Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits (and get honest about my misses) as a first-time VP of Marketing. If this was forwarded to you, join the 5,000+ people who apparently enjoy watching me figure this job out in real time by subscribing here.

Most people think pipeline is the biggest pressure marketing leaders are feeling.

They’re not wrong.

Targets keep going up. The model keeps changing. Everyone’s staring at the same spreadsheets, trying to magic-wand the math into mathing.

But underneath all of that, there’s something else happening that feels harder to name. At least for me.

You can’t really hide behind your title anymore. Or at least, I don’t think you can. Not if you want to stay relevant.

You have to be able to do the work.

I feel that pressure pretty constantly. Not just from the market, but from myself.

Leadership roles in marketing are changing faster than the job descriptions. And the people who seem to be holding their footing right now aren’t the ones who only manage the work.

They’re the ones who can still get into it.

Why “babysitter leadership” feels harder to justify

You can see the shift if you’re paying attention.

• In AI-native companies shipping at speeds that don’t feel real

• In lean teams doing what used to require a lot more people

• In execs asking questions about output instead of effort

Even in conversations with marketing leaders running teams far bigger than ours, the same pattern keeps coming up. Teams are getting smaller. Layers are disappearing. Expectations are going up.

You just don’t need massive, headcount-heavy marketing teams to get real work done the way you used to.

This isn’t a knock on people management. Managing people is hard. Leading well is a real skill. Some people are genuinely great at it.

But marketing leaders who stay far above the work and escalate everything are getting harder to defend.

It’s expensive. Not just in salary. In opportunity cost.

When a marketing leader can’t execute, they struggle to understand what’s actually happening. Teams feel it pretty quickly, and everything just starts to move slower.

You end up hiring because no one’s actually sure how big the problem is. You lean on agencies and freelancers because no one internally can define what “good” looks like. Feedback gets fuzzy because it’s coming from the outside looking in.

I’ve sat in meetings where things stalled for weeks because no one would just call it. And that adds up quicker than people realize.

Teams notice pretty quickly which marketing leaders are actually close to the work. Not to control it, but to understand it.

Being close to the work just changes how fast things move.

How I’m trying to navigate this myself

I don’t have a clean system for balancing leadership and execution. I’m still figuring it out.

I do know that I didn’t get into marketing to spend my days managing people or living in meetings. I like the work. And I don’t really know how to lead it if I’m not close to it.

I was the first marketer at UserEvidence. “Doing” was just part of the deal I signed up for.

Some weeks I’m buried in the work. Other weeks I look up and realize I haven’t been close to the actual work at all.

The one rule that’s kept me grounded is simple.

My mornings belong to execution. That’s when I write. That’s when I plan.

That’s when I get my best big brain work in.

The tradeoff is real. Meetings get pushed. Some decisions take longer. And by the time the afternoon rolls around, I’m not always at full energy.

But I’ve learned that when I give my best hours away, the rest of the day gets fuzzy fast.

And once I’m too far removed from the work, I can feel myself becoming less useful.

Where AI helps and where it doesn’t

I use AI every single day. 

It’s made me faster. It’s helped our team get more done with fewer people. A lot of the output we ship now would’ve required way more headcount not that long ago.

Where it breaks is judgment.

AI is really good at producing something that sounds right. It’s confident. It’s clean. And it’s often just a little bit wrong.

Someone still has to catch that. That’s where taste shows up.

Taste isn’t some abstract thing. It’s pattern recognition built over time.

It comes from doing the work, seeing what lands, seeing what doesn’t, and building enough reps that you stop overthinking it.

AI is great for getting you to a first pass faster.

Where it falls apart is knowing whether that first pass is any good.

That judgment doesn’t come from prompts. It comes from having seen enough real work succeed and fail that you can feel when something’s off.

If you’re too far away from the work, you won’t see it. And by the time you do, it’s usually too late.

The uncomfortable part most leaders avoid

There’s a perception problem in marketing, whether we like it or not.

I’ve worked with plenty of non-marketers who assume it’s fluff. That it’s arts and crafts. That it’s something that sounds nice but doesn’t really move anything.

Some of that is unfair. But some of it comes from what they’ve been exposed to.

Doing the work well isn’t enough anymore. You have to show what “good” actually looks like while it’s happening.

Because if you don’t, people make up their own story about what marketing is.

I don’t want to be in a position where other people are defining marketing for me because I didn’t show them what it is.

And with that, my last Evidently send of 2025

Looking back, this was the biggest year of my life.

There were plenty of marketing wins this year. You’ve read about most of them. I don’t need to rehash them here.

What matters more to me is the growth.

The reps. The mistakes. The moments where I handled things well, and the ones where I didn’t.

I took bigger swings at work than I ever have before, and I learned more this year than I expected to. I grew as a leader. I grew as a person. I also got married.

When I look back on the year honestly, I can look myself in the mirror and say I gave it everything I had. And then some.

I scheduled this send before leaving for my honeymoon on Monday. We’ve got a lot of walking ahead of us. Plenty of skiing. 

And a ton of champagne and pasta on the mountains, because apparently that’s a thing over there.

Hold up—what does UserEvidence do again?

Most companies have great customers. What they don’t have is a way to activate them.

So the stories, the insights, and the people who would actually help end up scattered across decks, tools, and Slack threads. Things get messy. Quotes get lost. Advocates get overused. Deals slow down.

UserEvidence fixes that.

We give your GTM team one platform to activate your customer base. You can find new advocates, capture customer proof, and publish original research— then use all of it where it actually moves the deal forward.

• Advocates — Activate your best customers without burning them out.

• Evidence — Verified, believable stories and results buyers actually trust.

• Research — Original long-form research content that shapes your narrative.

UserEvidence makes it easier for your team to use your customers in the channels and moments where trust matters most.