Lisa Jilek and the art of asking a better question

Lisa Jilek opened a leadership panel with an unusual request: tell us about some bad advice. At Twin Cities Startup Week in 2019, the sales and marketing executive wanted the introductions to include something less polished than a job title. Advice that had failed would do nicely. The room laughed. A conversation about influence and innovation had acquired permission to be interesting.

She had already set a modest, practical ambition for the gathering. People had taken time away from work and their lives to attend. She wanted them to leave with something they could use: a phrase, a story, a feeling that might help with a later conversation or decision. The return on the morning would be measured outside the room.

That opening offers a useful way into Jilek’s career. Her work has crossed consulting, technology, sales, and now communications. The settings change; the question of what people actually take away keeps returning. At Brandpoint, where she became chief executive in June 2025, that question has a new complication. An audience can get an answer from an AI system without ever visiting the company that supplied the information.

A seat at the table, and a reason to speak

Jilek’s business background includes a marketing management degree from the University of St. Thomas and business studies coursework at the University of London. She has held leadership positions at Thomson Reuters and Stratasys. Her own career description also includes founding a consulting business. This is a route through commercial problems and organizations, with different kinds of expertise gathered along the way.

At the technology consultancy then called OST, she joined in 2019 in sales and marketing leadership. Her remit concerned growth, but her public contributions also addressed who gets heard. In a 2022 reflection on women working in technology, she described how conspicuous all-male panels could be at conferences and partner events. More women on those stages, she argued, could make room for more women’s voices.

She also made a useful distinction about her own contribution. She was not personally a technologist. She could still speak about the place where business and technology meet. A company building digital experiences needs people who can ask what those experiences are for, how they will be used, and why a customer might care. Technical authority and business judgment have work to do together.

“While I’m not personally a technologist…”

Lisa Jilek, on speaking up in the technology industry, 2022

Her earlier panel had brought together executives from several organizations, including Self Esteem Brands, Capella University, and Thomson Reuters. The discussion covered influence, mentoring, and the realities of working with other people. Jilek’s role was to keep the exchange moving. A moderator has a particular kind of authority: she can direct attention without claiming every answer.

The plan has to survive contact with people

In her 2021 writing on digital growth, Jilek dealt with a familiar executive predicament. Leaders want to see progress in a roadmap or scorecard. Work on a new digital experience can be iterative, with each round changing what the team knows. A tidy reporting format can conceal the learning that makes the next decision better.

She advocated examining what had been accomplished, what had been learned, and how feedback would shape the next piece of work. She also emphasized an engaged executive sponsor. Someone senior needed to participate and make the importance of the project visible across the organization. Assigning a project a budget would only get it partway there.

Read as a piece of management thinking, the argument puts a burden on the executive as well as the delivery team. The people doing the work must explain their progress. The people authorizing it must be willing to understand progress that arrives in stages. That is an unglamorous bargain. It is also more useful than a slide that stays reassuringly green until the day everything goes wrong.

At a women-in-technology roundtable in Grand Rapids, Jilek led a discussion about navigating change. Twelve professionals from different fields gathered to consider the demands facing their organizations. The discussion began with asking why decisions were being made. Before a team can commit to a direction, it needs to understand the purpose behind it.

A new name for a changing business

Jilek moved into OST’s interim chief executive role in 2022, succeeding Meredith Bronk, and was appointed president and CEO in 2023. Bronk’s public endorsement emphasized Jilek’s knowledge of both the business and its culture. It was a succession from within, drawing on someone who had already worked on the company’s growth.

In November 2023, OST became Vervint. By then its capabilities had expanded through organic development and acquisitions, including software development, design, user research, and cloud expertise. Jilek explained the change as an effort to represent the business it had become and its commitment to purposeful digital change.

A name change gives an organization an unusually public test of clarity. Employees have to use it. Clients have to recognize the company behind it. The business must explain its direction in language that travels beyond the meeting where everyone agreed on the presentation. Vervint’s evolution placed that task directly within Jilek’s tenure.

When her departure was announced in January 2025, the company credited her with helping guide its evolution, launch its new brand, and refine its portfolio focus. She thanked the team, Koniag, and clients, and expressed confidence in the people taking the business forward. The announcement described a transition she was continuing to support.

There is also the matter of the cabins

One episode from her Vervint years takes the story a long way from a boardroom. In August 2024, Jilek and sales and marketing vice president Kyle Nelson traveled to Alaska for Koniag’s annual community service project. Their destination was Dig Afognak, a youth Alutiiq cultural immersion camp on Afognak Island.

The work included painting cabins, repairing siding, staining decks, clearing brush, and improving trails. Vervint had been part of the Koniag family of companies since 2012. The visit connected the consultancy’s leadership with a community served by its parent organization. Those corporate relationships had a physical address and a list of jobs that needed doing.

Jilek described contributing to the camp as rewarding because of its meaning for the community’s youth. The episode gives a specific setting to a broader message she had shared at a Vervint kickoff: the organization’s identity and purpose extended beyond its own people. In Alaska, that idea came with cabins, decks, and trails.

There is a pleasing practicality to the account. A repaired building can be used. A cleared trail can be walked. These are outcomes with fewer interpretive disputes than the average corporate dashboard. The work also offers a reminder that an organization’s relationships can carry obligations beyond the services it sells.

What happens before the click?

Brandpoint appointed Jilek CEO on June 16, 2025. Executive chair Steve Yoch pointed to her experience growing businesses and her reputation for collaboration and inclusivity. She arrived from a technology services business at a company whose work centered on helping brands create and distribute content through media outlets.

Her own welcome message put the consumer in the picture. In an environment crowded with information, she was interested in content that could help people make buying decisions. She thanked the board, interim CEO Amy von Walter, and her new colleagues. The assignment combined a familiar concern with growth and a different set of distribution relationships.

Brandpoint has been working with brands and publishers since 1996. Its creative team includes former journalists, professors, illustrators, and editors. That background gives Jilek a business built around both making a story and getting it into circulation. The audience’s route to that story, however, is changing.

In December 2025, Brandpoint launched AI Optimize, bringing content optimization, a release strategy, and technical auditing into a service for PR teams. In April 2026, it announced Brandpoint Optimize, connecting paid distribution and earned coverage with measurement of visibility in AI search. These moves shifted more of the business toward understanding what happens after content enters the wider web.

Jilek’s AI Visibility Brief on LinkedIn has explored the questions raised by that shift. She has described cases in which strong Google rankings did not translate into mentions in AI-generated answers. Her argument is that communications teams need to examine credibility, consistency, and third-party validation alongside their established search metrics. These are her company’s observations, with implications she is asking leaders to consider.

In another post, she described a dataset containing 3,473 category answers that named no brand. She treated those answers as an opportunity: a conversation was taking place, but no company had become part of it. It is a useful image for her current assignment. The question becomes where a brand belongs in a conversation, and what information would justify its inclusion.

On September 30, 2026, Brandpoint launched Optimize360, a platform designed for ongoing monitoring of brand representation, competitor comparisons, and opportunities to improve visibility. Jilek described a combination of intelligence, strategic guidance, and the company’s media network. The offer makes her earlier interest in learning and action newly concrete: examine how a brand appears, then decide what to do.

Back to the room

Away from work, Jilek enjoys reading, traveling, games with friends, and time with family. Her Minnesota recreation includes canoeing and pontooning at the lake up north. A pontoon is a pleasantly democratic vessel: conversation has room to spread out, and nobody needs to justify it with a quarterly objective.

Her public career returns to more demanding conversations. Who gets to speak? What is the reason for a change? What has the work taught us? Which part of an audience’s decision are we failing to see? These questions connect the moderator, the technology executive, and the communications CEO without requiring their jobs to be identical.

The opening request at that 2019 panel still fits. Start with something real enough to examine, including an idea that failed. Give people room to respond. Leave them with something they can use after the meeting ends. At Brandpoint, the room has grown to include systems that answer on behalf of people. Jilek’s task is to keep the business asking useful questions about who gets heard.