Best way to do nation wide marketing?

What is the best way for marketing to work effectively with an agile product dev team?

• Agile product dev. from a marketing perspective means a)features come through faster b)you don't necessarily know the exact size and shape of a feature until later in a cycle. But marketeers traditionally work in waterfall - brief on final features, create messages and materials, translate etc. If marketing used early dev  information before code freeze  it's likely to change the time and cost implications of re-doing can be huge. How do you align the 2 so that the benefits of agile development can be harnessed and not negatively impact marketing resources?

• Answer:

  Working with an agile product dev is fantastic. It's up to you to try and keep up as best you can, and up to them to keep you informed, as much as feasibly possible - but make no mistake, you will have to push them to do so. Keep in mind it is likely that part of what makes the team so agile is exactly that lower bar of 'external duties' such as having to report back to other departments. Raise this with the team and try to find a comfortable in-between that works for all. Take responsibility on keeping up to date - this might mean getting more lunches or water cooler talks with the devs to catch up 'unofficially'. Also, considering the two sided relationship - having a team so quick on their feet means you, on the customer side, can produce a strong impact by prioritizing and delivering customer feedback, which the team can respond to quickly. There's nothing customers love more than to see their feedback has not only been listened to, but heard and adopted. This will buy your company life time fans.