Where there is no vision, the people perish

Hey y'all,

In case you've forgotten, this is Aaron Francis from Try Hard Studios. The last newsletter I sent you was in July, so I owe you an update. My bad. Here's the short version: on August 1st, I started a new job as VP of Marketing and Community at Laravel.

If you're not familiar, Laravel is the company behind the Laravel PHP framework and Laravel Cloud, its hosting platform. I've been building with the framework and part of the community for more than ten years!

(PS: I'll be changing the subject of these emails moving forward, so if you have a filter set up based on the subject, well... change it I guess!)

Why Laravel

Working at Laravel has always been something I wanted, but the right shape of it just never came along. I didn't want to be in developer relations again and I didn't want to be a full-time engineer. I do like being out front!

So when Taylor (Laravel's CEO) came to me about leading marketing, it felt pretty close to perfect. My first reaction was: dude, I'm not a marketer. Maybe I'm a marketer in my bones, but I've never been one professionally.

Taylor talked me down pretty quickly. Laravel already has a great team of professional marketers, people who know the ins and outs of buying ads, running events, putting on conferences, demand gen, all of it. What they needed was someone who gets Laravel, gets developers, and can lead that team.

What about Sam?

My other hesitation was more personal. You might remember that I'd recently hired Samantha, a former coworker, to make courses and content with me. She'd just started as a full-time W-2 employee! She just bet her professional life on me! I told Taylor I couldn't leave her behind.

He said he knew, and that they'd hire her too.

Oh ok, well that changed everything. If there's one thing I refuse to do, it's screw over my friends for my own benefit. Once it was clear Sam was coming along for the ride, things got a lot more interesting.

Am I giving up?

By then I'd been independent for about two and a half years: the first stretch with my dear friend Steve, then a year or more truly on my own. And it was working. I was putting food on my family! Things were going well.

But... it was incredibly stressful. Not knowing where the next deal is coming from keeps you in permanent fight-or-flight mode. You don't spend much. You don't pay yourself much, because you don't know when the next check is coming. After a couple of years of that, it had started to take a toll.

So I had to ask myself: am I giving up on my dreams? After thinking it through, I don't think I am. My dream is to do great work, provide for my family, and live a life I'm proud of.

None of that requires me to do it all by myself.

With Sam taken care of and the "not a real marketer" fear put to rest, it became a no-brainer.

So far, so good

I emceed Laracon, which was always the plan, and then Taylor announced on stage that I was officially an employee.

There hasn't been a single day since where I've thought, "Man, I made a mistake."

It's been great.

My team is unbelievable.

They're all much better at professional marketing than I am, and I think that's exactly how it should be. More on that in a second.

Beyond the team, getting to work inside Laravel, something I've been part of for years but never officially, has been a real joy.

Where there is no vision

Back to the whole "I'm not a professional marketer" thing. There's a verse in Proverbs I keep coming back to: "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

That's a lot of my job.

Sure, I still write content and make videos and host events. But my real job is to answer the big questions: What are we even doing? Where are we going?

Before I'd even officially started, I wrote three or four thousand words laying out my vision for Laravel marketing: where we've been, where I think we should go, and what needs to change about how we talk about Laravel and how people see it.

We'll still have to do all the blocking and tackling to get there. But a leader's job is to hold a big, lofty vision and inspire people to build toward it.

That's a big shift for me. My entire career, especially when I was independent, I was an individual contributor. Usually the individual contributor. Now my job is to look at everything we could possibly do, decide what we're actually going to do, and make sure it lines up with where we need to go. (I still help execute, of course.)

Commander's intent

There's an idea I picked up from a book years ago called commander's intent. It's a military concept. You have a plan: we're going up the left side of the hill. But the intent is to get to the top of the hill.

Those are different things. On the way up the left side, you might run into something that makes the plan impossible. If your people only know the plan, they're stuck. If they know the intent, they can adapt. Our plan is X, Y, Z, but if you run into trouble, forget the plan. Get to the top of that goddang hill.

Intent covers a multitude of sins. The plan can go sideways and that's fine, because everyone knows where we're supposed to end up and can reroute. If you never tell people the real goal, you can't expect them to adjust, or to come up with a new plan for situations nobody anticipated. They'll just keep banging their heads against the wall executing a plan that no longer serves the point.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

So my first job, and my ongoing one, is to keep laying out an optimistic, hopeful vision for where this team and this company should go. What do we want to look back on in a couple of years and say, "That changed the company in exactly the way it needed"?

We'll figure out the details. I have no doubt about that. The people on this team are incredibly capable.

You'll see the first piece of that vision soon. We have a big launch in December that's the first real step toward changing how people see Laravel. There's no existential dread about it. It's obvious to me where we need to go if Laravel is going to win, and that feels really good.

Talk soon,

Aaron

PPS: Tweets + articles come back next week, still getting back in the flow.