For decades, we’ve rewarded hyper-specialization: knowing more and more about less and less.
Become an SEO expert. A Social Media Manager. Find your niche and let everyone else deal with the rest.
And yet, every time I start a new project, I find myself wishing I had a couple of “Leonardo da Vincis” on the team.
A bit of context.
Right now, I’m working on two completely different projects.
The first is the launch of a new website for a hotel group.
The second is the transition to a new digital agency for another group.
On paper, they’re two separate projects.
In practice, they’re almost the same thing, because both revolve around one word:
orchestration.
Launching a website today has very little to do with making it “look good.”
It means coordinating design, analytics, tracking, consent management, booking engine integrations, CRM, advertising platforms, APIs, redirects, DNS records, and dozens of invisible dependencies nobody notices…
until something breaks.
And trust me, sooner or later, something always does.
Changing digital agencies follows exactly the same logic.
You need to transfer permissions, reconnect ad accounts, verify Google Tag Manager containers, and so on.
And every single time, you discover that some critical account is still tied to the personal email address of a receptionist who left the hotel five years ago.
Both projects usually involve a dozen stakeholders, all very good at what they do.
And yet very few understand the system as a whole.
The result is what I call People Silos.
How many times have you heard:
“For that, you need to open a ticket.”
“That’s not handled by tracking.”
“You need to speak to the advertising team.”
“That belongs to another department.”
The problem is that hotels do NOT think in departments.
A hotelier doesn’t wake up in the morning wondering whether they need cross-domain tracking between the website and the booking engine.
They wake up wondering why bookings suddenly dropped after the new website went live.
Expecting them to formulate the correct technical request is simply naive.
And that’s exactly why I think we need, now more than ever, translators between departments.
People who understand enough about everything to identify the real issue, translate it into the language of the right technical team, open the Zendesk ticket, and follow the project through until the problem is actually solved.
The funny thing is that, despite often being called a “futurist,” I’m not particularly technical.
I still get lost inside Google Tag Manager.
Opening Meta Business gives me anxiety.
And my son is already a better programmer than I am.
He’s five.
But that’s precisely the point.
A project manager doesn’t need to be the best developer, the best marketer, or the best analyst.
They need to know enough about each discipline to connect all of them into one functioning system.
And that, in my view, is exactly the kind of person many agencies are increasingly missing.
And, I’d add, many universities and MBA programs too.
For years, we’ve been told that the future belongs to specialists.
You know what?
I suspect the opposite is true.
Especially because artificial intelligence is turning specialized knowledge into a commodity.
Leonardo became LEONARDO not because he was the greatest painter, engineer, or anatomist of his time.
He became LEONARDO because he refused to accept that art, engineering, anatomy, and architecture belonged to separate worlds.
And perhaps that’s exactly the kind of person hotel marketing needs today.
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
