Improve Pipeline Generation With Scrum

by Kelsey Sparrow | March 11, 2021 | Blog

Monotype, an on-demand digital typesetting and typeface design services company and longtime client, implemented Scrum in their sales teams to maximize their pipeline, improve team culture, and find opportunities to enhance prioritization during the pandemic.

In this article, David Harned, Vice President of Monotype’s Enterprise PMO (Project Management Office), steps through the experiment run by the Monotype sales department. By using the foundational 3-5-3 (3 roles, 5 events, 3 artifacts) structure of Scrum, teams walked away with an improved sales process. The teams experienced increased accountability, transparency, understanding of delivery timelines. The Scrum implementation enabled the teams to have a rapid feedback loop, leading to never before shared learnings and an actionable plan for improvements.

Here's a snapshot of the steps Monotype took:

1. Start with the Why: David met with the Vice President of sales to understand the key considerations for implementing Scrum.
2. Participation: David introduced the Scrum Framework to the sales teams and involved them in a collaborative brainstorming session on how to roll it out within their department.
3. Experiment: Ran Scrum for two Sprints. Identified 5 things that Scrum made more successful & 5 opportunities for improvement that were discovered. 

To learn more about the details of this implementation, read David’s article.

“We [at Monotype] pivoted to Scrum at the beginning of the pandemic and it would have been a very different (and painful) world if we didn’t. We went from underperforming on pipeline generation in Q1 to averaging 117% through April to November.”

– Thanh Hoang (SVP, Americas at Monotype)