Don't expect your organization to adopt a new strategy uniformly. Apply the 'Crossing the Chasm' model internally: identify early adopters to champion the change, then methodically win over the early majority and laggards. This manages expectations and improves strategic alignment across the company.

Innovation leaders struggle to secure resources. A powerful tactic is to have VPs align on their long-term strategic goals, identify overlaps, and then dedicate cross-functional teams to these shared priorities. This creates executive buy-in and carves out protected capacity for innovation.

Adopt engineering methodologies like sprints, story points, and capacity dashboards for marketing operations. This provides the data needed to manage stakeholder expectations, prioritize requests transparently, and move the team from reactive order-takers to strategic partners with a defensible roadmap.

True agility isn't just about sprints; it's psychological. By breaking massive projects into minimal viable products (MVPs) or small features, the team creates a steady stream of "quick wins." This builds a sense of progress and happiness—a "dopamine type of reward"—that keeps the wheel of innovation turning and prevents teams from getting bogged down.

Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.

Go beyond visual roadmaps. Create a monthly written document for executives that explains *why* the roadmap changed, details priorities, and includes data from recent launches. This forces intentionality, builds trust, and fosters deeper, more accountable conversations with leadership.

Constant, raw speed leads to burnout. A more effective operational model uses "pace"—a sustainable level of high performance—and "intervals," which are targeted sprints for key initiatives. This approach allows an organization to maintain long-term momentum without exhausting its team.

Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.

Forcing innovations to "scale" via top-down mandates often fails by robbing local teams of ownership. A better approach is to let good ideas "spread." If a solution is truly valuable, other teams will naturally adopt it. This pull-based model ensures change sticks and evolves.