives you that tool once again, where you can explore safely with that visibility and that iterative approach that Agile is truly core to the way Agile operates every day. Melissa So Hannah, I feel like you and I have been talking a little bit, geeking out on lean business cases and participatory budgeting. And I’m thinking about some of our listeners who might be brand new to Agile. And I could see this feeling a little bit overwhelming. So for those of you who are at the end of this show and feeling like, “oh my gosh, I could never do that,” what are a couple of first steps that people could take in this direction without having to jump all the way into the deep end? Hannah Bink Choose something that is key to your leadership, but they’re a little stuck on. Maybe you could introduce one of these activities, maybe both of these activities as a way to start thinking about investment differently. I’ll give you an example. Maybe your CMO is thinking about targeting a new segment. Hannah Bink Well, a new segment targeting strategy takes a lot of investment, right? There might be systems that have to be stood up. There might be education that needs to happen. You might have to hire new sales reps. Who knows? Starting to break down some of those long-term or strategic things that are still a little murky and using this as a pilot could be a really effective way to do that. Hannah Bink Another approach is if you find yourself as a marketing organization truly overwhelmed with all the competing priorities coming your way, not that would ever happen in any company, this might be a tool to help focus the new requests that are coming in, the new investment proposals that are coming in, or the new staffing strategies, or the new product investments that are coming in as a way to either bring the customer closer or get a clearer view of what the proposer is actually pitching you. Just a few ways to pilot it early and learn. Melissa Yeah, I’m hearing you really articulate the Agile principles, right? Which is break things down, experiment, adapt and learn, and apply that to this as well. You know, pick a starting point and continue to iterate. So, you know, Hannah, you’re just a wealth of knowledge around this. If people are interested in connecting with you, how can you be reached? Hannah Bink I am available on the interwebs on LinkedIn under Hannah Howard Bink. They can also reach me through Scaled Agile. I love a good email and I usually do respond. Melissa Sounds great. I appreciate your being here with us today.

Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile Discusses Participatory Budgeting (Part 2)

We had the pleasure of talking about participatory budgeting with Hannah Bink, Senior Director Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile.Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figureout how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgetingprocess, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency.  TranscriptMelissa Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile.Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah.Hannah Bink Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you.MelissaGreat to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey.Hannah BinkIt was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing.Melissa Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time?Hannah BinkWhat I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear.MelissaYeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned?Hannah BinkI think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear.The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually orin person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about.MelissaYeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting.And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups.Hannah BinkAbsolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful.MelissaFor sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world?Hannah BinkSo we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives.  I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas. You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds?You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fair and a collaborative approach that aligns to your shared goals. It’s a really fascinating way to bring partners or bring customers to the table and closer to the decisions marketers are making.MelissaWell, and it’s so powerful because you not only are bringing them into the room, and you and I have certainly seen examples where you’re asking somebody and asking a partner, asking a customer what they might prioritize. But I think it is different. Like you’re saying, if you’re thinking about it in monetary terms and saying, if you were in sitting in our shoes, what would you fund? And having them actually put, literally put money on the table around that because I feel like that forces a mental shift as well.Hannah BinkI really, really love the monopoly money concept, to your point, because there’s something interesting about having a physical bill in your hand that you’re now putting on a table and giving to a collective pile to fund something. It’s very different than just looking at a sheet and saying, I support XYZ. But when you’re giving away money, even if it’s fake money, there’s something psychological about that experience.Melissa Mm-hmm. All right, so we talked about engaging partners in channel marketing. Talk to us a little bit about how you could use this with ABM.Hannah Bink So with ABM, I really like bringing the customer in if you have that really close collaborative strategy. Marketers can adopt this approach to involving that client’s team into that budgeting process. It’s really fantastic at allowing clients to sort of see behind the curtain, especially when your ABM strategy aligns with that client’s goals. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re trying to sell internally or they’re trying to affect some sort of internal change. Bringing them into the fold as part of that account expansion strategy could be really powerful for everyone. Not to mention, you’re going to create a long lasting relationship which should lead to higher retention rates, maybe even account growth just inside the one business segment that you’re working with. Similarly, if you’ve got a SaaS product or if there’s like a physical thing that they can buy, I’ve never met an account that doesn’t want a say in how they’re sold to. Often they’re genuinely appreciative to have a chance to have some sort of say in it or shocked that they’re invited into the conversation. Again, this could be an incredible tool for long-term or customer retention.MelissaYeah, I mean, we’re really shifting the paradigm, not only in participatory budgeting, but also in or with agile techniques. And in my mind, it’s the paradigm is shifting from a tennis match where we’re lobbing a ball over to another person, another group, another outside entity and waiting for the return, to really a team sport and inviting those people that we used to lob the ball to onto the team and saying, no, let’s think this through together. And that’s the shift that we’re trying to create.Hannah BinkI’ve always said that the wildest thing about marketing is that we’re asked to sell a product we’ve never used to people we’ve never met working in context we’ve never worked in. And people ask questions like, well, why doesn’t the marketing work? Bringing the customer closer is a great way to bridge that gap.MelissaYeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made in marketing for sure. So talk to us about a time that you used participatory budgeting. You know, I’d love our listeners love real world examples. So what did you notice that surprised you? Did it change your mindset or your behavior?Hannah BinkSo I’ve actually used it successfully in staffing strategy. Every department, marketing, sales, anyone is gonna have their own wish list of the skills they think they need, the roles they think they need. And when there’s budget at play, it can get pretty contentious or just frustrating because you’re not quite sure how decisions are being made. We took a participatory budgeting approach to the staffing strategy where we sat and came up with our ideas ahead of time, did the research of just how much it costs to acquire or develop those skills. And then in traditional company, each department has their own budget. But especially when things get tight, or if you have a centralized budget where staffing is held in one place, you really need to bring all the voices to bear to understand the impact of these skill-oriented decisions. I’ll give you an example. I can tell you for a fact that my sales department right now wants nothing more than a field marketing department. They want that built. It is a major wish list item. But they don’t necessarily understand the full business impact of what field marketing means. If I put a field marketer in every region, that means I also need to empower them with potentially an agency in that region because no one person can do everything in marketing. I probably also need to staff up headquarter support to support all of these regional marketers suddenly. And then I probably also need to expand my system investment so that they have some sort of malleable support system that works 24 hours a day and has some sort of approval process, built-in automation. This is a significant investment. It’s not just hiring six people. So by using the sort of feasibility study or cost analysis step that other people are doing, we’re talking about staffing strategy using real dollars. What is the actual impact of field marketing investment versus more data analysts or more electrical engineers? How do you compare these skill sets? We’ve used participatory budgeting at Scaled Agile to get each department to the table and to have a really holistic view of the hiring strategy. And the conversations are hard. I’m not going to lie, they’re really difficult. But that’s kind of the point, is to have the hard conversation because this is real dollars. There are real impacts to the decisions we’re making. I was taken aback by just how willing people were to have those conversations and make those trade-off discussions in real time. MelissaWell, you’ve got the smartest people in the room, right? And you’ve got the people with the most information about how it impacts them and the cost. And what’s different is, again, we’re shifting away from this hierarchical notion that the person at the top knows the most. And they don’t often know the most. And you need real conversations happening in order to make the best decisions and get the most information out on the table. And I think that’s another great benefit of participatory budgeting and this type of approach. Hannah Bink I remember our HR leader was very skeptical, thinking through the example I’m mentioning, very skeptical of all the fighting she thought was going to emerge. And she was genuinely shocked by how collaborative people were. I think there’s power in just having more information that’s digestible. Having the details in front of you. O ranges in many cases, as opposed to apples to helicopters. You don’t know what you’re looking at, but this forces you to bring that information together, bring the right people in the room, and most people just want to do what’s best for the company at the end of the day. MelissaSo thank you, Hannah. This is the end of part one of two. Appreciate your sharing your stories with you, so rich, so full of color. And listeners, stay tuned with us for part two of participatory budgeting and lean business cases.

We had the pleasure of talking about participatory budgeting with Hannah Bink, Senior Director Digital Marketing and Operations at Scaled Agile.Participatory budgeting is a democratic process that allows community members, team members or stakeholders to directly participate in decision-making regarding how funds get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector as a means of distributing public funds, but has become a very popular tool in enterprises trying to figure out how to allocate their spending as well. Participatory budgeting involves involving citizens in the budgeting process, allowing them to have a say in how public funds are allocated. It is an inclusive approach that aims to promote transparency. TranscriptMelissa Welcome to the Marketing Agility podcast, where we discuss all things related to the growing field of agile marketing. This podcast is co-produced by Frank Days and the Agile Marketing Alliance, so that we can learn, share, and grow together. I’m Melissa Reeve, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. And we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah Bink, who is the senior director of digital marketing and operations at Scaled Agile.Hannah has over 15 years of B2B marketing experience in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors prior to her current role at Scaled Agile. We’ll talk with Hannah today about participatory budgeting and creating lean business cases in marketing because this show is all about scaling agile marketing. Welcome to the show, Hannah.Hannah Bink Happy to be here, Melissa. Nice to see you.Melissa Great to see you too. So Hannah, how did you become an agile marketer? Tell us a little bit about your journey.Hannah BinkIt was very complicated. I applied to a job. Uh, I was looking for a new, new opportunity and scaled agile was looking for a partner marketing director. Um, I had never heard of agile. I’d heard of lean, but never worked in it. Fortunately, the, the leadership there took a chance on someone and figured it was easier to teach me agile than marketing.Melissa Absolutely, and that’s tip number one for our listeners, that oftentimes it is easier to take somebody who has a background in marketing and bring them into the Agile world. They’re just able to speak the language of marketing and connect with other people. So I’m glad that it was a fit, and I do remember reviewing your resume when I was at Scaled Agile. So today, let’s talk a little bit about participatory budgeting. I know it’s probably a new term for a lot of folks who are in the space, even folks who are agilists. So how would you describe it to somebody who’s just hearing that term for the first time?Hannah Bink What I like about that term is it’s kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll give a little detail. Participatory budgeting is by definition, a democratic process, lots of voices coming to bear. And this allows community members, team members, stakeholders to all directly participate in decision-making related to how funds actually get allocated. It’s best known in the public sector. This has been used there for many, many years as a means of distributing public funds. And it’s become very popular in enterprises when they’re also trying to figure out how do we allocate our spending in a fair representative way. Participatory budgeting involves citizens in the budgeting process, and it allows them to say or allows them to have a say in how public funds are actually allocated. So it’s important that it’s very inclusive and that it aims to promote transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, really bringing those voices to bear.Melissa Yeah, what I love about everything you’ve said so far is it really emphasizes, like you said, that participatory nature of budgeting. And when I think of budgeting in a large organization, it’s often more political than it is participatory. We’re not thinking of each other. We’re mainly thinking of our fiefdom. So how does this play out when people are doing it, whether it’s in the corporate environment or in that public sector that you mentioned?Hannah Bink I think it’s ironic that you described it as political, given its roots in the public sector. But you’re absolutely right. So the process is honestly pretty simple at a surface level. The work to be done is planning the event. Then you reach out to the community, and there’s an emphasis on getting those diverse voices, whether this is in the public sector or in the private sector, you want to bring a lot of different viewpoints to bear.The members, either the community members or your stakeholders or your team members, they propose ideas that they’d like to see funds used for. And these could cover anything. I mean, in a public sector, they might be infrastructure, they might be education or health. Inside of an organization, it could be something like hiring or technology investment or long-term strategic plays. After those ideas are proposed, somebody’s got to do a refinement step. You’re looking at feasibility studies. You’re looking at cost estimates. What are we actually talking about in terms of the effort and spend to deliver these ideas into reality? After that step, you bring all those members to a seat. You either virtually orin person, put them at a table together. I really have seen this work well when people have physical monopoly money that represents a part of a budget. So in front of them, they may have a list of all those ideas and next to those ideas are the actual money that it’s gonna cost to fund them. That monopoly money is not enough to fund everything on that list. They’re going to have to sit as a table and work together to negotiate what projects, what ideas get the funding. And they’re literally putting money down. I was at a conference in 2019 when Luke Holman gave a keynote. He had run one of these for the city of San Jose. And he told this story about a minor who joined. So they had community members of all ages, all parts of the city, all financial backgrounds. And one of the things on the list was crime prevention. And four out of the five people at the table said, we don’t really have a crime problem, especially not a gang crime problem. We need to focus on the pollution issue in our city. And this one little girl spoke up that Gang violence is actually a really big problem in her neighborhood, and she walks home from school and she feels unsafe going from school to home. I’m choking up just thinking about it. The whole table completely changed the way they thought about the urgency around this gang crime prevention issue. Having those diverse voices at the table is what participatory budgeting is all about.Melissa Yeah, and I know we’re going to dive into how this looks for marketing. What a powerful example. And I just want to tease out a few things that you talked about. One was obviously that diversity of voices. You know, if it had all been adults in the room, it wouldn’t have been as compelling as having somebody who feels that fear of the crime on a daily basis. I think the other thing is just shifting the conversation from what I’m going to call it sage on a stage, but it’s usually somebody presenting their point of view behind a podium. They’re in sell mode. You’re trying to sell this idea that you have of where the budget should go into, we’re all sitting around a table, we’re all in this together, and we need to work through the pros and the cons together. That’s a really big cultural shift when you’re talking about something like budgeting.And while our topic today is about scaling agile marketing, I think this technique could apply to small groups as well as large groups.Hannah Bink Absolutely. And you may be thinking, oh, well, I’ve got 20, 40, 80 stakeholders. I can’t just put them at a table together. You put them at small tables, and then you look at the results overall. Do we see patterns emerge? Are there schools of thought that might be shared across tables? And does the composition of a table change the ideas or the projects or the features that they’re investing in. It’s really, really powerful.Melissa For sure. So then how are we seeing marketing organizations adapt this to their world?Hannah Bink So we’re seeing some really interesting patterns. I’m gonna speak as a career B2B marketer, that’s my world, but I’m sure it’s emerging in B2C as well. And there’s three things I’ve seen it really use well in. One is engaging customers. I’ve seen it work really well in channel marketing and in account-based marketing. When we’re talking about engaging customers, is sort of the new way companies are thinking about engaging customer advisory boards when they’re talking about product development or product roadmaps or informing where those investments should really go long term. It’s also a great way to create channels for customers to provide feedback or vote on marketing initiatives.  I’ll talk a little bit more about that related to ABM organizations. In a B2B world, you’re often working closely with a company to engage more buyers, more of the departments to meet whatever their strategic business problem is. If they have a seat at the table, they can genuinely inform you about the right way to do messaging, the right way to do positioning, who better inform how you’re developing personas. You can also start to think about it in channel marketing when you’re collaborating with partners on joint marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re doing co-marketing events or co-marketing campaigns. You can adopt participatory budgeting principles by involving partners in that budget discussion and in the decision-making. Where do we spend those funds?You can also decide on resource allocation or project priorities. Marketers and partners can ensure that there’s fair and a collaborative approach that aligns to your shared goals. It’s a really fascinating way to bring partners or bring customers to the table and closer to the decisions marketers are making.Melissa Well, and it’s so powerful because you not only are bringing them into the room, and you and I have certainly seen examples where you’re asking somebody and asking a partner, asking a customer what they might prioritize. But I think it is different. Like you’re saying, if you’re thinking about it in monetary terms and saying, if you were in sitting in our shoes, what would you fund? And having them actually put, literally put money on the table around that because I feel like that forces a mental shift as well.Hannah BinkI really, really love the monopoly money concept, to your point, because there’s something interesting about having a physical bill in your hand that you’re now putting on a table and giving to a collective pile to fund something. It’s very different than just looking at a sheet and saying, I support XYZ. But when you’re giving away money, even if it’s fake money, there’s something psychological about that experience.Melissa Mm-hmm. All right, so we talked about engaging partners in channel marketing. Talk to us a little bit about how you could use this with ABM.Hannah Bink So with ABM, I really like bringing the customer in if you have that really close collaborative strategy. Marketers can adopt this approach to involving that client’s team into that budgeting process. It’s really fantastic at allowing clients to sort of see behind the curtain, especially when your ABM strategy aligns with that client’s goals. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re trying to sell internally or they’re trying to affect some sort of internal change. Bringing them into the fold as part of that account expansion strategy could be really powerful for everyone. Not to mention, you’re going to create a long lasting relationship which should lead to higher retention rates, maybe even account growth just inside the one business segment that you’re working with. Similarly, if you’ve got a SaaS product or if there’s like a physical thing that they can buy, I’ve never met an account that doesn’t want a say in how they’re sold to. Often they’re genuinely appreciative to have a chance to have some sort of say in it or shocked that they’re invited into the conversation. Again, this could be an incredible tool for long-term or customer retention.Melissa Yeah, I mean, we’re really shifting the paradigm, not only in participatory budgeting, but also in or with agile techniques. And in my mind, it’s the paradigm is shifting from a tennis match where we’re lobbing a ball over to another person, another group, another outside entity and waiting for the return, to really a team sport and inviting those people that we used to lob the ball to onto the team and saying, no, let’s think this through together. And that’s the shift that we’re trying to create.Hannah BinkI’ve always said that the wildest thing about marketing is that we’re asked to sell a product we’ve never used to people we’ve never met working in context we’ve never worked in. And people ask questions like, well, why doesn’t the marketing work? Bringing the customer closer is a great way to bridge that gap.Melissa Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made in marketing for sure. So talk to us about a time that you used participatory budgeting. You know, I’d love our listeners love real world examples. So what did you notice that surprised you? Did it change your mindset or your behavior?Hannah Bink So I’ve actually used it successfully in staffing strategy. Every department, marketing, sales, anyone is gonna have their own wish list of the skills they think they need, the roles they think they need. And when there’s budget at play, it can get pretty contentious or just frustrating because you’re not quite sure how decisions are being made. We took a participatory budgeting approach to the staffing strategy where we sat and came up with our ideas ahead of time, did the research of just how much it costs to acquire or develop those skills. And then in traditional company, each department has their own budget. But especially when things get tight, or if you have a centralized budget where staffing is held in one place, you really need to bring all the voices to bear to understand the impact of these skill-oriented decisions. I’ll give you an example. I can tell you for a fact that my sales department right now wants nothing more than a field marketing department. They want that built. It is a major wish list item. But they don’t necessarily understand the full business impact of what field marketing means. If I put a field marketer in every region, that means I also need to empower them with potentially an agency in that region because no one person can do everything in marketing. I probably also need to staff up headquarter support to support all of these regional marketers suddenly. And then I probably also need to expand my system investment so that they have some sort of malleable support system that works 24 hours a day and has some sort of approval process, built-in automation. This is a significant investment. It’s not just hiring six people. So by using the sort of feasibility study or cost analysis step that other people are doing, we’re talking about staffing strategy using real dollars. What is the actual impact of field marketing investment versus more data analysts or more electrical engineers? How do you compare these skill sets? We’ve used participatory budgeting at Scaled Agile to get each department to the table and to have a really holistic view of the hiring strategy. And the conversations are hard. I’m not going to lie, they’re really difficult. But that’s kind of the point, is to have the hard conversation because this is real dollars. There are real impacts to the decisions we’re making. I was taken aback by just how willing people were to have those conversations and make those trade-off discussions in real time. Melissa Well, you’ve got the smartest people in the room, right? And you’ve got the people with the most information about how it impacts them and the cost. And what’s different is, again, we’re shifting away from this hierarchical notion that the person at the top knows the most. And they don’t often know the most. And you need real conversations happening in order to make the best decisions and get the most information out on the table. And I think that’s another great benefit of participatory budgeting and this type of approach. Hannah Bink I remember our HR leader was very skeptical, thinking through the example I’m mentioning, very skeptical of all the fighting she thought was going to emerge. And she was genuinely shocked by how collaborative people were. I think there’s power in just having more information that’s digestible. Having the details in front of you. O ranges in many cases, as opposed to apples to helicopters. You don’t know what you’re looking at, but this forces you to bring that information together, bring the right people in the room, and most people just want to do what’s best for the company at the end of the day. MelissaSo thank you, Hannah. This is the end of part one of two. Appreciate your sharing your stories with you, so rich, so full of color. And listeners, stay tuned with us for part two of participatory budgeting and lean business cases.

Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile Discusses Participatory Budgeting

Melissa Reeve

This is the first episode of season 2 of this podcast—our theme is scaling agile marketing. Following this, we felt it was appropriate to kick off the season with Melissa Reeve and Hannah Bink of Scaled Agile because their firm is the author of one of the most robust and well known scaling frameworks. In this conversation we set the stage by talking about the role of frameworks, how they complement and extend agile methods, and how they put their own framework to use at Scaled Agile. If you like what you hear you can hear more from Melissa on the SAFe Business Agility Podcast. 

This is the first episode of season 2 of this podcast—our theme is scaling agile marketing. Following this, we felt it was appropriate to kick off the season with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissamreeve/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Melissa Reeve</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-howard-bink-47993b13/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hannah Bink</a> of <a href="https://www.scaledagile.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Scaled Agile</a> because their firm is the author of one of the most robust and well known scaling frameworks. In this conversation we set the stage by talking about the role of frameworks, how they complement and extend agile methods, and how they put their own framework to use at Scaled Agile. If you like what you hear you can hear more from Melissa on <a href="https://www.scaledagile.com/safe-business-agility-podcast/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the SAFe Business Agility Podcast</a>.

Melissa Reeve and Hannah Bink or Scaled Agile talking scaling Agile in marketing