This episode of Decoded, featuring Google’s Neil Hoyne and Optimove’s Pini Yakuel, is a timely conversation on adaptability, organizational design, and the risks of doing nothing. It’s for marketers, strategists, and business leaders to ask a fundamental question: What will it take to become a faster, more customer-connected team, without losing control?
In a world shaped by AI, change fatigue, and customer expectations that evolve faster than most roadmaps, marketers face a dilemma: How do you keep moving forward when nothing feels certain? Worse, how do you avoid standing still when the playbook you’ve always used no longer applies?
How do you market when no one knows what is coming next?
Neil Hoyne, author of Converted and Chief Strategist at Google, paints a picture many marketers will recognize. “Marketing teams don’t just bake bread; they are bread,” he says. “It’s not just what they do; it’s who they’ve become.”
“Tactics are multipliers, not miracles.”
Hoyne takes it further: “If your strategy is ‘use AI better than the competition,’ you don’t have a strategy.” Real innovation, they agree, doesn’t start with tools. It starts with a new way of thinking.
That new way means challenging legacy beliefs, especially the worship of specialization. “We’ve gone too far into specialization,” Hoyne says. “It’s time to bring back the craftsman.”
Together, Hoyne and Yakuel sketch a vision for a new kind of marketing team: agile, experimental, connected to outcomes, not inputs. Not just fast for the sake of speed, but humans, in their intuition, can shift from bread to cupcakes before anyone else even sees the trend coming.
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The problem? When customers shift, teams don’t. “So, when customers want cupcakes instead, they miss it entirely. Because they weren’t watching the customer. They were defending the bread.”
Pini Yakuel, Optimove’s founder and CEO, agrees and sees the root of the problem in the industrial-era assembly line. Most marketing departments are optimized for consistency, not adaptability. “Positionless isn’t binary,” he says. “Can you let a team own 10% of something, start to finish?” In a world that requires speed and nuance, even small changes can make a difference.
But even with flexibility, many teams fall into the trap of over-relying on tactics, especially AI. “Accelerate what already works,” Yakuel cautions.
In Summary
Listen to the episode now to hear how some of the world’s most forward-thinking companies are breaking through inertia.
To learn how your team can avoid being paralyzed in times of uncertainty and become Positionless, don’t stay stuck, contact us to request a demo.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
