This is an interview in GeeX Review magazine, the first developer magazine in MEA, you can read the full edition : Geex Review "Women in Tech"
GeexReview readers want to discover your journey, can you tell us how everything started?
Well..my entry point into tech has nothing to do with tech skills as well as my background that has absolutely nothing to do with it, you can say that I’m from a different world but this remains just a detail, It only takes continuous learning to grow and clear life goals to flourish
What challenges have you faced being a woman in a world traditionally led by men?
To be honest, I have been through a lot of challenges but let’s say that my focus was not about that, for me the only place where we can talk about the difference between a man or woman is in the Moroccan Hammam :D.
It is worth sharing that Morocco records one of the largest women's graduation rates in the field of engineering. According to a recent UNESCO study, women make up 42.2% of total engineering graduates in the country, it’s huge and we are very proud of our girls rocking their roles.
But let's say from a personnel point of view the fact of being a man or a woman changes nothing after all we are humans!. Values, perseverance, clear goals, and consistency are key points that make every individual stand out and shine.
What was your biggest challenge in xHub and the IT field ?
My biggest challenge was to create a balance between a completely different field to me & my background, I wanted to take benefits from this world and the results were magical. I have always been mesmerised by human behavior & psychology and since I’m in a tech company my focus was about exploring and interacting with techos, since day one my goal was and still building the best place for developers in Morocco and Africa, I dedicated myself to make the developers world shine, for me every developer has an entrepreneur deep down in her/his soul and beyond all the stereotypes about developers as they are geeks, nerds, etc.. the truth of the matter is they are the ones who push decision-makers to success
What’s your current role & goals?
Today I’m having more focus on Marketing & customer engagement, I’m taking benefits & the luck of being surrounded by brilliants developers & trying to take in advantage the best of their logical methodologies to raise the company brand awareness, in order to be engaged with customers & African developers communities, & that’s why in 2020 I had a clear goal to turn my team 100% Agile, & manage all the Marketing projects with Agile.
Wait wait, what? Agile Marketing? this is a 100% software development methodology, how come?
Well, had the same exact reaction when I was reading an article about it, it's just fascinating how the tech world can help every single discipline in a way or another, adopting Agile is an amazing Marketing step to take in order to scale up your business
So what is Agile Marketing?
Agile Marketing is a business practice that allows companies to make the right decision to grow at a fast pace & raise brand awareness with maximum optimization. It’s a process that smart marketers are using at every touchpoint with the customer life cycle.
Agile aims to deliver business value regularly providing visibility and reducing risk.
In the case of marketing, instead of spending 6 months preparing for a campaign roadmap for a new project or product launch, agile marketing-driven teams have the ability to deliver better results within just a few weeks, in this equation agile marketers create valuable deliveries having more focus on creativity & goals while gathering immediate feedback on their performance for iterative cycles. This approach has shown some great results that can level up business performance in a smart and efficient way!
What are the steps to turn a Marketing team 100% Agile?
There is no magical recipe for it, but the following steps can help you
write your way into agile marketing for sure:
- Convince your team, they need to believe that this is an amazing opportunity to reach the best of their potential
- Define your projects & their timelines
- Choose a project management tool such as Jira, Trello….etc
- Plan every project sprints with a deadline & well-defined achievements & goals
- Define your project workflow & sprint users stories & sub-tasks
- Scrum it up
- Assign every project to a marketer as PO (project/product owner)
- Hold your stand up meetings
- Hold a sprint review & sprint retrospective
- Publish, test, analyses, iterate & repeat
What are the pros of going Agile?
Indeed agile has shown a variety of benefits to marketing & there are several pros to list, but the following ones are the fruits of agile in our marketing circle
- Improve productivity & creativity
- Ensures quality-quickly delivery
- Adapt to changes in the market
- Reduce missed deadlines
- Having more focus on project purpose & goals
- Analyzing data, A/B testing to adjust & iterate
- Helping us to focus on our users & real audience to create more value & impact
What’s your advice to Marketers who want to get benefits from this amazing methodology ?
Have lunch with your software engineering team :D , learn from them, Adapt or Die :D
Sorry not sorry..but this is the ugly truth the tech world is evolving at a high pace which means that disciplines such as marketing need to keep up with this evolution as much as possible, marketers in the other hand need to take advantage of the exciting methods and tools to adapt it to their context which brings us to the first point we have discussed previously you seriously need to have lunch with ur engineering team! :D
Thank you for this great interview. We are now knowledgeable about both agile marketing and the importance of having lunch with SWE teams xD
Thanks, always happy to meet GeexReview readers, cheers
