The Agile Marketing Edge Ep. 28: The Collaboration Gap Killing Marketers

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The Agile Marketing Edge Ep. 28: The Collaboration Gap Killing Marketers

AgileSherpas 08.04.2026 18 просмотров 1 лайков

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Everyone says collaboration matters. So, why is it still broken? 92% of marketers report collaboration challenges. Let that sink in. In this episode of The Agile Marketing Edge, Andrea Fryrear digs into one of the most uncomfortable findings from the 9th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report — the collaboration gap that’s quietly slowing teams down, eroding trust, and killing performance. Because the real problem isn’t that teams don’t value collaboration. It’s that most teams think they’re collaborating well… when they’re not. What You’ll Learn 🎯 Why most marketing teams overestimate how well they collaborate 🎯 The difference between process problems vs. coordination problems 🎯 How Agile teams reduce bottlenecks — but expose new challenges 🎯 Why collaboration issues are structural, not cultural 🎯 The specific practices that actually build trust across teams ⏱️ Timestamps 0:00 – Why “agreeable” manifestos don’t change behavior 0:50 – Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge 1:35 – The problem with consensus-driven Agile thinking 2:40 – What a manifesto with “teeth” should actually do 3:50 – The uncomfortable question: what are we avoiding? 5:00 – 92% of marketers face collaboration challenges 6:10 – Why collaboration is broken by default 7:20 – Process problem vs. coordination problem explained 8:40 – Why non-Agile teams struggle with bottlenecks 9:50 – How Agile teams solve flow (but expose new issues) 11:10 – The hidden cost of capacity mismatches 12:20 – Why optimizing one team creates new friction elsewhere 13:30 – The truth about “enterprise agility” 14:40 – The dangerous collaboration perception gap 15:50 – Why teams think they collaborate better than they do 17:00 – What reliability and trust actually look like 18:10 – Why Agile teams earn more trust across the org 19:20 – Collaboration isn’t cultural — it’s structural 20:30 – The systems that actually improve collaboration 21:40 – Why values without mechanisms don’t work 22:50 – What real Agile collaboration looks like in practice 24:00 – Why manifestos avoid specificity (and why that’s a problem) 25:10 – What to do now: 3 practical actions 26:20 – Benchmark honestly and test your assumptions 27:10 – Final takeaway: fix the system, not the slogan More from the Agile Marketing Edge Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RVT0-nxJV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZ6EEn-oqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9B3rYX3mg Enjoying our videos? Subscribe to our channel and get notified when we publish new content at: https://www.youtube.com/@AgileSherpas?sub_confirmation=1 🏔️ Join The Agile Marketing Edge Community at: https://www.agilesherpas.com/the-agile-marketing-edge-podcast 👉 If your team feels like it’s moving fast but still getting blocked by everyone else, it’s time to fix how your organization actually collaborates: https://www.agilesherpas.com/contact 📌 Subscribe to The Agile Marketing Edge for weekly episodes that turn Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. #agilemarketingedge #agilesherpas #andreafryrear #agilemarketing #marketingoperations #aiinmarketing #martech #marketingleadership #digitaltransformation #marketingstrategy

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Why “agreeable” manifestos don’t change behavior

When is the last time that you read a document that you agreed with completely, like every single sentence, and yet you walked away feeling vaguely annoyed? That was my experience reading the new manifesto for enterprise agility which was recently published by PMI and the Agile Alliance. Now it is a beautifully designed document thoroughly researched. They surveyed 700 plus seauite leaders. They interviewed 30 executives. They examined 49 existing manifestos and frameworks. And it contains sentences like guiding with purpose and adjusting along the way outweighs overplanning and

Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge

the illusion of control, which is true technically. But here's my problem, which I originally posted about on LinkedIn and will now be ranting about a whole lot more. A manifesto that generates zero push back is not a manifesto. It's a poster with better typography. The original agile manifesto worked because it named contested tradeoffs, things that the people using agile frameworks actually argued about. It had teeth. And I just feel like this one does not. So

The problem with consensus-driven Agile thinking

here's what I want to spend today's episode on because I think there's a more interesting question that is hiding under my original critique. If I say I want a manifesto with teeth, what does that really look like? In other words, what are the uncomfortable, specific, unwelcome things that agile has to tell organizations about collaboration that they really need to hear in 2026 today. That's what I want to explore. Not the values that everybody nods along with and then doesn't really change anything, but the data that makes people squirm in their chairs because they realize it's going to force them to take a big old swing if they want a chance at a home run because, haha, coincidence.

What a manifesto with “teeth” should actually do

We now have that data. Our 9th annual state of agile marketing report just dropped and the collaboration section in particular is full chock full of exactly the kind of specific super uncomfortable findings that good discomfort causing manifestos are made of. All right, so let's get comfortable. I mean, haha uncomfortable people. Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning agile theory into realworld marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryer, CEO of Agile Sherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster outcomedriven marketing. Every week we dig into the what, who, and how behind Azure marketing. From building high velocity workflows and cutting waste to measuring what actually matters and scaling success across teams. Today, we are using our own research to do something the PMI manifesto didn't. Name these

The uncomfortable question: what are we avoiding?

specific hard trade-offs in how teams actually collaborate and what it costs when you get it wrong. First, let me be fair to the PMI Agile Alliance document before I push back on it. The research behind it is legit. Two global seuite surveys, 30 plus executive interviews, a public feedback board. They synthesized 49 different enterprise agility frameworks. That is not nothing. And the four values that they land on, clear purpose through adaptive plans, shared enterprise outcomes, over functional optimization, continuous reinvention, overpreservation, human centricity amidst change. These values, they're not wrong. But here's the thing about values like these. Nobody is arguing for the opposite of those things. Nobody is out there

92% of marketers face collaboration challenges

saying, "Woo, departmental silos over enterprise outcomes or strongly making the case for rigid efficiency over adaptability. So when you write a manifesto around things that are technically true but practically uncontested, all you've really done is document consensus. And consensus in my experience does not change behavior. And that's what we need is behavior change. And it certainly does not feel like a manifesto. I mean, the document does have also nine principles, and to be fair, a few of them have a little bit of teeth, but the teeth they do have just aren't very sharp. Like the phrase govern with clear guard rails, not gatekeepers. That's kind of specific, but most people would say they do that. Now, I'm pretty sure that all the people

Why collaboration is broken by default

who would get labeled as gatekeepers by somebody else would adamantly deny that they themselves engage in gatekeeping behavior. So, how are you going to get them to not gatekeep if they don't think they do it right now? And then we have the phrase fund purpose and intent not execution activity. It sort of feels like that names a real tradeoff and might force a real change in behavior. But again, you can easily make the case that you're already doing this no matter what your behavior is actually dayto-day right now because I can see and hear in my head the most change averse executives that I have ever worked with. The ones who would rather be drugged by their toenails

Process problem vs. coordination problem explained

through a sticker patch than adopt agile. Those people would tell you with a 100% belief that they are already doing this. And they would also say they are doing many of the other things in this manifesto. They would tell you those things with a straight face and they would believe it. And it's because by the time you get to the end of this manifesto, the elaboration parts have really softened any of its edges. And so by the time you're done reading, you've agreed with everything and you feel good because hey, look at that. You have already achieved enterprise agility. But then you also feel kind of bad because apparently you have achieved enterprise agility and things are still not working. So apparently agile isn't the answer and doesn't help. And I feel like this is one of the reasons that people conclude that agile is dead or it doesn't work or provides no ROI or

Why non-Agile teams struggle with bottlenecks

whatever other nonsense you may hear. And it's why documents like this tend to give me hives and make me all twitchy because it reinforces this belief that oh, we're already doing all these things. We're already agile, I guess, and so it's not working. It's not making things better. though it clearly isn't the answer. And honestly, this is why we do our state of agile marketing report. We don't just say, "Hey, collaboration is important. You should do it. " We really dig in and ask who is being successful at collaboration, who is not, and the important part, who thinks they're doing it well when they're probably not. And what does that look like? And this last part is where he maybe is a little bit uncomfortable. I think that is what a manifesto should do is point out the difference between good and bad. And how do you bridge that gap and call people to action to jump over that gap if they really want to be able to say

How Agile teams solve flow (but expose new issues)

that they are being and doing agile? They want the label. they've got to do the things. So, here's the headline from the collaboration section of this year's report. 92% of marketers experience collaboration challenges. So, basically everybody, every marketer everywhere experiences collaboration challenges. If you are hearing that and thinking, "Yep, sounds about right. " Let's all just sit with that for a second because we're not talking about a segment of struggling teams in B2B or B to C or in a particular industry or a particular function. We are talking about near universal pain in our role. So basically crossf functional collaboration in marketing is broken as a default not as an exception. That's sad. But here's where it's going to get interesting. The top challenge faced by non-adile

The hidden cost of capacity mismatches

marketers is slow approvals and bottlenecks. 46% of them named that as their top challenge. For agile marketers, only 32% named slow approvals and bottlenecks as their top challenge. What that 14 point gap tells us is that this is a process problem. Slow approvals are fundamentally a structural friction issue. You do not have the right workflows, the right decision rights, the right visibility into where things are stuck. And agile solves that. Not perfectly, but measurably, demonstraably solves that. But here's the thing about agile marketers top challenge because it wasn't the same as non-aggile marketers. The top challenge that we heard from our agile marketing respondents was capacity

Why optimizing one team creates new friction elsewhere

mismatches. 40% of agile marketers said capacity mismatch was their top challenge. Which means their team has solved the process problem. They are moving fast, iterating, delivering and now their biggest obstacle is legal, IT, sales, product, the departments that they depend on and collaborate with are not keeping in sync with them. They are not built the same way. So, if it was me trying to write a manifesto with teeth, I would say this out loud in like bold type with lots of underlining and arrows pointing at it. Solving the process problem inside your team creates a new coordination problem with every team around you. If we're really talking about enterprise agility, like big giant flashing lights around this, we cannot optimize at the team level is a ridiculous thing to do. Agile

The truth about “enterprise agility”

adoption at the team level without any movement at the organizational level creates a capacity and speed mismatch that eventually just becomes demoralizing. Your team is ready, nobody else is. That is not a motivation problem. It is a structural one. And can we pause for a second and just be like, it's 2026, y'all. How many years ago did the OG manifesto come out? Like a long time ago. We're talking in decades now. And this is still an issue. We still have capacity mismatches at the team level. The PMI manifesto, the new one talks about shared enterprise outcomes over functional optimization. We need that. But we haven't even got team level stuff right. We are still having teamtote team mismatch. We have to get this stuff right before we can even think about enterprise level optimization. So if we want shared enterprise outcomes over functional optimization, that kind of great value, true value, there's a

The dangerous collaboration perception gap

lot of work ahead. And so what does this mean in practice? It means that a department's functional agile transformation, whether it's marketing or somebody else's department, it's going to fail. Agile is going to fail at the department level. It's going to fail to reach its potential until the departments that are around you, those that you collaborate with change too. That is the uncomfortable version of that value that we see in the PMI manifesto and our data backs that up. So for orgs who have left functions like marketing out of their agile transformation, y'all are in for a world of hurt because you cannot go faster than your slowest component. And everybody's going to get slowed down when you are leaving people out of the agile transformation. It's time to say the hard things out

Why teams think they collaborate better than they do

loud. The next quiet thing that we need to say out loud is that the perception gap is doing a lot of damage to teams. And this is a finding that I kept coming back to in the report because I feel like it was not obvious but really important because here's how it goes. We asked marketers in our report, how effectively does your team work with other departments? Non-aggile marketers, 74% of them said very or mostly effective. So three4 threequarters agile marketers 85% said very or mostly effectively at first glance an 11point gap maybe not that dramatic. You might read it as you know non-aggile teams they're doing okay and agile teams are doing a bit better. But here's why I think that

What reliability and trust actually look like

reading is wrong and why other parts of the report say so explicitly. Non-aggile marketers are almost certainly overestimating how well they collaborate. And now here in this report, we did not survey other departments. We didn't ask legal or product or sales what they actually think about working with their marketing teams, but I got strong reasons to believe that these self assessments might be off. Now, here's the evidence. We asked a separate but related question. How reliable would other departments say marketing is when working toward shared goals? Agile marketers, 80% would be extremely or very reliable. Non-aggile marketers said others would say they are extremely or very reliable only 66%

Why Agile teams earn more trust across the org

of the time. That's a 14point gap in perceived reliability. And that's marketers estimating how others see them, not self-rating their own work. So when you ask marketers to take that outside view, the gap widens significantly. Then we layer in other data points. 89% of agile marketers say agile helped them respond more quickly to requests from other departments. 83% say agile increased internal stakeholders trust in their team's predictability. Those are outcomes generated by a specific set of agile practices. things like visible workflows, regular delivery cadences, transparent prioritization. Non-aggile teams just don't have those structural trust builders. So, they

Collaboration isn’t cultural — it’s structural

might think they're collaborating well, especially if they've never experienced agile ways of working and they don't know what they're missing. They just don't have a better point of reference to realize how untrustworthy they actually are in the eyes of their partners. But their partners may tell a different story. And when we work with private clients, we survey those partner stakeholders. And I can tell you those stakeholders always tell a different story. Their survey results are wildly different when the marketers are not using agile yet. This is a manifesto worthy finding. Not collaboration is important, but your team may be significantly overestimating how collaborative you actually are. And there's no way to know

The systems that actually improve collaboration

without asking the people you're collaborating with or building systems that make the work visible enough so that trust builds on its own. A flat statement of shared outcomes over functional optimization doesn't tell you this. Data can. Okay. Now, let's talk about what agile actually does. And most of the time, it is not what the pretty poster says. Here's another thing I think is worth naming directly. The reason that agile marketers collaborate better is not that they just value collaboration more. It's not that they're nicer people or more intentional humans. It's just structural. 99% of agile marketers say agile improved their ability to collaborate with other departments in our survey this year. 99%.

Why values without mechanisms don’t work

99%. We surveyed 430 marketers. Like that's nuts in terms of statistical significance. 89% said it improved the quality of their communication. These are not soft outcomes. They are downstream results of specific agile practices. When you make work visible, when you hold regular reviews, when you clearly define what done looks like before you start the work, when you have a backlog that stakeholders can see and influence, trust is a byproduct of that system, not a value on the wall that you have to remember to act on. This is the part of the conversation that fluffy manifestos consistently skip. They name the values, they describe the principles, but they don't explain the mechanism. Move authority and decision-m to where value is created is one of the PMI manifesto's nine principles.

What real Agile collaboration looks like in practice

And it's right. But what does that look like on a marketing team? Specifically, it looks like a prioritization system where the team makes the call on what fits in the next sprint, not the CMO making ad hoc requests that override everything else. It looks like a capacity model that makes we do not have room for that right now a visible fact, not a feelings-based negotiation. It looks like retrospectives where the inevitable collaboration friction gets named and addressed on a regular cadence, not a quarterly all hands where nobody says anything real. The mechanism matters. The values are an aspiration. Practices are how you get there. Now, I do want to be honest about something as we near the end of this episode. I am probably harder on

Why manifestos avoid specificity (and why that’s a problem)

documents like this one than they deserve. I know why manifestos get written this way. You want broad endorsement. You want to speak to a broad swath of industries and organization types. You need the 700 seuite survey respondents to recognize themselves in the values. You cannot have the CEO of a big pharma company and 50 person software startup reading the same document and feeling like it doesn't apply to either of them. So you abstract, you generalize, you write sentences that are technically true and technically very agreeable. I get it. I have written content for big audiences. Specificity is the enemy of scale and scale is the goal. But here is the tension. Specificity is also the only thing that actually changes what somebody does on Monday morning or in their next board meeting. Our

What to do now: 3 practical actions

collaboration data is very specific. It says non-aggile teams think they collaborate well, but they don't. It says solving your own team's process problems creates new coordin coordination friction with everybody else. It says 40% of agile marketers are stuck not because of their own practices, but because they're the speedboat in an armada that is still rowing. Those findings may not feel very inspiring sometimes, but they do feel true. And that's the difference between a document that gets passed around on LinkedIn and a document that I really hope gets used to make a difference. Speaking of which, here's what you can do with this data. First, of course, if you have not read the collaboration section of our 9th annual state of agile marketing report, please go read it. It is free to download and easy to get. I don't want

Benchmark honestly and test your assumptions

you to read it to validate what you're already doing. That is not the point. I want you to read it to benchmark honestly and think about that perception gap finding in particular. Do you actually know how the departments you work with experience your collaboration? If you don't, go find out. Ask a stakeholder this week. Reach out to me and I will give you our stakeholder survey for free. You can send it to them and find out what they really think. It's probably worse than you think. Second, identify which problem your team actually has. Is it a process problem, slow approvals, unclear workflows

Final takeaway: fix the system, not the slogan

requests that disappear into black holes, or is it the coordination problem where your own team is running well, but the organizations around you are not? These require very different interventions. Do not throw sprints at a capacity m mismatch problem. Third, and I'm sorry to say this is the harder one. If you're not agile yet or you're early in your adoption, you got to ask yourself, does my team have any structural trust builders in place? visible work, regular delivery touch points, a backlog that stakeholders can actually see. You need these because we value collaboration is not a structural trust builder. Reliable delivery cadences are. So, not a transformation, an experiment. Pick one of these three and do something about it this week. Until next time, I am Andrea Frier and remember, the struggle is real, but so is agile marketing.

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