Mastering Sprint Planning: A Survival Guide for Marketing Leaders In B2B Startups

As a marketing leader in an early-stage B2B startup, you have so much on your plate - strategic planning, content creation, design, SEO, social media management, product marketing, building and maintaining the website, RevOps, countless meetings, outbound, inbound, demand generation, lead generation, performance analytics, team management, events, PR, and more.

It’s overwhelming!

How would you prioritize all this?

Every time I joined a startup, after a very short while, I was buried under a mountain of initiatives, requirements, and tasks, and I didn’t know where to start.

After reducing my sleeping hours to the minimum possible to get more stuff done, I was ready to test something more sustainable.

I looked at my product peers and adopted what worked like magic for them - sprint planning.

I’m using the word “magic” because whenever the CEO approached them with a new initiative, they went to their sprint planning board and discussed the priorities. It was always clear that their resources were limited and that if they added another requirement to their scope, it came INSTEAD of a requirement in the current scope.

I’ll walk you through 5 stages to help you manage educated discussions with your CEO. It’s much easier said than done, but the option not to adopt it is not really an option if you want to get some results and decent sleeping hours.

STAGE 1 - Set your OKRs

This is critical. You need to know where you’re going in order to get there.

Set 2-3 objectives for the coming quarter (they must be tied to the business objectives), and then set 2-3 key results for each objective. Keep it as simple as possible.

Here’s a short article I wrote about OKRs: OKRs for Early-Stage B2B Startups

STAGE 2 - List the tasks for each KR

Once you have the key results ready, list all the tasks you need to execute to achieve them.

I usually divide them into these categories: planning, content, design, operations, website, product marketing, social media, analytics, paid advertising, SEO, outbound, and events.

STAGE 3 - Prioritize by NOW / NEXT / LATER

I use this prioritization method because I think it is the easiest to follow, and I’m trying to keep it simple.

Set a priority for each task based on impact and reach. For example, if you have a task to optimize the ad copy of your Google Ads campaign and another to improve the design of your internal Google Slides template, ask yourself which one has more impact and will reach more of your target audience.

I know that was an easy one. In reality, it will be more complex for two main reasons:

1. You’ll have a lot more than two tasks to prioritize.

2. Everything is critical and should have been ready yesterday.

But I hope the concept is clear.

STAGE 4 - Set the due date

This is where resource limitations come into play. Be honest with yourself, your team, and your CEO. You and your team have just X working hours daily, so keep it real.

STAGE 5 - Track progress

I manage 2-week sprints because it gives me the time to plan and execute at a good pace.

I always plan at least two sprints ahead and keep room in each future sprint for the tasks my team and I couldn’t accomplish in the current sprint. Even if you are an amazing planner, execution might be tricky, and not everything is in your control, so things may take longer than you planned.

Sprint management is dynamic and should happen daily according to your progress. You should use it to manage your team’s daily meetings and show the management team how you’re progressing toward your OKRs.

I update the status of each task daily and adjust effort allocation if I notice that some of them are moving slower than expected.

To sum it up

It might look like overhead, and it will be a bit of overhead at the beginning, but if you start now, in just a few quarters, you’ll be a master. Then, whenever the CEO comes to you with a new initiative, you will be able to open your sprint planning board, discuss the priorities, and make better decisions that will allow you to achieve the marketing OKRs.