Summary
Senior leaders around are trying to stay relevant in the world of marketing. They keep asking the same three questions:
- Do we have the right business model for the future?
- Do we have the right organisation and talent to deliver it?
- Am I still relevant in a world that’s changing faster than ever?
For marketers and operations leaders navigating AI and platform disruption, this conversation is a reminder that advantage comes from rethinking the foundations: how your business creates value, how your teams work together, and how quickly you’re willing to update your own operating system.
The Three Questions Every Senior Leader Keeps Asking
When Rishad Tobaccowala travels and meets senior teams across markets, he hears the same three business questions on repeat. The first is blunt: “Do we have the right business model for the future?” The second follows quickly: “Do we have the right organisational design, the right talent, the right partners for that future?” The third usually surfaces later, when the room relaxes, and people stop speaking on behalf of “the company” and start speaking for themselves.
On the surface, leaders ask him, “How do you still know what is going on?” Given his tenure, they want to know how he keeps such a current edge. Yet, as he points out, they are not actually asking about him. They are asking about themselves: “Am I still relevant, and how do I stay relevant as everything shifts?” Those three questions become a running diagnostic: business model, organisational design, and personal renewal. If you keep cycling through them, you are less likely to drift as the world keeps moving.
The Anxiety Behind “Am I Still Relevant?”
The problem behind that third question is not a lack of intelligence. Many of the leaders Rishad describes built their careers in more stable market structures, then woke up inside a world of platforms, clouds, and AI-native competitors. Publicly, they still talk fluently about “digital transformation” and “new models.” Privately, some of them worry that their playbook is ageing faster than they are updating it.
Because they rarely admit that in the boardroom, the anxiety tends to show up sideways: in defensive decisions, or in delegating “the future” to a small innovation team at the edge of the business. Fixing this starts with treating personal relevance as part of the job. That can mean a regular cycle of learning, unlearning, and re-framing, choosing one or two deep domains each year, and creating spaces where teams can safely challenge your assumptions. When you work on your own relevance with the same discipline you bring to your P&L, you give the organisation permission to upgrade as well.
Your Phone Has Updated More Than You Have
Rishad uses a simple data point to make the relevance problem uncomfortably clear. Your phone has probably gone through more than a dozen operating system upgrades in the last decade, each one adding new capabilities and changing how apps work together. Most leaders, in contrast, still run on a mental “OS” that looks suspiciously like the one they used when TV, print, and in-store were the primary battlegrounds. The world has updated itself in the background, while many senior people have not kept pace.
You would never leave a core system unpatched for ten years, yet leadership behaviours often reflect pre-platform, pre-cloud assumptions. The answer is to treat your own development as an upgrade cycle: schedule deliberate “OS updates”, ask younger teams to show you how they work, and learn one new tool or capability properly rather than skimming trend decks.
From “Where Do I Win?” to “How Do I Stay a Winner?”
Strategy conversations used to start and end with two questions: where do we play, and how do we win. That lens assumes relatively stable rules, where you choose your market, refine your proposition, and then execute. In the transcript, Rishad suggests that this frame is no longer enough on its own. The real question for modern leaders is ongoing rather than static: given constant shifts in technology, behaviour, and competition, how do I stay a winner over time.
In this world, relevance becomes a moving target rather than a box to tick. Staying a winner means redesigning how you run strategy: shorter, more frequent loops, metrics that track learning as well as results, and a culture that retires old bets as confidently as it launches new ones.
The Slow Incumbent Fallacy
When people talk about disruption, they often reach for an easy story: incumbents lose because they move too slowly. Sangeet Paul Choudary calls this the “slow incumbent fallacy,” and uses Adobe to show why that story is incomplete. Adobe saw the cloud shift early. It moved from boxed software to subscriptions, delivered its products over the cloud, and became a Harvard Business School case study for making exactly the kind of transition everyone says incumbents avoid. Yet, a decade later, it still struggles to match Figma.
The issue comes down to how you structure your business around new capabilities. It is not enough to “go cloud” or “add AI” if you still organise everything around the old unit of value. Adobe brought its file-centric logic to the cloud era, while Figma started by asking what the cloud made possible and designed around that.
Adobe vs Figma: Built Before vs Built For the Cloud
The Adobe versus Figma story works because it moves from theory into architecture. Adobe built powerful tools for individual designers, optimised around the design file. In that world, a designer completes a file and then hands it over to the next team. Even in the cloud, the structure still revolves around discrete files and task execution. Figma, by contrast, was built after the cloud and imagined its business around what the cloud enables: many teams collaborating live on the same work, across locations and disciplines.
Because Figma is structured around elements rather than files, it can treat a single button or component as an object that it governs across every design. Organisations can decide what that element should look like, who can change it, and how those changes propagate through shared libraries. That shift turns design from a series of individual tasks into an end-to-end workflow that can be executed and governed at scale, which is what separates a modern platform from a modernised product.
Task Execution vs Workflow Governance
Before tools like Figma arrived, most software for creative teams focused on the task in front of one person. Adobe’s tools helped an individual designer produce a rich file, then hand it over to the next stage. Even when those tools moved to the cloud, the logic stayed the same: finish a file, pass it on, repeat, while governance sat outside the work in manuals, brand books, and long approval chains.
In the newer model, the focus shifts from “does this person have a great tool” to “can we run and control the entire design workflow at scale.” Figma treats design as a shared system rather than a sequence of isolated files, so teams can work live on the same asset and stay aligned by default. For marketing leaders, that changes what you can control and how design choices flow across teams, brands, and channels.
Why Element-Level Control Changes the Game
Sangeet’s example of the humble button brings this to life. In a file-centric world, every designer tweaks their own version of a button inside their own file. In an element-centric world, that button exists once in a shared library, with clear rules on how it looks, where it can be used, and who can change it. When you update the master element, the change flows through every place it appears.
That may sound simple, yet it quietly rewrites brand control and consistency. Instead of running audits after the fact, you design a system where compliance is baked into how people work day to day. You cut back on manual reviews, reduce drift between markets, and create a cleaner base for experimentation because you know the foundations stay stable.
Platform Thinking and the Partner Ecosystem
Once you think in elements rather than files, the ecosystem around your product changes as well. Sangeet points out that Figma’s structure lets it expose APIs at the level of components and workflows. This means partners can build new ways of working on top of Figma, rather than just integrations that move files around. A plug-in can manipulate a design system directly, enforce rules, or spin up new variants in context, because the underlying platform understands the objects it is working with.
The insight for marketers is that architecture shapes your partner strategy more than your partner strategy shapes your architecture. If your systems only understand “campaigns” or “files,” partners can only add value around those units. If your platform understands journeys, components, or audience states, then partners can innovate at that level instead. The action is to audit where your current stack behaves like a product and where it behaves like a platform, and decide deliberately where you want compounding value and third-party innovation to come from.
What Leaders Should Take Away About Relevance
Staying relevant is less about heroic reinvention and more about disciplined, ongoing upgrades to how you think and build. Rishad and Sangeet’s conversation can translate into a simple scorecard you can revisit each quarter.
Ask yourself:
- Business model: Have we changed how we create and capture value in light of platforms, cloud, and AI, or have we only digitised old products.
- Organisation and talent: Do our structure, incentives, and partners reflect the work we say we need to do now, not the work we did five years ago.
- Personal operating system: When did I last make a deliberate upgrade to my own knowledge and behaviours, rather than relying on experience alone.
- Architecture vs surface: Are we building for new capabilities, as Figma did, or are we running legacy logic on modern infrastructure, like Adobe’s file-centric model in the cloud.
- Ecosystem: Does our stack invite partners to create new workflows, or does it only allow them to move data between closed products.
If you can answer those questions with evidence, not just intent, you are already working on relevance in a structured way.
