This is a bittersweet edition of Evidently.

It's the last one I'll be sending. I'm leaving UserEvidence to take on something new.

When Evan Huck and Ray Rhodes hired me as the first marketer here, they were taking a real bet on me.

I had never been a VP. Never built a marketing team. Never owned the whole function. They hired me because of the work I had done before, not because I had already done this job.

But they gave me something most marketing leaders never get: space. Space to build, space to make mistakes, space to figure things out along the way.

When I started writing this final edition, I set out to write 20 lessons and ended up with 19. 19 happens to be the number I wore my entire life playing baseball and hockey, so I'll take it.

Here are 19 things I didn't understand about this job until I was actually in it.

#1 Getting buy-in and bringing people along is the job

The first time I led fiscal planning at UserEvidence back in December 2023, I spent weeks building our first pipeline model with our RevOps freelancer.

All the historical data we had, detailed assumptions, the works. I felt really good about it all too.

Then I unveiled it for the first time in a final meeting with the co-founders and it blew up in my face.

Evan and Ray questioned everything: the data, the assumptions, how we'd calculated them. I remember sitting there thinking about how many weeks I'd spent on this and I felt stupid.

That's 100% on me. I hadn't brought anyone along, no check-ins, no early looks, just a big reveal nobody was ready for.

When a plan or pitch goes nowhere, it's usually not because the work was bad. It's because the people who needed to believe in it weren't part of building it.

Always bring people along with you.

#2 Your reaction sets the tone

There were moments at UserEvidence where I let frustration show when I shouldn't have. Not dramatically, just enough for the team to pick up on it.

In a meeting, in how I phrased something, in the silence after someone shared bad news.

What I learned is that your team doesn't just watch what you do. They watch how you react when things go wrong. If you go sideways, everyone feels it. Nobody knows what to do with it.

I had to learn to process the frustration privately. No matter the reason for my emotions, I learned not to let it show up as the version of me my team was watching.

How you show up in those moments is wildly important.

#3 Founders bet on conviction

I noticed a pattern with Evan and Ray early on in my time at UserEvidence.

When I came to them with a recommendation and wasn't fully sold on it myself, they'd shut it down. When I came in with genuine conviction, even when we didn't fully agree, they'd let me run with it.

It frustrated the hell out of me at first. I didn't understand what they were doing and why they kept doing it.

Eventually, I figured it out. They weren't evaluating the idea. They were evaluating whether I believed in it enough to own it. And if I didn't, why would they?

That reframe changed how I operated. If you believe in it, own it and go.

#4 Know when to stay in your lane

Early on in my time at UserEvidence, I saw a problem and wanted to help solve it.

We were a sales-led company that needed to get more out of our outbound motion.

I interviewed a bunch of Clay agencies, did my due diligence, made reference calls, and chose one I was bullish on. Even paid for it out of my marketing budget.

It didn't land the way I hoped. Three months into a six-month project, we cancelled. I walked away having spent real budget, real time, and credibility on something that was never mine to fix.

Good intentions don't change whose lane it is.

#5 Focus is about what you say no to

Heading into Q4 last fall, I documented everything being asked of the marketing team.

62 things, maybe 63. I put it in a doc and shared it, not as a complaint, but as evidence. This is what crazy looks like. We cannot do all of this.

Here's the worst part: we got the list down to 18 true commitments. And I still signed us up for too many things.

We didn't deliver nearly what we should have for a team that had made such a strong case for saying no.

Saying no is not a decision you make once. It's a decision you have to keep making, usually at the exact moment when it feels least defensible.

#6 Communication is mostly repetition

Nobody is thinking about your priorities as much as you are.

Your team is heads down. Other functions are living in their own world. Leadership is juggling ten other things. The message you sent last week is already buried.

So you say it again. In the team meeting. In the weekly all-hands. In a Slack channel. In the conversation during office hours with the sales team. In the weekly founder update.

Then you say it again.

It feels like overkill until the day someone finally says it back to you unprompted. That's when you know it landed.

#7 Show up for your people early

One of my cheat codes as I built the marketing team here: fly out and meet every new hire as soon as you can. Ideally in the first week and on their home turf, not mine.

We covered everything you'd expect in a first week. But doing it in person, on their turf, getting to know them as a human being before the work got hard.

That's what made it different. It changed everything about how fast people got up to speed and how much ownership they took on early.

People who feel supported and confident from day one run faster.

#8 Give up some of the doing

For my first eight or nine months at UserEvidence, it was just me, a laptop, and a lot of opinions about how I wanted to run marketing for the first time.

I had agency and freelancer help, but I was the only marketer here. It was a lonely place.

Then Alex joined. Then Jillian. Then Luke. Then Mary. Same pattern every time: I'd hand something off, watch them work, and realize they were doing it better than me. That part should feel good. It mostly did.

The hardest thing to give up was the stuff I actually enjoyed doing. But you can't be in everything.

At some point you have to delegate, trust that people are going to do it well, and be okay with the fact that it might not look exactly how you would have done it.

#9 The best marketers want ownership

The thing I looked for most in every interview was simple: does this person think and work like an owner?

Not someone who waits for direction or needs to be managed through every decision. Someone who sees a problem, wants to solve it, and goes and figures it out without being asked.

A lot of people say they want that in a job. Very few actually mean it. When you find the ones who do, give them real problems, real autonomy, and real trust to go run.

#10 Your team notices when you notice them

Any time someone did something worth recognizing, I made sure they knew I saw it.

A Slack channel. A shoutout in my weekly founder update. A mention in the Monday all-hands meeting. Whatever fit the moment.

It sounds simple because it is. But a lot of managers skip it, especially when things are busy or the team is behind plan.

That's exactly when people need to hear it most. When they do good work and nobody says anything, they notice that too.

#11 Find people who’ve been there before

Trying to figure this job out on your own is hard. What made me better was finding people who had already sat in a seat like mine and came out the other side.

Take the shortcut.

My mentors, Kyle Lacy and Brad O'Neill, helped me work on the parts nobody prepares you for. Kyle helped me figure out how to actually run a marketing team and own the function. Brad helped me work on my blind spots, manage up, and work cross-functionally.

Our marketing advisors, Devin Reed, Jen Allen-Knuth, Kaylee Edmondson, and Jason Oakley, got us unstuck when we were overcomplicating things. They never let us off the hook.

#12 Managing up is a skill nobody teaches you

Before UserEvidence, I had always worked for marketing leaders. People who spoke the same language and understood my work intuitively.

This was the first time I worked directly for founders. The autonomy Evan and Ray gave me was real. But I had to earn it, and keep earning it.

That meant communicating progress clearly, flagging problems before they became surprises, and building enough trust that they felt confident letting the marketing team run.

It didn't come naturally at first. I figured most of it out by getting it wrong first.

But when it clicked, it changed everything. The time I put into managing up gave our team the space to do their best work without constantly having to justify it.

#13 Culture starts at the top

Evan and Ray blocked their calendars for family. Took time off without guilt. Treated life outside of work as something worth protecting.

They also understood that life gets in the way sometimes. And they never made you feel bad about it.

I watched that and did the same thing. Life gets in the way: appointments, family stuff, the random inconveniences that show up whether you plan for them or not. I'd overcommunicate what was happening and when I'd be back, and I'd always get my work done.

My team did exactly the same thing.

Nobody watches what a company says it believes. They watch what the people above them actually do. The message was simple: life happens, manage your time, deliver on what you're accountable for. No guilt, no performative hours, no explaining yourself.

When it comes from the top, people believe it.

#14 The pressure never really goes away

There's the expected kind of pressure. Pacing to plan, managing the request volume, keeping the founders confident in what you're building. You learn to carry that part.

The harder kind is self-inflicted. The standard you hold yourself and your team to. The company-level problems you take on as if they're yours to fix. And the ones you've made up in your own head that were never actually problems to begin with.

That version wore on me more than anything external did. I spent real energy on problems I couldn't solve and not enough on the ones I could.

Not every problem is yours to fix. Some of them were there before you arrived and will be there after you leave.

#15 Best practices aren’t rules

The conventional best practice for new marketing leaders is don't touch the website in your first 90 days.

We launched a new one in my first five weeks to get ready for the Series A announcement. New positioning and messaging, new branding. New everything.

It put a noticeable win on the board early, built trust with the founders right out of the gate, and gave the company something to rally around at a moment when we needed it.

It went incredibly well. And it's something I hope to never have to do again.

#16 Momentum is everything

We spent all of last summer grinding away behind the scenes. It was the hardest stretch for the marketing team since I got to UserEvidence.

Creating Highline out of nothing, figuring out the Zealot acquisition, and hiring for a key role on the team. Trying to hold it all together at the same time too.

There were moments where none of it felt like it was going to work. And then it all landed at once.

After Highline, everything changed. The insane amount of noise we made on LinkedIn. Stalled deals started moving. Closed lost deals came back from the dead. We had our strongest inbound quarter of the year by a mile.

That's how momentum actually works. It doesn't show up when things are easy. It shows up after a long stretch of hard work that nobody sees, and then suddenly everyone does.

#17 Celebrate the wins or nobody will

There were quarters where the HubSpot scoreboard didn't add up the way we wanted. It's easy to let that swallow everything.

Don't. Bring it up in a 1:1. Send a Slack before you close your laptop on a Friday. Make it a moment in the weekly team meeting.

There's a difference between the outcomes you control and the ones you don't. When the team executed the way you wanted to, take the moment.

If you don't celebrate it, nobody will.

#18 Most of leadership is learned the hard way

Most of what's in this post came from making decisions, living with the outcomes, and figuring out what to do differently next time. Not from a book. Not from a course. Not from advice on LinkedIn.

That's just how it works. You learn by doing. You learn by messing up. This role was a perfect example of that.

I beat myself up way too hard in the early days. Over mistakes I can't even remember now.

Own it. Have a short memory. Go at it differently next time. That's the whole game.

#19 The team is everything

The best work of my career was done with this team. But that's not what I'm taking with me.

It's the people: Alex. Jillian. Luke. Mary.

The laughs. The hard conversations. The moments where nobody knew the answer yet and we figured it out anyway. People who pushed my thinking. People who watched me figure out this job in real time and never held it against me.

Those four are going to accomplish a whole lot more without me here. They were the best marketing team I've ever been a part of and they're just getting started.

Evidently isn’t going anywhere

Alex Eaton is taking the seat. He was my first hire at UserEvidence. He's now a first-time VP of Marketing, which means he's doing exactly what this newsletter was always about: figuring it out in real time, for the first time, in public.

Same premise. New person living it.

I’m proud of him.

That's my run at UserEvidence

Thank you to everyone who read Evidently and followed along since this little newsletter experiment launched back in April 2024.

Turns out writing about this job made me better at it.

The replies were always the best part. A random email from someone saying they were going through the exact same thing.

That stuff never shows up in a dashboard, which is exactly how you know it matters.

Mark