A software engineer walked into a marketing conversation with a taxonomy of dogs. Not breeds. Internet dogs: doggo, pupper, woofer. The natural corporate response would have been a gracious smile followed by a quiet return to the quarterly campaign plan. Nathan Rawlins’s team at Lucidchart made the video instead. It used the company’s diagramming language to explain the joke, acquired millions of views, and grew into sequels about cats and the creatures known online as “nopes.”
The campaign looked wonderfully unserious. The thinking behind it was not. Rawlins, Lucid Software’s chief marketing officer since 2017, saw the useful intersection of culture, product, and story. The joke could only work as a diagram, and the diagram happened to show what Lucidchart did. A strange idea from an engineer had become a demonstration, an advertisement, and a morale boost at once.
Rawlins has spent a career around software that asks people to change how they work. His method is to make that change legible without bleaching out the personality. It sounds simple until you consider how much enterprise software still speaks as if the audience were a procurement spreadsheet that had recently learned to nod.
The straight line through three software eras
There is a pleasing continuity to Rawlins’s public work. In 2010, while serving as senior director of product marketing at Jive Software, he warned companies against bolting wikis, blogs, customer communities, and bits of “social bling” into what he called a “Social Frankenstein.” All the correct parts could still produce something without a soul. Technology, he argued, should begin with the business and with the human relationships it was meant to improve.
Jive was selling social business before workplace feeds became ordinary furniture. Rawlins led product marketing and brand as the company grew through its 2011 public offering. He later moved to Puppet, where he led worldwide marketing as infrastructure automation and DevOps moved from early-adopter jargon toward the mainstream.
In 2016, Puppet Labs became simply Puppet. Rawlins explained the change with the practicality of someone unwilling to argue with his own customers: people already called the company Puppet, so why push against the name? The wider rebrand aimed to communicate simplicity, stability, and maturity. It was category work performed with an ear for the words people actually used.
When Rawlins arrived at Lucid in 2017, the company presented a particularly interesting marketing problem. A diagramming application could be useful to almost anyone, yet “diagramming software” sounds like a niche built inside a niche. Lucid’s motion ran from individual discovery to company adoption. Rawlins later described it as business-to-consumer-to-business: win a person, let usage spread, then meet the enterprise already populated by believers.
That model makes the doggo campaign less eccentric than it first appears. Enterprise customers remain people after they open a work laptop. They carry the same sense of humor through the office door. Rawlins has argued that B2B marketers can use consumer instincts without becoming frivolous, provided the creative idea still fits the product and its audience.
Drawings are the most natural form of communication.Nathan Rawlins
Permission to be odd, discipline to be useful
The viral videos supplied the colorful part of the story. Rawlins has always paired experiments with an affection for less glamorous foundations. Search, he has said, is ground zero. A website has to work before a marketer can enjoy the fireworks. The team tried ideas that failed as well as the ones that traveled. The important capability was not predicting virality. It was creating enough permission to test, measure, and learn.
One of his favorite examples of this temperament is delightfully sticky: a family tradition of subjecting marshmallow Peeps to small experiments. The confectionery may not have deserved it, but the instinct is revealing. Curiosity becomes useful when someone is allowed to poke the thing and observe what happens.
Colleagues’ public recommendations describe Rawlins as energetic, technically aware, warm, and able to compress a difficult value proposition into language a company can rally around. His B.A. in Humanities from Brigham Young University sits neatly beside that reputation. His career has depended on translation: from product to buyer, specialist to generalist, and abstract system to shared story.
His recurring trick is not to make complex software look simple. It is to find the human problem inside the complexity, then give everyone a picture of the same problem.
A meeting is not necessarily collaboration
At Lucid, Rawlins’s subject widened from diagrams to the nature of collaborative work. He likes to dismantle the familiar sticky-note meeting. Everyone gathers in a room with laptops powerful enough to organize the entire exercise. Instead, people write on paper, place the notes on a distant wall, squint, and send some unlucky soul to group and transcribe them. The ritual feels collaborative because many bodies are present. Much of the useful context disappears before the next meeting.
A shared digital canvas changes more than efficiency. People can contribute at the same time. Notes survive. Voting becomes visible. Ideas can be grouped and moved into project systems. Most importantly, a participant who does not want to be the loudest person in the room can still put the best thought on the board. Rawlins’s case for visual collaboration is partly a case for more equitable attention.
He is equally skeptical of the old command to “break down silos.” Specialized teams exist for a reason. A framer, electrician, and drywaller should not become interchangeable during a home renovation. They do need a shared plan. Rawlins uses that domestic construction example to argue for visual connective tissue across specialized groups. Autonomy can remain intact while the dependencies become visible.
There needs to be a lingua franca across these teams. We think that it’s best to be visual.Nathan Rawlins
The idea proved especially durable during the move to remote and hybrid work. Rawlins resisted treating a video call as a digital copy of the conference room. The better question was what a digital environment could improve. Asynchronous contribution, durable context, and easier participation were not emergency substitutes. They were corrections to habits that had been inefficient for years.
The missing middle of AI transformation
Rawlins now applies the same visual logic to artificial intelligence. Companies buy tools, employees write and analyze faster, and leaders expect an organizational leap. Then the gains fail to travel from individuals into the institution. Rawlins calls this the AI transformation gap.
His explanation is satisfyingly unmagical. An autonomous agent cannot navigate a process that the organization itself has never clearly documented. Workflows contain exceptions, informal handoffs, hidden data, and decisions that live inside experienced employees’ heads. Before automating them, a company has to see them.
The bridge across the AI transformation gap
Rawlins’s warning: many organizations try to leap over the middle box.
The middle phase is visibility: map the current process, design the future one, and preserve the result as governed, living documentation. Only then can an agent receive enough context to make useful decisions. The proposal naturally serves Lucid’s products, but its logic extends beyond them. A fast engine is no help when nobody agrees where the road goes.
This also explains Rawlins’s careful stance on AI in marketing. He sees the technology as a starting point, a way to get past a blank page or remove repetitive labor. Human judgment remains the finisher. Teams need skepticism, transparency, and room for independent thought. Otherwise efficiency creates a sea of interchangeable output, and the tool that promised creative freedom quietly becomes a copy-and-paste machine.
His phrase for the opportunity is “augmented creativity.” AI can offer a draft, simulate a viewpoint, or visualize a concept. People decide what is relevant and where to take it. The distinction fits a marketer who has lived from the dot-com boom to the era of agents and still believes enterprise audiences deserve an authentic voice.
Clarity as a form of respect
Rawlins enjoys exploring Utah with his family, an ordinary detail that suits a career spent asking people to look at the terrain before choosing a route. His stated ambition at Lucid has been much larger: bring visual collaboration to every knowledge worker on the planet. The scale is grand; the mechanism remains a shared canvas, a visible dependency, a place for the quiet person’s note.
The software categories have changed around him. Social business gave way to DevOps, visual collaboration, work acceleration, and agentic AI. Each arrived with its own vocabulary and its own temptation to confuse technology with progress. Rawlins keeps returning to coherence. Use the words customers use. Let unlikely ideas arrive from unlikely people. Map the work before automating it. Give complicated systems enough form that a group can discuss them honestly.
Even the doggo diagram belongs on that line. It took a private language from the internet, arranged it into something visible, and invited millions of strangers to recognize the joke together. The subject was silly. The act was serious communication. Enterprise software could do worse than remember the difference.