How Fidelity Investments is Embracing Agile Marketing

Fidelity Investments is one of the biggest players transforming from traditional management to an agile culture, and I got to take an insider look into how they’re doing this in the marketing space.

I had the opportunity to interview Jerome Ruwe, Head of the Agile Enablement Office for Enterprise Technology and Global Services, and David Dintenfass, Fidelity’s CMO, who are among those leading this massive agile transformation, to hear just how their company’s marketers are changing the way they work.

The driving force that put Fidelity on this agile journey began with how customers’ behaviors were changing the financial planning and investing space, most notably driving the importance of digital experiences and engagement. While the company was doing well, it wanted to proactively position itself as a digital business with the customer-obsessed culture, flexibility and speed needed to stay competitive in an ever-changing landscape where customer preferences are varied and competition can be just about anyone.

With senior leaders on board, Fidelity’s agile transformation started with decentralizing the marketing, product and technology organizations, thus bringing leaders closer to the people doing the work, allowing for more bi-directional feedback.

Fidelity used an operating model similar to the one below to create cross-functional squads focused on all stages of the product development lifecycle, tribes to group multiple squads who work together to address similar opportunities, and chapters to ensure deep expertise and standards of excellence are embedded in all work.

Before agile, marketing had good ideas based on user research, but it wasn’t tightly integrated technology.

“We had a lot of smart, well-intended people who weren’t on the same page,” said Ruwe.

“We knew we had to organize around the customer and integrate technology into our process,” added Dintenfass.

Today, the company holds Big Room Planning sessions, which bring technology and marketing together to align on mobile strategy. During this collaborative planning, technology and marketing look at the customer journey end-to-end and clearly define priorities and work.

Before agile marketing, the company used data, but in the new model, the data is more real-time and more deeply integrated into the design process.

Prior to the agile transformation, there wasn’t a consistent approach for running marketing campaigns. These days, a data-driven approach is driving marketing, and agile — with the increased integration of marketing and technology — helps them get data earlier and often.

We use data to inform our next marketing campaign,” says Dintenfass. “Agile has brought more traceability, clearer goals and we can more easily measure the results of a campaign’s return on investment,” he adds.

From a day-to-day operations perspective, marketing is operating much like software teams. They use the Scrum framework to achieve agility, having a cycle of Daily Scrum meetings to collaborate on the day’s work, retrospectives to reflect on how the team works together, and sprint reviews to demonstrate work and get feedback from stakeholders.

Ruwe says that Scrum has helped marketing work differently and understand exactly who they are targeting with each campaign and how they’ll measure success. The team achieves this by writing up their work in a story format, clearly identifying personas and discussing what benefit the work brings to a prospective client.

While there’s still a lot of flexibility in campaign delivery, there’s also now clear priorities as guardrails that are aligned through all levels in the company. The highest level is Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), which then get decomposed into initiatives across the organization, followed by epics and stories.

“We’ve made a shift from project thinking to product thinking. We prioritize a key objective at the start of the quarter, which gives us the ability to go to market more readily,” says Ruwe.

Marketing campaigns are able to go to market faster because work is done in smaller increments, allowing the squads to get rapid feedback and easily course correct.

Fidelity launched the campaign “Saved By Zero” using an agile marketing approach.

“We tried a number of approaches and learned that, for our target market, 80’s music resonated,” said Dintenfass. “And if it didn’t, we had the ability to pivot quickly.”

“By doing it in smaller test increments, we don’t invest heavily in a big campaign,” says Ruwe. “Then, when we decide this is the ad we’re going to run, we put it in all channels,” he adds.

Fidelity is leading the charge in large enterprise agile marketing and proving it can really make a difference to employees and customers.

“To marketers looking to explore agile marketing, it absolutely can and does work in the marketing area. The practices support what we’re applying here. Customer-centricity is part of agile transformation. Embrace it, don’t think it’s not for you,” says Ruwe.

Jerome Ruwe is an experienced agile practitioner who is passionate about creating corporate cultures that embrace agility. He’s leading the charge in transforming to agile at Fidelity Investments.

David Dintenfass is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of User Experience Design at Fidelity Investments. In his role, Mr. Dintenfass leads Fidelity’s retail client strategy, segment management, customer acquisition, content management, media, digital marketing, user experience design, and creative development.

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