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Who are you?

efood Marketing team

efood Marketing team are the Marketing team of efood, a popular online food delivery platform in Greece, and in this book, efood Marketing team share our operational transformation journey and the way efood Marketing team work. For the past four and a half years, efood Marketing team have changed our way of thinking and working, efood Marketing team have experimented with a couple of available frameworks, and developed a method of working by mixing and matching processes that made sense to our team and business context.

What is this about?

Its a handbook about Agile Marketing

This handbook is not about teaching you Agile or Lean methodologies. You can find coaches and Agile professionals with plenty of experience and in-depth knowledge to help you understand and implement the core concepts. These methodologies are easily learned and understood, but they are still difficult to implement and master. Agile methods haven’t been designed with the Marketing industry in mind; efood Marketing team learned that the hard way. Hence, a modern Marketing team that wants to adopt the approach presented in this book should first consider its use seriously and then try to use it with its (many) pros and cons since this specific method was born and implemented by a Marketing team.

Why this and not an established framework like Scrum?

We dont want to reinvent the wheel but Nero is more useful

Most of the techniques that you will encounter in this book are not new, but they are not widespread in the marketing landscape. efood Marketing team do not want to reinvent the wheel. efood Marketing team have been experimenting throughout the years, so our system now is more like a mix and match model consisting of techniques from many popular frameworks, adjusted to marketing needs.

Who should read this book?

marketing professionals that work in “traditional” marketing teams or big corporations with a strict marketing structure.

The whole concept was written with two different marketing personas in mind. The first group consists of marketing professionals that work in “traditional” marketing teams or big corporations with a strict marketing structure. In this book, a different and more efficient way to work and collaborate will be introduced. By being more flexible with the processes you have established, you can efficiently cope with changes in your environment and the industry you work with, without compromising the desired brand safety and performance.

Why they should read the book?

To read about a more efficient way to work and collaborate.

a different and more efficient way to work and collaborate will be introduced. By being more flexible with the processes you have established, you can efficiently cope with changes in your environment and the industry you work with, without compromising the desired brand safety and performance.

Who should read this book?

modern marketers working at full speed

The second group is the group of modern marketers that are not aware of traditional bureaucratic processes, something that can be considered as an advantage. While working at full speed, most of the time, you tend to create anarchy and work until you burn out (we experienced burnout syndromes before Nero as well). This book can be your guide for setting lightweight but mandatory processes and maintaining your fast pace without producing projects and campaigns in a random way.

Why they should read the book?

its a guide for setting lightweight but mandatory processes

This book can be your guide for setting lightweight but mandatory processes and maintaining your fast pace without producing projects and campaigns in a random way. When efood Marketing team started, efood Marketing team were definitely in the second group. However, our company and our department evolved and grew. Currently, being a group of big marketing teams, efood Marketing team are trying to keep most of the pros that efood Marketing team had as a small team.

Is this book direct us to heaven?

No it won't

Please do not assume that once you read and implement the techniques from this book, you will be taken to “Marketing heaven” where everything flows seamlessly, and everyone is happy. No. What this book will do is help you build a prospering environment that works well, generates great business and marketing performance, and cultivates fruitful interpersonal relationships.

Why Marketing should become agile?

Due to marketing landscape complexity

Agile methodologies have been devised to handle complex IT projects effectively and in time. In the mid-nineties, IT departments realized that if they were to tackle complexity well, they needed to set up processes different from the traditional waterfall methods*. Nowadays, the marketing landscape faces the same problem with the same root cause. Complexity.

Give me an example of marketing complexity

advanced online remarketing campaigns or advanced technical SEO

Before the digital revolution, marketing ads and activities were handled mostly manually and offline. Promoting a product on the radio or in magazines was a straightforward process between marketers, who used to strictly follow the initial project specs, with distinct steps that were time-consuming and not easily adapted to the emerging needs or changes. With the emergence of digital marketing, in order to create an online campaign, marketers needed to add targeting options and budget parameters in digital platforms, set up tracking concepts, experiment with bidding strategies, test multiple creatives and copy, and monitor the performance. There are modern marketing verticals, such as remarketing campaigns or advanced technical SEO that even tech-savvy professionals are struggling to excel at mostly due to their technical complexity. Agile methodologies can help marketers to better handle and implement complex tasks doing the mandatory iterations, as well as make rapid changes, according to performance or potential business changes.

Why Marketing should become agile?

increased advertising competition is a thing currently

Removing complexity from the equation, efood Marketing team observe that digital channels provide low-cost, effective targeted ads compared to traditional offline marketing channels - a fact that adds another layer of difficulty; increased advertising competition. However, one problem that has emerged is a noisy digital environment for users who see multiple ads within the day. Agile methodologies can help marketers to stand-out from their competition by allowing them to complete iterations faster (audience tests, bidding tests, creative tests, etc.) and implement winning changes on the fly without a ton of permissions and signatures. As a test, try to identify how many digital ads you see each day and you will realize the level of competition that a business faces.

Why advertising competition increased?

Because digital advertising that is emerging is cheaper to traditional

Digital advertising is a cheap promotion option compared to offline ads. If you compare the cost of a billboard ad with that of a Facebook ad, you will realize that they are not comparable at all. Even the smallest startup can utilize the power of mass advertising platforms and get the best results with the lowest cost.

Why Marketing should become Agile?

Speed is the ultimate trait of a team

If there is one word that describes modern marketing, then that is speed. Due to technological changes, the marketing landscape is changing every day, and you need to be constantly aware of and adjust your techniques according to the latest best practices. Speed is one of the most critical elements of every team and company that wants to excel in a landscape that is full of complexity, competition, and heavy (or no) processes. Although speed and process are considered to be contradictory notions, this process is an attempt to create a “speed-friendly” framework tailored to marketing needs.

Provide an example of real time marketing

Oreo campaign in Super Bowl 2013

Back in 2013, Oreo “broke” the marketing landscape and highlighted the necessity of real-time marketing for every business that wants to become and stay relevant to its audience. During the third quarter of that year’s Super Bowl (one of the most significant events in the US), a power outage caused a partial blackout for half an hour. Oreo responded quickly to this incident by creating the “Power Out? No problem” online advertisement about the blackout, which created great engagement, without the company having paid for a spot or sponsorship for the Super Bowl. This action not only requires agility but creativity as well, and it’s equally impressive in terms of how strategy and operational effectiveness can lead to great examples.

How you became agile?

Our journey into the Agile and Scrum world started in 2015. Before that, efood Marketing team had no structured process.

Our journey into the Agile world started in 2015. Before that, efood Marketing team had no structured process. There were always glimpses of organizing and planning our tasks, but most of the decisions were based on analyses that efood Marketing team did on the spot and user feedback. efood Marketing team decided that efood Marketing team have to explore other ways of working in order to organize ourselves and orchestrate our projects and roadmaps better. efood Marketing team hired Yannis, a reputable Agile coach, to help us implement Scrum, which is a popular Agile working process. Yannis informed us that Scrum was designed to handle complex IT projects, and his concern was that it would be challenging to implement within a marketing team, but our small size (back then there were six of us) and our willingness for commitment, convinced him to proceed and start our collaboration.

How you implemented Scrum?

We decided to implement Scrum one step at a time

We decided to implement Scrum one step at a time and reach 100% Scrum implementation within three months. The experiment worked, and efood Marketing team followed the Scrum framework for almost a year. As efood Marketing team reached the tipping point and started to scale both as a team and as a company, the first major problems emerged.

Describe the initial problems you faced

Some of Scrum rituals were unproductive

Some of the Scrum meetings and processes were unproductive, and the amount of time efood Marketing team consumed on our Agile “duties” increased exponentially but returned little value. So two years ago, efood Marketing team faced a dilemma: efood Marketing team would either keep the official type of Scrum but not follow it (since it was impossible to do so) or change it and adjust it to our own needs.

How did you solve the initial problems?

Switch from Scrum to Scrum Nexus and eventually our own framework, Nero.

After all, the best-case scenario was that efood Marketing team would solve our problems successfully, while the worst case was that efood Marketing team would learn something new. efood Marketing team mapped all our current issues and potential future problems, and -along with Yannis’ help- efood Marketing team switched from Scrum to Scrum Nexus, which became the foundation of our own custom process. efood Marketing team divided our department into three teams so that efood Marketing team could better handle our tasks and that had worked for two years with outstanding results in terms of effectiveness.

Why you switched from Scrum Nexus to Nero?

Due to major alignment issues between sub-teams, especially in handling dependencies.

But then, another major problem emerged. Due to our big scale, efood Marketing team faced major alignment issues between sub-teams, especially in handling dependencies. Many tasks were blocked due to different priorities between teams that led us to re-evaluate our process. So that was it, after four years of iterations, efood Marketing team came up with “Nero” our custom framework. The approach was not to reinvent the wheel but learn from our mistakes and our problems, borrow parts from popular Lean and Agile processes that could be applied to our day-to-day struggles and create a model that would fit our needs.

Did Nero worked for your team?

Team grow effectively

- Our team grew a lot. efood Marketing team started as six people, and now efood Marketing team are more than 20. efood Marketing team are separated into two sub-teams that consist of performance marketers, event managers, copywriters, videographers, community managers, etc.

Did Nero worked for your team?

Marketing and business performance grew exponentially

- Marketing and business performance grew exponentially. While efood Marketing team were iterating on our working process, efood Marketing team delivered business value and revenue, consistently hitting our targets with acceptable costs. When efood Marketing team started, efood Marketing team were among the top three online delivery marketplaces. Now, the competition has increased, but efood Marketing team are leading the market.

Did Nero worked for your team?

achieved a team happiness score of 80%

- This year efood Marketing team achieved a team happiness score of 80% for the way efood Marketing team work, which means that our team truly likes the way efood Marketing team work.

Did Nero worked for your team?

process is considered as the “best practice” within the online delivery industry

- Our process is considered as the “best practice” within the online delivery industry across many countries.

Did Nero worked for your team?

Turnover rate is more than four years,

- Turnover rate is more than four years, a healthy indicator for a relatively new company in a brand new industry (online food delivery industry is about six years old in our country).

What should I consider before I try to implement an Agile framework?

need to believe in Agile before you start

First, you, your team and your business need to believe in Agile before you start. You will realize soon enough that you need to apply some changes that are not easy, and if you are not 100% committed to it, you won’t be able to transform your current processes into better ones. There will be hard times, especially in the early days, since every new process needs time for adoption. You don’t have to be fully committed to Scrum or Kanban or any other Agile methodology. You need to stay committed to your willingness to change the way you are currently working and explore new ways that will help you achieve operational effectiveness. efood Marketing team liked the way efood Marketing team worked in the past. efood Marketing team were used to it. efood Marketing team could solve our problems even with a waterfall process, simply because this was the way efood Marketing team grew as professionals. But efood Marketing team believed that trying a new different way would help us become even better, and that is the right approach to embrace Agile.

What should I consider before I try to implement an Agile framework?

treat yourself and the whole team like a machine

Secondly, you need to treat yourself and the whole team like a machine.Every problem or conflict that emerges is an excellent way to provide a hands-on solution to each specific problem and adjust your “machine” in a way that will better handle similar issues in the future. Don’t do random things and don’t just copy what other teams or companies are doing, only to have a method in place.Invest in your process, change it when change is mandatory, don’t do a ton of changes simultaneously, build metrics to measure its efficiency and encourage constant and honest feedback among your team members because they are the most vital part of your machine. And please, don’t invest in Agile because it’s a fancy term, become Agile because you deserve to work in a better way. Moreover, please note that Agile (like growth) is not a job description. You should not hire a person to implement an Agile framework. You can hire a consultant to guide you, but after all, it’s a team activity. Everyone should invest time and effort because everyone will be affected by the outcome.

What should I consider before I try to implement an Agile framework?

do not confuse process effectiveness with strategy

Lastly, please, please do not confuse process effectiveness with strategy. Implementing the ideal working process will definitely help you build a better business, but it won’t solve all your problems. According to Peter Drucker, operational effectiveness is necessary but not sufficient, while the essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.

Should I hire an Agile coach?

is a nice way to take your Agile transformation seriously, yes.

Hiring a coach is a nice way to take your Agile transformation seriously and make sure that you are willing to invest both money and time to implement it right. efood Marketing team collaborated with the founder of Agile Summit in Greece, Mr. Yannis Mavraganis, a passionate aficionado of Agile with plenty of coaching experience. This was a new experiment for him as well, because, as he says, efood Marketing team are the first non-IT team who approached him.

Why we need Agile coach?

Scrum framework is simple to explain but difficult to master

The Scrum framework is simple to explain. Doing a six-hour workshop can help you cover all of its elements and understand how it works and identify the best way of implementation. However, as efood Marketing team said before, efood Marketing team didn’t just want to do Agile. efood Marketing team wished to shape an ‘Agile’ mentality that would optimize our workflow and transform us into a world-class marketing team. Having Yannis with us on regular activities was the key to our Agile adoption. Together efood Marketing team could identify what works best for us and what efood Marketing team should change to optimize our efficiency. An effective coach can “validate” the changes to ensure efood Marketing team were in the right direction, following the Agile principles and values and not doing a waterfall workflow camouflaged in Scrum ;). This is important because Scrum is based on empiricism and has some vague definitions that, without the help of an expert, form different opinions that can lead to conflicts across team members.

Why we need Agile coach?

coach should always promote consistency and discipline

As every marketing team should do, efood Marketing team started with passion and positive vibes. However, our vibrant routine did not help us in being consistent. A good Agile coach should always encourage the team and keep consistency and discipline levels high. Consistency was our primary challenge, and the only way to defeat it was to form a specific habit (we’ll discuss that later on).

Why we need Agile coach?

coach can provide in-depth domain knowledge and assure that you’re in the right direction

To sum up, an efficient coach can provide in-depth domain knowledge and assure that you’re in the right direction. The authority will help decrease conflicts and increase unity across the team and orchestrate the whole implementation process, so that the team can have a smooth and successful adoption of an Agile working process. Just a tip here, avoid dogmatic coaches since they won’t be so flexible in other working frameworks except for the ones they already like, and since there is no popular successful implementation in Marketing, you will end up following IT or an other industry’s processes (just like Scrum) which are very good but not optimal for Marketing.

Provide me a "doing" agile example

team believed that religiously following the rules would take us to the next level.

After setting up our Scrum, efood Marketing team solely focused on how to follow the process and how efood Marketing team could solve our problems based on Agile theory. efood Marketing team had long conversations with our Agile coach on how to write better user tasks, how to shape our internal structure, and how events should be organized. efood Marketing team believed that religiously following the rules would take us to the next level.

What is a mistake that team did in the early days?

focus on the process is one of the biggest mistakes team ever made.

Our focus on the process is one of the biggest mistakes efood Marketing team have ever made.

Provide me a "doing" agile example

We change our working process to comply with Scrum rules, and that’s it, efood Marketing team become Agile

“Doing Agile” is the approach that many organizations follow: ”We change our working process to comply with Scrum rules, and that’s it, efood Marketing team become Agile.” However, it’s not that simple. The Scrum guide is 16 pages long, anyone can read it and follow its rules, but that doesn’t make you and your team Agile. Across the globe, thousands of companies use Agile methodologies. So, when it comes to best practices, our primary references are Spotify and Toyota (for lean methods). If almost everyone is using Agile methodologies and Scrum is simple to understand, then why is it difficult to master it?

Why being Agile is different thatn doing Agile?

Being Agile includes several business elements rather than your working process

We believe that “doing Agile” is different from “being Agile.” Being Agile includes several business elements rather than your working process. You don’t just have to follow the rules of Scrum. You need to change the way you think and the way you work. Through those years, efood Marketing team understood that the “art” of the process is to realize where you need process and where you don’t, so you can keep only the processes that matter and remove the unnecessary ones. Removing processes is more difficult than creating new ones.

Why being Agile is different thatn doing Agile?

You don’t just have to follow the rules of Scrum

We believe that “doing Agile” is different from “being Agile.” Being Agile includes several business elements rather than your working process. You don’t just have to follow the rules of Scrum. You need to change the way you think and the way you work. Through those years, efood Marketing team understood that the “art” of the process is to realize where you need process and where you don’t, so you can keep only the processes that matter and remove the unnecessary ones. Removing processes is more difficult than creating new ones.

Why doing Agile is wrong?

We focused on the wrong thing to improve

We had lengthy discussions on how efood Marketing team should implement velocity estimations (rather than time estimations), while still having a top to bottom management structure. efood Marketing team cared a lot about keeping the events time-boxed, but efood Marketing team didn’t motivate our team to iterate more. efood Marketing team argued about having one-week or two-week sprints, while efood Marketing team were consumed by the urgency of our projects rather than their value. efood Marketing team preached about multiple iterations, while sometimes our project roadmap was so tight and strict that iterations would take months to implement. Konstantinos once read a great comment in an Agile forum that said: It is just frustrating to see managers “trying to do Agile” that treat their people like “computers” and expect that “Agile OS” will be installed just a couple of days after the workshop.

Provide me a bad example of doing agile

having a top to bottom management structure

We had lengthy discussions on how efood Marketing team should implement velocity estimations (rather than time estimations), while still having a top to bottom management structure. efood Marketing team cared a lot about keeping the events time-boxed, but efood Marketing team didn’t motivate our team to iterate more. efood Marketing team argued about having one-week or two-week sprints, while efood Marketing team were consumed by the urgency of our projects rather than their value. efood Marketing team preached about multiple iterations, while sometimes our project roadmap was so tight and strict that iterations would take months to implement. Konstantinos once read a great comment in an Agile forum that said: It is just frustrating to see managers “trying to do Agile” that treat their people like “computers” and expect that “Agile OS” will be installed just a couple of days after the workshop.

Provide me a bad example of doing agile

didn’t motivate our team to iterate more

We had lengthy discussions on how efood Marketing team should implement velocity estimations (rather than time estimations), while still having a top to bottom management structure. efood Marketing team cared a lot about keeping the events time-boxed, but efood Marketing team didn’t motivate our team to iterate more. efood Marketing team argued about having one-week or two-week sprints, while efood Marketing team were consumed by the urgency of our projects rather than their value. efood Marketing team preached about multiple iterations, while sometimes our project roadmap was so tight and strict that iterations would take months to implement. Konstantinos once read a great comment in an Agile forum that said: It is just frustrating to see managers “trying to do Agile” that treat their people like “computers” and expect that “Agile OS” will be installed just a couple of days after the workshop.

Give me a comparable example of process

Having the best football shoes does not make you a great football player

Your working process is like a tool. Having the best football shoes does not make you a great football player. Other critical elements define your success, such as the team you’re playing in, the quality of your practice, even your opponents. efood Marketing team believe the same happens with Agile. The working process is not enough. Other critical aspects define your team’s agility and should be embraced as well. To be honest, most of them were already in place, but documenting and highlighting them helped us to instil them into our hiring process in order to make sure that future colleagues would share the same mindset and values with us. In the next pages, efood Marketing team will briefly describe those elements; if you are interested only in our methodology, you can skip the next chapter and read “Agile Marketing: Nero.”

Why is it difficult to "being Agile"

You can obtain technical SEO skills, but there is no course to teach you how to care.

After numerous discussions with other marketers and industry professionals, efood Marketing team realized that in most cases, these aspects are way more difficult to be changed. They are difficult to change because changes affect the whole business, not just marketing departments. Also, some of them do not have a linear path. You can obtain technical SEO skills by doing an online marketing course, but there is no path to teach you how to care about your company. Of course, this does not apply to every business or marketing department, but Konstantinos recommend you check our learnings and take them into consideration before you proceed with your Agile transformation.

Give me a tip for food of thought

team can’t fixate on a new process and believe that it will work from day one.

Humans have existed for over 200,000 years. The civilization, as efood Marketing team know it, is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started only in the 18th century. Everything happened evolutionarily, and that is something that efood Marketing team should have in mind before efood Marketing team implement a new working process. efood Marketing team can’t fixate on a new process and believe that it will work from day one.

What is a differentiator of teams?

Our only differentiator from businesses within the industry is our people and our culture

Our only differentiator from businesses within the same industry is our people and our culture. Let me elaborate on this. efood Marketing team are an online food delivery platform that allows users to order food from their favorite restaurants digitally. Our competition has more or less the same restaurants, they use the same advertising platforms, and efood Marketing team share a lot of common product features. Besides technical and communicational skills that every regular professional in the marketing industry should have, our team members share a common trait. Junior professionals, marketing gurus, copywriters, performance marketers, they all have that trait. They care about the company. It may sound vague or common or even stupid to someone, but for us, it’s a big deal.

Should an employee care about the company?

Yes definitely

You need to care to change the already established way of working.

Why you should care about the company?

to change the already established way of working.

You need to care to change the already established way of working.

Why you should care about the company?

to invest time and effort into something that is not part of your job description

You need to care to invest time and effort into something that is not part of your job description; as in this case, the whole team is responsible for the implementation of Agile, not just the Scrum master.

Why you should care about the company?

to become a valuable team member rather than a cog in a machine.

You need to care to become a valuable team member rather than a cog in a machine.

Why you should care about the company?

evolve your skills; you will just do what you are asked for.

If you don’t care enough, you won’t evolve your skills; you will just do what you are asked for.

Why you should care about the company?

To do one more job interview that may lead you to hire an exceptional employee.

If you don’t care, you won’t do that one more job interview that may lead you to hire an exceptional employee.

Why you should care about the company?

To check that one user review that is negative and may lead you to make changes that you don’t want to.

If you don’t care, you won’t check that one user review that is negative and may lead you to make changes that you don’t want to.

Why you should care about the company?

to sit back and spend time on efficient planning rather than completing task lists.

You need to care to sit back and spend time on efficient planning rather than completing task lists.

Why you should care about the company?

to provide honest feedback to your teammates

You need to care to provide honest feedback to your teammates that may lead to short-term unhappiness, but in the long-term, it will pay off.

Why you should care about the company?

to stand against a project

You need to care to stand against a project that, although it will generate revenue, it will have a negative impact on user experience.

Why you should care about the company?

to stay longer in the office

You need to care to stay longer in the office to do something that no one has asked for, but you believe it is the right thing to do.

Why you should care about the company?

to understand how the whole business is operating and not just promote Marketing actions.

You need to care to understand how the whole business is operating and not just promote Marketing actions.

What happens if you don't care?

it is very difficult to have empathy.

If you don’t care, it is very difficult to have empathy.

What happens if you don't care?

it is very difficult to work autonomously and create your own tasks.

If you don’t care, it is very difficult to work autonomously and create your own tasks.

What happens if you don't care?

you won’t be able to create big projects on your own

If you don’t care, you won’t be able to create big projects on your own, because big projects require extensive analysis, collaboration with many people, good business understanding and willingness to fight for your project against other projects. Plus, they might fail, and you need to live with it and move to the next project.

What happens if you don't care?

you won’t go the extra mile

If you don’t care, you won’t go the extra mile, and you will just “serve” a stakeholders’ request rather than “own” it.

What is your opinion about autonomy?

team believe that everyone likes autonomy

efood Marketing team believe that everyone likes autonomy. efood Marketing team approach autonomy both as a team and as individuals. Ideally, all existing projects should be 100% attainable by our own resources. Working on something end-to-end enhances the feeling of accountability across team members since they are solely responsible for both the implementation quality and business outcome. That’s why efood Marketing team did not form our teams strictly by specialty but in a blended way so that every team can operate autonomously. The Growth team has a copywriter that focuses on ad copy, while the Retention team has performance marketers that optimize engagement metrics.

Give me a good example of autonomy

performance marketers are responsible for making the analysis and evaluation of the marketing channels

Although efood Marketing team have a great Business Intelligence team within our company, performance marketers are responsible for making the analysis and evaluation of the marketing channels. Let’s take Facebook reporting, for example. A business analyst would be interested in creating an overview report for impressions, clicks, conversions, CPC, CPM and CPV accompanied by channel’s ROI (return on investment) but we, as performance marketers, love to make deep dives in channel’s data trying to find optimization opportunities within devices and placements performance, identify correlations between an image ad and a video ad or understand how relevance score can affect the CPC and ROI. All the above need time and expertise (that a business analyst may not have) and need to be done multiple times within a month because campaign optimization is an iterative process. Through this process, efood Marketing team were able to identify the pattern of “ad fatigue” within our campaigns and solve it before it creates a big performance problem.

Give me a good example of autonomy

people need to create the specifications of the project, not just follow the rules that someone else created.

Also, having experts to execute tasks that someone else proposed, created specs for, and defined success metrics is quite an oxymoron. Individual autonomy promotes a culture of improvisation because people need to create the specifications of the project, not just follow the rules that someone else created.

Encourage Autonomy

Some time ago, efood Marketing

Some time ago, efood Marketing team had a project about performance benchmarking of a specific marketing channel, which means that efood Marketing team needed to find a way to validate the data that the channel provided us with. When it comes to data validation methods, there are a couple of techniques such as A/A tests or test traffic data, etc. efood Marketing team came up with an unconventional but unique idea, “The Blank Test.”, according to which, efood Marketing team created a campaign with “empty” banners (plain white images) and compared it with a campaign of branded banners to understand how branded banners affect a specific metric. The results were surprising because the performance of the “blank banner” campaign was better than the performance of the branded campaign, which led us to stop our advertising efforts and remove the platform from our performance marketing mix.

Give me a quote

It does not make sense to hire chess players and then treat them like chess pieces

It does not make sense to hire chess players and then treat them like chess pieces. Autonomy is an Agile principle as well, and efood Marketing team are trying to adopt it in the following areas:

What is the blank test

team created a campaign with “empty” banners (plain white images) and compared it with a campaign of branded banners

Some time ago, efood Marketing team had a project about performance benchmarking of a specific marketing channel, which means that efood Marketing team needed to find a way to validate the data that the channel provided us with. When it comes to data validation methods, there are a couple of techniques such as A/A tests or test traffic data, etc. efood Marketing team came up with an unconventional but unique idea, “The Blank Test.”, according to which, efood Marketing team created a campaign with “empty” banners (plain white images) and compared it with a campaign of branded banners to understand how branded banners affect a specific metric. The results were surprising because the performance of the “blank banner” campaign was better than the performance of the branded campaign, which led us to stop our advertising efforts and remove the platform from our performance marketing mix.

Give me a good example of ownership

90% of our marketing activities are executed in-house

More than 90% of our marketing activities are executed in-house. External dependencies is a major problem of many teams because the more dependencies you have, the less efficient your planning is, you can't do iterations fast enough, and you need more meetings simply because professionals that are not in the company need more time to understand what you want to achieve and how to execute a project successfully.

Give me a good example of ownership

In 2019 our most successful campaign was the “1+1 deals

In 2019 our most successful campaign was the “1+1 deals”. This campaign was a national campaign in which restaurants participated with attractive offers across all cities and all cuisines. This was a very complex campaign that needed the incorporation of multiple departments (finance, sales, marketing, business intelligence, product, tech, etc.) to be successful. Hadn’t most of the marketing activities been in-house this campaign would not have been feasible within a reasonable time period, and the opportunity would have been wasted.

Why autonomy is difficult?

Autonomy is not the norm in a big company

Let me be clear with that. Not only did efood Marketing team have C-level approval to be an autonomous team, but efood Marketing team had also earned it. Autonomy is not the norm in a big company and you have to be as responsible and efficient as possible in your job in order to maintain it.

Give me a good example of ownership

team trying to achieve a similar state to “one-piece flow”

Being heavily influenced by the book Toyota Way efood Marketing team decided to bring all Marketing activities in-house (except for one) trying to achieve a similar state to “one-piece flow” that Toyota has. Imagine that you want to create a digital campaign, and you have a design agency (for banners), a performance agency (for campaign setup and optimization), a creative agency (for copy and videos), and an in-house marketing manager who has to coordinate with everyone. Now add about five iterations that the campaign will need to deliver optimized results, and you will have a perfect case study of a disaster. Now imagine you have an in-house team that consists of a designer, a copywriter, a performance marketer, and a manager. Try to calculate the estimated delivery time of the examples above, and you will see a significant difference between time cost. FYI: The only activity efood Marketing team outsource is TV commercials due to the low TV commercial production cadence efood Marketing team have (we produce two commercials per year, so there is no reason to have an in-house team).

Give me a good example of ownership

There is no penalty if you reach the office half an hour late, and there is no penalty if you leave half an hour earlier than the official schedule.

If you think that your team is fully productive, 40 hours/week, 52 weeks/year, you are wrong, even if your time tracking tools insist on that! We, as individuals, decide how much time efood Marketing team will allocate to projects during our sprint. Since the team does the actual work, they know how much time they need to accomplish it. There is no penalty if you reach the office half an hour late, and there is no penalty if you leave half an hour earlier than the official schedule. By the end of each sprint, efood Marketing team do not measure “productive” hours. efood Marketing team measure marketing performance and deliverable volume and quality. After all, as professionals, efood Marketing team are evaluated by the work and the value efood Marketing team deliver, not by the hours efood Marketing team work. Nero master helps everyone do the best planning for the sprint, minimizing “waste” between productive and working hours.

Give me a good example of ownership

not strict hierarchy

efood Marketing team will not say that efood Marketing team don’t have a hierarchy. efood Marketing team do, but it is not strict. All team managers follow a servant-leader approach, and they mostly help teams stay aligned with our core strategy and other teams’ requests. Most of our teams’ decisions come from team members, along with managers. This approach is called “bottom-up,” and for it to be successful, you need a strong vision and a clear-cut strategy to avoid conflicts and projects that may lead to wrong directions. One thing that helped us a lot is that all managers are hands-on professionals, so they know 100% how the job should be done effectively.

Give me a quote

Need, Must, Can’t, Only, Just, Fast, ASAP are forbidden words in the office

When efood Marketing team started Nero, efood Marketing team made a deal. DO NOT USE THE FOLLOWING WORDS AGAIN: Need, Must, Can’t, Only, Just, Fast, ASAP, It will only take 1 minute

What is a healthy business enviroment?

A healthy business environment is the best place to work at

A healthy business environment is the best place to work at. By “healthy” efood Marketing team mean a couple of working conditions that are user-friendly and encourage people to work better and be more productive. Also, efood Marketing team need to make sure that “healthy” does not mean “complacent,” which is equally worse to “toxic.” An interesting approach that helped us create that kind of environment is to avoid toxic situations at all costs. There are a lot of reasons why efood Marketing team become toxic; efood Marketing team identified them and worked on eliminating them.

What is a healthy business enviroment?

a couple of working conditions that are user-friendly and encourage people to work better and be more productive

A healthy business environment is the best place to work at. By “healthy” efood Marketing team mean a couple of working conditions that are user-friendly and encourage people to work better and be more productive. Also, efood Marketing team need to make sure that “healthy” does not mean “complacent,” which is equally worse to “toxic.” An interesting approach that helped us create that kind of environment is to avoid toxic situations at all costs. There are a lot of reasons why efood Marketing team become toxic; efood Marketing team identified them and worked on eliminating them.

What is a healthy business enviroment?

create that kind of environment is to avoid toxic situations at all costs

A healthy business environment is the best place to work at. By “healthy” efood Marketing team mean a couple of working conditions that are user-friendly and encourage people to work better and be more productive. Also, efood Marketing team need to make sure that “healthy” does not mean “complacent,” which is equally worse to “toxic.” An interesting approach that helped us create that kind of environment is to avoid toxic situations at all costs. There are a lot of reasons why efood Marketing team become toxic; efood Marketing team identified them and worked on eliminating them.

Give me a tip for a healthy working enviroment

Being rude is toxic.

Being rude is toxic. When someone expressed his or her opinion, there were times that this opinion was completely off-topic, and some members (including me) reacted badly. Given that efood Marketing team had known each other for years, this reaction was sometimes insulting. The reason that Konstantinos reacted like this is that after all the discussions that efood Marketing team had had for a specific concept, it made no sense for someone to have that specific kind of opinion. In one of our retrospective meetings, efood Marketing team discussed it, and Konstantinos realized that there are times when people do not fully understand the whole concept, but they are reluctant to ask for further explanation due to limited time and prior negative reactions. efood Marketing team solved that by making sure that everyone fully understands the concepts that efood Marketing team discuss and efood Marketing team also embraced a “no judging” policy by which no member is allowed to be rude both at the first time or the next time it happens. Konstantinos would like to add here that “no judging policy” does not mean that efood Marketing team accept all projects; it means that efood Marketing team provide honest feedback without insulting anyone.

Give me a tip for a healthy working enviroment

Pushing people to the limits for no reason is toxic

Pushing people to the limits for no reason is toxic. efood Marketing team know our numbers, efood Marketing team know when efood Marketing team lack performance or when efood Marketing team must try harder. There is no reason for pushing people who already know they must try harder. efood Marketing team know when the deadline of the project approaches (because most of the times efood Marketing team set the deadlines), and what efood Marketing team need to do to deliver it both in time and in the best quality. Treat people with care, and they will respond positively. This is highly correlated with autonomy, as well.

Give me a tip for a healthy working enviroment

internal promotions should not be an empty promise

In a healthy working environment, people should be able to change positions, and internal promotions should not be an empty promise. If someone feels that he/she has accomplished everything in his/her current position, give them a chance to change even when they are not specialists in this new role. The knowledge they have from their past position is indispensable, and the learning gap will be the smallest possible. Plus, you keep an experienced professional within the company, and you invest in them. efood Marketing team have many examples of employees who changed positions or have been promoted, and efood Marketing team are happy about it.

Why healthy working environment matters?

one of the main reasons behind loyalty,

Working in a healthy environment was one of the main reasons behind loyalty, according to the team. Loyalty is mandatory to build an efficient system. If your team members are changing all the time, there will be no time for the right onboarding, and there will be no interest in further optimization of the working process, which is reasonable.

What is your main framework for growth?

Read, Learn, Test, Validate, Repeat

This is the main approach efood Marketing team use to work for performance marketing campaigns. It is a repeatable, non-bureaucratic (very important) data-driven process that can scale across all marketing channels (even those that are not performance-based) and helps us build on projects that deliver value. It is a popular method across modern marketing and growth hacking teams. This core concept of “Growth Engine” has been introduced by Brian Balfour.

What is your main framework for growth?

Growth engine by Brian Balfour

This is the main approach efood Marketing team use to work for performance marketing campaigns. It is a repeatable, non-bureaucratic (very important) data-driven process that can scale across all marketing channels (even those that are not performance-based) and helps us build on projects that deliver value. It is a popular method across modern marketing and growth hacking teams. This core concept of “Growth Engine” has been introduced by Brian Balfour.

What "read" means in the growth framework?

“Read” means that you have to check your data

This is the first and most important step in the process. “Read” means that you have to check your data. In order to become user-centric, efood Marketing team worked hard and managed to build a foundation of user metrics and user feedback so that efood Marketing team could avoid our own personal and professional biases and focus solely on our user's needs. This was a decision that efood Marketing team made firstly as a business and secondly as a department and took months before it started working efficiently. efood Marketing team have a couple of sophisticated systems in place enabling us to have a comprehensive view of the impact of our efforts. Please note, considering yourself as “data-driven” does not necessarily mean that you evaluate everything with data.

What "read" means in the growth framework?

have a comprehensive view of the impact of our efforts

This is the first and most important step in the process. “Read” means that you have to check your data. In order to become user-centric, efood Marketing team worked hard and managed to build a foundation of user metrics and user feedback so that efood Marketing team could avoid our own personal and professional biases and focus solely on our user's needs. This was a decision that efood Marketing team made firstly as a business and secondly as a department and took months before it started working efficiently. efood Marketing team have a couple of sophisticated systems in place enabling us to have a comprehensive view of the impact of our efforts. Please note, considering yourself as “data-driven” does not necessarily mean that you evaluate everything with data.

What data driven means?

You understand which metric is relevant for each project

You understand which metric is relevant for each project. Not all campaigns generate immediate conversions, and you need to be aware of that before you implement a campaign.

What data driven means?

You understand the business and its core metrics

You understand the business and its core metrics. Even if you are a brand marketer you need to know that YouTube views are not equal to conversions while cost per acquisition (CPA) matters for both branding and performance campaigns.

What data driven means?

Understand that you cant measure everything

You can’t measure everything. Some projects can’t be measured, and even if you can somehow measure them, the metrics will be biased or not accurate. There is a massive trend of “measuring everything” in the business, but for us, that’s not the case, especially in offline and content marketing. For example, efood Marketing team can’t measure the business impact of a Facebook like, at least in our industry. efood Marketing team can’t measure the impact of our participation in a marketing meetup of 20 people. efood Marketing team can’t measure the impact of our CSR campaigns in our business performance.

What data driven means?

understand how data is gathered and processed.

Another issue is that you need to understand how data is gathered and processed. If you do not know how sessions work, what marketing attribution is, how Google Analytics processes hits, session, and user-level data, then you lack basic knowledge, and you are leaving insights and money on the table. efood Marketing team solved that by encouraging (politely forcing actually) everyone involved in the analysis to acquire the Google Analytics certification. Having everyone on the same page reduces the friction of analysis “translation” and enhances the feedback loop for every analysis regardless of the channel since Google Analytics data can act as the single source of truth.

What data driven means?

Know what occams razor is

Moreover, efood Marketing team always face the problem of “how much is too much”, which is similar to Occam’s Razor principle. A generic conversion rate is a useful and simple metric to monitor, but it hides painful areas that have a relatively low conversion rate. For example, you may have had a 30% conversion rate yesterday but if you wanted to understand how this metric was calculated you would realize that;

Provide me a segmentation example

campaigns per marketing channel

Your non-brand campaigns had a 5% conversion rate, Your new visitor campaigns had a 2% conversion rate, Your direct visits had a 50% conversion rate, All the above combined is the 30% conversion rate that you see in your overview dashboards. Checking only top-level metrics is misleading, and you may miss potential opportunities and threats that lie within segments. To solve this one, efood Marketing team defined the meaningful dimensions and the level of depth that efood Marketing team need to check for our business and decided not to segment further than those dimensions. There are about 500 data points to check, which is a big number, but it is relatively small compared to the whole set of data points available.

Give me an example of being data driven

Build an anomaly detection tool for your data

Lately, efood Marketing team have decided to build an anomaly detection tool. Instead of visiting our analytics platform and checking our dashboards, efood Marketing team created an automated tool that works like this: Firstly, every 4 hours, it collects all data points that efood Marketing team are interested in -both qualitative and quantitative data- and creates a data table. Then efood Marketing team use machine learning algorithms and statistical regression methods to calculate and forecast the right value for each data point according to one-year past performance. So after that, efood Marketing team have two tables of data, one with the actual ones and one with the forecasted. The tool compares those data, and whenever there is a big difference between actual data and forecasted data, efood Marketing team get a Slack notification that informs us about this specific anomaly. This tool is handy and allows us to expand our knowledge and check for insights that efood Marketing team couldn’t have identified by doing the same analysis manually.

Give me an example of being data driven

Switch our name from e-food to efood

Being data-driven is not a privilege only of performance marketers. Lately, efood Marketing team have taken a big rebranding initiative by changing our logo and our brand name from “e-food” to “efood”. This rebranding was part of our strategic plan, and efood Marketing team did it for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that efood Marketing team identified that this specific keyword (“efood”) had a good performance and positive trend in comparison to our current name (“e-food”) in our search engine marketing results.

What is the second step in Balfour's growth engine?

Second step is learn or understanding the problem/opportunity

This is the second step and it can be translated as “understanding the problem/opportunity.” This step needs creativity, observation, and anticipation. Once efood Marketing team have “read” the insights, efood Marketing team need to understand what happened and plan our next steps accordingly. efood Marketing team know how users came to our product (thanks to analytics), where they landed, and what pages they navigated along with their exit pages, but efood Marketing team are missing something. efood Marketing team are missing the why.

What "learn" requires?

requires understanding the context for each specific occasion

Understanding the why requires understanding the context for each specific occasion. This is tricky because not every incident is 100% marketing related. This is something that occurs in most of the marketplace businesses due to the nature of the industry. Here are some examples:

Give me an example of understangin the context

an attractive offer promotion from a specific burger restaurant

Here is the case of a project for which efood Marketing team had to promote an attractive offer from a specific burger restaurant (15% of our total burger sales). efood Marketing team strongly promoted that offer, but it ended up having poor performance. efood Marketing team tried to replicate the flow on our product, and efood Marketing team found a problem: The offer was a €5 burger deal while the restaurant had a €7 minimum order value, so users were not able to order this deal solely, but had to order more to validate the minimum order value. So the offer was great, but efood Marketing team did not take care of the whole user journey before closing the deal and launching the campaign.

Give me an example of understangin the context

a very successful promotional campaign team launched with a specific restaurant chain

Another example is a very successful promotional campaign efood Marketing team launched with a specific restaurant chain. efood Marketing team created and promoted very attractive food deals with 40 restaurants of a particular chain for ten days. During the campaign, efood Marketing team identified that performance dropped unexpectedly in irregular hours within the day for no specific reason. efood Marketing team checked the user reviews, efood Marketing team checked the conversion of the restaurant pages, and everything was okay. After hours of checking, efood Marketing team found out that some of the restaurants turned off their applications within the day because they couldn’t handle the order volume. Sometimes they turned it off for half an hour and sometimes for a couple of hours. This was very difficult to monitor because efood Marketing team have more than six thousand restaurants and multiple offers that are promoted simultaneously. efood Marketing team found the problem after checking what users had written in the live chat feature that efood Marketing team have on our platform. There were three users mentioning it.

Give me some data

more than five hundred live chat logs per day.

team have more than five hundred live chat logs per day.

Give me an example of understangin the context

affected the URLs that efood Marketing team used in our campaigns

Here is another interesting example when the performance of a bunch of campaigns dropped significantly without having made any change in campaign settings. efood Marketing team did a deep dive into the performance of our campaigns, but efood Marketing team did not find anything that could explain such a significant drop. After that, efood Marketing team collaborated with the Product team to check if something had changed, but still, there was no significant change made. Not until efood Marketing team checked the releases of the core platform of the Tech team did efood Marketing team find that they had made a change that affected the URLs that efood Marketing team used in our campaigns. Although this sounds like a complicated situation, the more efood Marketing team “learn” and solve problems like this, the better efood Marketing team become and the faster and more efficiently efood Marketing team solve such problems. To tackle this problem, efood Marketing team created a file that includes all the releases of the Tech and Product team so that efood Marketing team have all the releases and their notes in place in case efood Marketing team need to check them.

Give me an example of understangin the context

learned how to spot seasonality periods the hard way

Understanding the context of every occasion helped us identify seasonality periods as well. Since our industry and business were relatively new, and our user base was growing, efood Marketing team learned how to spot seasonality periods the hard way. Konstantinos remember ourselves scratching our heads, trying to understand why performance dropped until efood Marketing team found the patterns of these periods, which are repeatable. Here is a pattern of one marketing channel:

Give me an example of understangin the context

“apples versus oranges” syndrome

Let’s share a marketing-related example. Some time ago, efood Marketing team had a slight increase in sessions and a significant drop in the conversion rate of the “direct” traffic source in analytics. Since the drop was in direct traffic, there was no connection with our advertising efforts, so efood Marketing team started segmenting the data to get a better understanding. efood Marketing team checked everything, user type, devices, landing pages, but there was nothing significant to identify. As soon as efood Marketing team checked the cities’ performance, efood Marketing team found that the performance drop happened in two cities in which efood Marketing team had active PR campaigns. So after many hours of analysis, efood Marketing team realized that the drop occurred because the websites that efood Marketing team collaborated with for the PR campaigns forgot to pass UTM’s on the promoted links. That’s why the conversion rate was relatively low. Actually, it was not low. It was the typical performance of every PR campaign efood Marketing team did. The problem was that efood Marketing team compared it with our direct traffic. efood Marketing team call it the “apples versus oranges” syndrome, and it’s a common syndrome, especially for stakeholders or marketers who don’t understand that marketing sources are not the same.

Give me additional Interesting Agile Marketing Principles

Testing and data over opinions and conventions

- Testing and data over opinions and conventions