[DECODED] Positionless Marketing: Enter the Age of Hyper-Execution

[00:00:11] Phillip: I'm Phillip Jackson, and I have a theory that the future of marketing, it isn't bound by titles or departments or assembly line thinking. It's fluid and dynamic, and most importantly, it's positionless. And in this debut episode of a five part series, we step into a bold new framework for how marketing teams should think about their work and how they win in today's chaotic and ever changing landscape. Welcome to Decoded, a Future Commerce limited series presented this season in partnership with Optimove. And we're joined by my cohost, Pini Yakuel, who's the CEO of Optimove, a new company who draws inspiration from an unlikely place, the basketball court. In a world where seven footers are shooting threes and running plays, Pini saw something bigger, a strategy, a philosophy, and it's a call to arms for marketers everywhere. Positionless marketing isn't just a catchy term. It's a response to the inefficiencies and the bottlenecks and the rigid roles that keep teams from reaching their true potential. And it's about moving at the speed of human intuition and reclaiming the creativity and the data and the execution into a single motion. And it's what happens when marketers are free to operate without waiting on handoffs from engineers or creatives or analysts. This episode, the first part of five parts in this series, it lays the foundation for a movement. And we're gonna unpack the roots of this philosophy, its evolution through technology and culture, and how positionless is reshaping the way that brands engage with consumers. This is the beginning of the positionless era. Let's decode it together. We're here. We're kicking off this first episode of this season of Decoded. Pini, I'm so glad to be doing this with you. We've been getting to know each other. And if there's anything that I know about you it's your love of basketball. And it's your love, I think, of sport in general. But I think it's, you have a very deep belief and conviction that the world is changing and the world is becoming more positionless, not just in the marketer, which is something we're gonna talk about this season, but you've noticed that this abstract idea from basketball actually applies to lots of things. Give me a bit about what positionless is all about and give us a little bit about you at the same time.

[00:03:05] Pini: Awesome. So first of all, great to be here, Phillip. Excited to do this with you and thank you for giving me the opportunity. And yeah, so I'm 47. I'm Tel Aviv, born and raised in Israel. I spent a couple of years, actually four years in Manhattan, Brooklyn when I started The US office for Optimove. So I do have some familiarity with the American culture. And again, as you said, I'm a big basketball buff, especially nowadays. The funny thing is that I was like that in my high school days. And then for some reason I lost interest, and I used to watch Michael Jordan and stuff like that, wake up at 4AM in the morning to watch a game because there's a time difference. Right? And then I didn't watch it until The Last Dance came out. So Michael Jordan again...

[00:04:02] Phillip: Oh, yeah.

[00:04:02] Pini: From this documentary, it's kind of like reignited my love for the game. And then I started watching, and then it was COVID, and I started watching games in the bubble.

[00:04:14] Phillip: Same.

[00:04:17] Pini: That was 2020. So I'm like, what is this game? Somewhat I remember. Yeah. The ball is still orange and they still need to put it in the basket, but like the game is really different. And I started kind of like to look at it and study it and got back into it and discovered that the game has changed and it became a positionless game. They call it positionless basketball. It stems from many, many reasons. You got the data track of people analyzing the data of basketball and understanding many, many different things. This was mostly led by Daryl Morey. And then you have, I think that, obviously the media and how the world has changed and little kids kind of like watching videos of whether it's Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. And if you're a seven footer, or you will be a seven footer, you're not seven footer right now because you're twelve, you want to kind of like take a step back three and learn some ball handling skills. And you want to do the fun stuff. You don't want to be pigeonholed into being the position of a center. "Just go over there, play post up. You're not allowed to dribble. You're not allowed to take the ball side to side full court. That's not what you do."

[00:05:26] Phillip: Totally.

[00:05:28] Pini: And for that reason, all of a sudden you're seeing these different creatures play the game, which didn't exist in the past, like a Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Greek Freak.

[00:05:38] Phillip: Totally.

[00:05:39] Pini: Which is an insane driver to the basket and he's a seven footer and with crazy long arms and crazy speed and athleticism. A person like that would not play like he's playing today in the seventies. Right? And you look at another person like Nikola Jokic, you know, who's probably maybe one of the best passers in basketball today. And he's the center. He's the five. These guys are not supposed to pass the ball. The offense is not supposed to run through them.

[00:06:12] Phillip: Sure.

[00:06:13] Pini: So I started thinking about that and that was like really cool. I got like loads of examples and if you want, we can geek out on basketball. And by the way, mostly what I like about basketball is I also like a lot the debate shows because I feel like the ability to make an argument based on data and win the debate and prove that you are right, I think you can see there really, really cool examples of whether it's First Things First or First Take or what used to be Undisputed or all of these shows are really nice at doing that. And I just love it as a debater. So I really like to kind of like, it's a part of it. Part of the game to me is a lot of the gossip and it's like my soap opera, right?

[00:07:07] Phillip: Totally.

[00:07:08] Pini: It's the whole thing, it's the whole product. It's not only the game.

[00:07:12] Phillip: Totally. I grew up obviously in the eighties and the nineties. Try growing up with the name Phil Jackson in the eighties and the nineties. Which for the uninitiated is, you know, one of the winning coaches of of all time. Coached Michael Jordan.

[00:07:33] Pini: Kobe too.

[00:07:33] Phillip: Yeah, exactly. I grew up in Orlando, so I got to watch Shaq play in his rookie years in Orlando when he when he played for the Magic.

[00:07:48] Pini: Shaq and Penny.

[00:07:49] Phillip: Shaq and Penny. Yeah. And Anthony Hardaway and the whole crew back in the day.

[00:08:00] Pini: Yeah.

[00:08:00] Phillip: And I also fell off. You know, I watched basketball until the Pacers. I hated the Pacers because they killed the magic, the dreams of the magic going all the way many, many times. So I had my own heartbreaks with basketball as well. I played a lot of basketball, pickup basketball in high school.

[00:08:20] Pini: Nice.

[00:08:21] Phillip: But I'll be honest with you, the mechanics of the game and the understanding of how the game was played was never... The position of basketball was never something that, like I didn't play basketball on a team. So understanding the strategy of basketball, that did that wasn't really something that appealed directly to me until much, much, much later. I also had a very similar coming back to basketball post COVID NBA bubble. And I think that that's such an interesting story. I didn't know that about you. But it came through my kids. My kids fell in love with basketball post COVID because we live down here close to Miami. We're in West Palm Beach. And our hometown team is Miami Heat, and Coach Spo and we had a killer team here for a few years.

[00:09:22] Pini: You made the finals in the bubble.

[00:09:25] Phillip: Yeah, yeah. And made the finals here just a couple of years ago. Had Jimmy Butler who just kept pulling out win after win. Jimmy just in the playoffs is a different player altogether. So when you have a team like that right here, it's really easy to, especially as a kid to really get activated into understanding like, getting really excited about the game. But of course, also looking now at the game, I think there's a lot of criticism of the game, too. But to your point, the game has evolved. And I think when you're looking at that, I love to look in abstract at how we glean like real life, I don't want say marketing lessons, but I look at other disciplines and other areas of things like sport. And I look at that and I say, "Wow, there are a lot of parallels in other disciplines that do have a lot of mirrors into the world that I live in and live and breathe here in like ecommerce and retail." So you seem to have that as well. So this like versatility in the evolution of the game is that more people are playing more versatile roles, people are becoming more flexible. Would you say that they're becoming more like generalist in what they're doing? Or is that they're branching out more? Is that by virtue of the fact that data is powering that or is that because, is that like a money ball sort of a thing? What is powering that?

[00:11:13] Pini: I think the reason I'm talking about positionless marketing and looking at positionless basketball, I mean, 2020, I looked at it and I found it to be interesting. I didn't know that I would try years later to basically make it into a whole marketing movement, which is what I'm doing now because the time wasn't right. I mean, there's a saying by Victor Hugo, which is, "There's nothing better than a good idea when its time has come." So the time has come now. And the reason the time has come is because of GenAI. I think every one of us today, we live in a world where we can put on an Ironman suit and be enhanced. That's it. If I'm enhanced, I don't like the word generalist because I think generalist is typically can be, I don't know what you think, but to me it sounds like a negative context.

[00:12:13] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:12:14] Pini: So you don't do anything good. Right? So you're just a generalist.

[00:12:17] Phillip: Yeah. Like, jack of all trades is usually used in a negative context.

[00:12:22] Pini: Right. Like master of none. I actually like to think about let's take it to the positive side. Let's look at a Renaissance man or a Renaissance woman, right? So those greater than life individuals like da Vinci and the people that they were mathematicians and philosophers and painters and musicians. And, you know, it's like the celebration of the wide gamut of human talent. That is to me what this could be. It's kind of like, how can we unlock our multipotentiality? Speaking of this word, multi potentiality. I don't know if you remember, there's like a Ted Talk about this woman coming in and saying that she's a person with multi potentiality and she never wanted to be in one profession. She says like, she starts her Ted Talk by saying, "I hate the question when we were kids and people ask you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?'" You have to say, you either have to say a fireman or a pilot or a carpenter or this or that, right? So you have to say something. And she described herself and other people as kind of like, she goes into a profession, she does it for a few years and then she does something else. Now I'm not saying that this is where I'm heading, but the word multipotentiality came from that session, which is nice.

[00:13:38] Phillip: Yeah. Emily Wapnik, by the way, I remember it very clearly. Yeah.

[00:13:42] Pini: Exactly. And the idea is that, to me, it allows us also to celebrate the joy of creation. Right? The good side of it is I can be more creative. I can dabble into more fields of expertise? And ultimately, it's gonna be good for business. It's good for efficiency. It's good for solving the massive execution problem, which is plaguing marketing teams these days.

[00:14:14] Phillip: One of the challenges in marketing teams too is not... I think a lot of people would say, "Oh, the challenge is that technology is moving really quickly or trend based marketing has really dominated the marketing field. And so we have to react quicker than ever before. And that means that marketing teams have to be adapt to changes in channels or changes in strategies really quickly. And they have to have their finger on the pulse of culture." I hear all these sorts of things, but I don't know that that's actually all the case. I feel like that's actually always been the job to some degree. {laughter} In reality, I liken it back to the job that I did twenty years ago, Pini, where I worked in a fully vertically integrated ecommerce business, where I sat in the engineering team, and I led an engineering team. But the engineering team sat right next to the marketing team and the marketing team had a paid search department, sat right next to the catalog team and the catalog team sat on the other side of the wall from the fulfillment department, the fulfillment department had a loading bay and the loading bay had the delivery guys and the delivery guys... Sometimes we got pulled out to help, you know, pull loads in on the truck, we'd sort mail on a Saturday, sometimes, we'd help people answer calls and they'd roll over sometimes if something went wrong in supply chain, they'd roll over and I'd have to answer the phones from time to time. I understood how every facet of that business worked by virtue of me being in the same building with everybody else.

[00:17:02] Pini: Right. You wore many hats.

[00:17:03] Phillip: But you had to and if you were there long enough, you understood how the whole of the business worked. You didn't have a choice, right? Because you understood the whole of the business structure, you understood every role. And when you're there long enough, especially if you're playing on a team, in a team dynamic, you understand every person's role, you understand where they're going to be. And when you start to understand everyone's role, you almost know how to fill in that role if the time comes and you know what's necessary. The modern business, especially in a marketing team, has become so insular and siloed. Most people are so disconnected from other parts of the business that they don't even know how the whole of the business operates. And this is one of the challenges that we have, especially in software, is that this best in class software environment has also created very disconnected software, especially in ecommerce. So marketers don't even know how the whole of the business operates. And now the rest of the software doesn't talk to the rest of the organization software as well. So that is where I feel like we have broken down, and this marketing role has become so granular and so isolated. It's not that people don't desire to want to be positionless or what have you, it's not that people don't have this natural nature to be able to be more fluid or to be more dynamic in their role. I think people by nature would want to be that way. I don't think we've had the tools or the nature of the organizations in ecommerce, in particular, and marketing in particular over the last fifteen years has made it more isolating. So now, I think to your point, things are changing to where we are moving away from that. And that's a really exciting thing for me, because I think we're heading into a brand new world. So that's my big rant and soapbox is that we've been collapsing organizations down to very siloed organizations. I think we're moving directly away from that. And I think GenAI is definitely something that's gonna... We'll talk about that in a future episode in the series. I think that that's going to blow this thing wide open. Everybody's going to have tools now to enable them to be more fluid in those roles as well. But I like the way that you say it much more because you say it more eloquently and with fewer words.

[00:19:32] Pini: Thank you. Yeah. I believe that ultimately, and because of this idea, I studied this notion more and more. And I think that we are probably, you know, we can still remember living in the peak of the industrial revolution. It's probably eighties and nineties, right? And then the information revolution started. But the industrial revolution actually taught us to work in this assembly line type of a way. And it's funny, like it all comes from basically conveyor belts and people, you know, like Charlie Chaplin in modern times trying to, his entire job is just to kind of like screw this one bolt and basically turn it just one bolt.

[00:20:23] Phillip: Totally.

[00:20:24] Pini: He makes fun of that. It's like, just turned me into this person with an arm and an elbow and that's all I do, right? That's my job. It's basically the criticism against this industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution, what it did, it was like, we need to provide a lot more product at a lower price and we need to do mass manufacturing. And we can't do it if one person manufactures everything. It's gonna take a ton of time to train one person. That one person is gonna be extremely expensive or there's too many dependencies. There's gonna be a lot of variants, variant in the quality. So one product can be of higher quality with a very good artisan person that can manufacture the product, soup to nuts. And another product could be of poor quality because that person is not that talented. And ultimately, the assembly line was a great way to basically reduce, to create centralization, reduce variance in each one, in each station of the assembly line, and ultimately produce a product at a high quality for the masses, low price. And that approach has been, it's not only in factories or assembly lines or logistics centers or whatever, it's in medicine, right? When you go to the doctor, there's a guy who knows ear, nose and throat.

[00:22:00] Phillip: That's right.

[00:22:01] Pini: The human body is too complicated, right? If you want somebody with experience, they to hone in on one field. They studied in medicine how the heart works and the stomach, but many years ago. Now they do the nose and the ear and the throat, right? That's what they do. And when you need to get treated, you need to move between those specialists, in case you have something wider. So ultimately that was a really good approach, but it sucks. We all know it sucks, right? And in a modern work environment, in marketing, you can be trying to do something, say, "Oh yeah, you can't do it right now. You have to wait for IT."" When are they going to do it? It sounds to me like a five minute job." "Yeah, they're on vacation," or they're all hands on this one project. They're doing this one project, which is extreme. We cannot interfere, you know, with their queue or their backlog. They're just doing this one thing. They'll be finished in March. It's like, "What do you mean? So I have to wait for two months for this five minute thing?" "Yes. Do something else." And then you start to get frustrated, right? You wait and you wait and you're saying, If I could just self serve and do it myself, it'll take me two seconds, or whatever, twenty minutes or an hour and I'll be done with it." But the problem is it's too risky to let you do it. You don't know the protocols. You may cause damage. You have no training. You have no this. You have no that. So that is how things have always worked. Many people felt like Charlie Chaplin in that movie. But going back to your example of working at an ecommerce company at the beginning, you know, startups show us a different way, right? Startups work in this super agile environment. Yes, they have titles, but the titles are very fluid. The marketing guy is going to do one thing and then the marketing and sales and products and all the same thing right at the beginning.

[00:24:06] Phillip: Totally.

[00:24:07] Pini: And you just get stuff done and you work at an extremely high pace. So what do startups have over big companies? Speed. They don't have the resources, they don't have the firepower, they don't have access to capital or research or whatever. They have speed. And they have quick decision making and speed because they're positionless. So now you ask the question like, can it happen at a larger organization? And to me, absolutely, yes. I feel like we can definitely be able to do it with GenAI and with platforms like Optimove. Marketers can basically self serve on 80% of the cases. In the 20% of high stakes jobs or things that require deep specialty, yes, they'll go to the next department. It doesn't mean those departments will go away. It just means that the type of work they do will start to change.

[00:25:04] Phillip: Let's talk about this idea of positionless marketing or positionless sort of organizations. How big is Optimove today? Are you adopting this within your own organizations and how do you maintain that ethos as you're growing bigger and bigger? So that's a mindset, I think, and sort of more than it is a managerial style.

[00:25:32] Pini: So Optimove today, are 550 people in the company. And to me, the reason I can, you know, preach about this notion of positionless is because me personally and us at Optimove, we've always been that. The reason, it's not like we don't have departments and we don't have different positions in the company, we do. But we've always appreciated people who are... We don't have content free people here, even if they're very high up in the executive chain. They all know a lot. They know a lot about the product, about our customers, about our users, about the roadmap, about this, about that, about ops. They know a lot. And in many ways, I think it's also cultural. So being a company from a small country, which is Israel, every person is typically required to do more or to be more versatile. So that's how the business started. And I'll give you an example. My SVP of revenue, who's doing sales, is actually an engineer who started doing data science work for us when we started. I hired him as a student out of school. So he went through engineering, professional services, consulting, sales, going up the ranks in sales, doing it, moving to London, doing sales in London, then taking over sales in America, then taking over partnerships, then looking... So moved through the ranks. Almost every person in our executive team here started their job in Optimove by writing SQL and working with data.

[00:27:18] Phillip: Wow.

[00:27:19] Pini: So to us, it's very... And I think many startups will feel, or many tech companies will basically feel that they empathize with this story or they feel they have the same story because in tech it is happening pretty often. But I think with larger brands and very, you know, companies that have many years and have been around for a while, that's not always the case.

[00:27:47] Phillip: There's a future that we'll talk about in, I think Episode 2, you know, where GenAI, I think it was going to shape and change a lot, and we'll do a little sort of future casting there, but giving us a little taste of what does positionless marketing look like in the adoption of, say, Optimove's ideal future? What does that begin to look like for an ecommerce company that is looking more positionless? It's not title-less, but what does that look like?

[00:28:24] Pini: I think ultimately, I see a world where the CRM marketing team or any team that is positionless, they can be to a certain degree autonomous, which means to get a job done from beginning to end, they have little dependencies on other people in the organization and outside the organization.

[00:28:51] Phillip: Got it.

[00:28:51] Pini: This basically, what this does, it unlocks speed and it also unlocks the execution problem. The execution problem, the assembly line, ultimately what it does, it kills execution. And that's the biggest problem. You talked about this hyper... We're in this era of marketers are being asked to kind of like follow trends and actually these days they have lower budgets. So it's not only that they have to... So they need to do more with less. Consumers expect personalization. Consumers no longer want to get shitty experiences. So now marketers have to do more and more and more with less and less and less. And if they work under that system or paradigm of an assembly line, they're going to wait and wait and wait. They're going be very slow. And we just had one customer on stage at Optimove Connect and they demonstrated how they took campaign execution time from six weeks to twenty four hours. And it's not necessarily because the six weeks were six weeks of net work. It wasn't that. It was waiting. There was a lot of waiting in that six weeks because you're not autonomous. Now all the data is in Optimove. They don't need to write a brief about who they want to pull in. They just research it and do it themselves. All the visual assets and the creatives, they build an Optimove, they build all the channels. They've replaced five vendors with our technology.

[00:30:25] Phillip: Wow.

[00:30:26] Pini: Suddenly instead of logging into multiple desperate systems, instead of having multiple desperate teams, one department that does this, one department that does surveys and other department... No, it's all the customer. It's the same customer. It should be one team. One team that handles the customer. They can be autonomous. So that's how I see it. And by the way, while I'm thinking right now as we talk, I have this new image of you know about Jeff Bezos and the two pizza pie analogy of the organic dev team?

[00:31:03] Phillip: Sure. Yeah. Give it for those who aren't initiated.

[00:31:08] Pini: One of the best examples of how IT organizations and development organizations should be ran is Jeff Bezos basically actually did the same thing, right? He basically said a team size should be like two pizza pies. So like with two pizza pies, you can feed the team, right? They can have dinner. So it's basically, let's say 10 people team or eight people team. And that team is, they write their own codes, they write their own APIs so that other teams can communicate and consume their service. So their service is immediately democratized to other teams to consume. They also set up their own dev ops and machines and hardware and everything they need. They are completely autonomous and they're responsible. And then they monitor and track all of the features that they released into production. They're responsible for the health of those features in production. They're just one unit. And let's say they own a certain page or a certain service on the Amazon website. And that page functions amazingly well. It's getting always more features and more love. They get the feedback, they analyze the data of the usage, and then they prove based on that. And then across the entire Amazon organization, let's say you have 500 teams like that or a thousand. So then everything is fast. Everything is very, very fast. And that team you got product, you got dev ops, you got engineers, you got designers, you got... So it's just one unit, no dependencies. And the unit itself is positionless. I mean, of course, in the unit, got some roles, but they can function as an A team.

[00:32:51] Phillip: I think I'm starting to get it. I think I'm starting to get it. And I think that the, going back to the original analogy, in basketball, you know, Coach Spo over in Miami. If you're coaching, if you're moving more into sort of the manager or the coach of a team like this, what does the evolution of the coaching style look like in a team that's more positionless? So if you're now looking at an organization that's more positionless today than it was yesterday, how does the coaching style change over time? Because necessarily management has to adapt and change. So how does that begin to change in the organization?

[00:33:42] Pini: Yeah, I think that that's an excellent question. I think in a world where you have an assembly line, what the manager does, they're mostly obsessed with the bottlenecks and they need to go through they're being tasked with, you know, going through the organization, open up bottlenecks to make sure that their team can actually work. It's not all of it, but there's definitely some of that, if not a lot of it. It depends on the organization and how problematic it is. If the team becomes positionless and they can start actually execute faster, I think the role of the manager is what's the quality of the work? Can we get more creative? Do we have the best ideas? How can we delight our customers even better? What's next for our customers? So now we start focusing on the actual craft of CRM marketing. Like for you, Phillip, right? You and Sarah, that you work together, you have to think about the content and what is it that you're going to do? How can you engage your audience? What's the best thing? How can you attract sponsors or people that make your whole business happen as an ecosystem? How do you optimize your ecosystem? Of course, you get to do it all the time because you don't have a 5,000 people organization. You are really positionless and autonomous in the way you operate. So that's what you focus on, which you should. So I think to me, that would be the biggest difference.

[00:35:15] Phillip: Yeah. And makes so much sense too. I think that as this series goes on, we're gonna explore this from many, many different angles. So we'll talk to a few guests. We're gonna talk to Neil Hoyne, who wrote this book called Converted. He's the Chief Strategist at Google. We're gonna talk to members of your team who have their own angles on the way that the product helps marketers become more positionless. I think we're also gonna tap into a little bit of the future side of how GenAI is gonna change, I think, all organizations and maybe even consumers to think more in this self sufficiency mode of thinking. So I can't wait to really tap into more of this. I'm really excited for the series, and I'm really pumped to be on this journey with you.

[00:36:10] Pini: Me too. Me too. That's exciting.

[00:36:13] Phillip: Appreciate it. Thank you all for listening, and stay tuned. If you aren't already subscribed, go subscribe right now wherever you listen to podcasts or better yet, hit us up on the YouTube for this five part series of Decoded, partnered here this season with Optimove.