What is GTM Engineering?

Gather ‘round, folks! I got some ☕️

Once upon a time, in a startup far, far away, there was a growth hacker. What did she do? She did whatever it took for the company to grow, dammit.

Oh, you want more details? Fine—she created hypotheses and ran experiments.

Oooh. Such scientific. Much wow.

Then she went the way of the Dodo. We don’t know why. These things happen.

Some time passed ⏳

Enter RevOps, the elder sibling—methodical, hard-nosed, in possession of a long list of Coursera certificates and the ability to talk to finance using only abbreviations like ROI, EBITDA, and MoM. (The last one is short for “Mother”, I think.)

For eons, RevOps climbed the pecking order unimpeded—companies hired SVPs of RevOps, hosted yacht parties, upscale private dinners, and all manner of extravagant excess. But now, a new family member threatens to upend that order.

It’s the middle child that took a year off after college to travel the world, then returned a decade later—transformed into an autodidactic polymath. Someone who can write poetry like Rilke but also calculate the area of bounded regions on a paper napkin, blindfolded and without a pen.

Drumrolls please 🥁

It’s the GTM Engineer.

I am not someone who gives many f****s about titles. If three f****s are required in a setting, I am liable to show up with one (or less). So I find the obsession that revenue teams have with the constant reinvention of job titles a little weird.

But, and before this post completely gets away from me… I do recognize the value of what a GTM Engineer signifies.

Working at early-stage startups (as I have) makes you internalize that growth comes from revenue acceleration and reducing wasteful spend. To maximize your chances of survival, you treat those variables as a continuum and not a binary lever.

It almost becomes personal after a while.

I have fought vendors, walked off negotiation tables, and broken contractual payment obligations in cases where I felt that my group was being treated as a line item in someone else’s balance sheet. No regrets whatsoever.

From that lens, the value creation that GTM Engineering promises bodes well with me.

So, let’s talk about that and more.

Who started it?

Clay created the first GTM Engineering team.

If you haven’t heard about Clay, don’t worry, you will—here and elsewhere. Think of it like Excel meets Zapier meets an API marketplace. It is good.

Okay, but why?

First, I think it was an extremely smart employer branding move on Clay’s part, even if unintentional. They wanted a certain type of person to run their GTM Engine… and look—now every Cool, Inc. in the world wants that person.

Second, if you understand how Clay works, a GTM Engineer is the human embodiment of their product. Clay is the Swiss Army knife of SaaS tools. It then makes sense that the people they hired to commercialize the product are, well, the Swiss Army knife of the commercial workforce.

Third, and by far the reason with the most far-reaching and persistent effects, generative AI and the commoditization of enrichment APIs are accelerating the collapse of traditional job roles.

What do GTM Engineers do?

The lazy answer, like growth hackers, is everything, or… whatever it takes.

I’ve personally seen them:

1. Creating content like a copywriter

2. Creating collateral like a designer

3. Building an audience like a marketer

4. Prospecting like a BDR

5. Running demos like an AE

6. Automating processes like RevOps

7. Integrating/debugging data like a dev

8. Generally… being a #boss

A GTM Engineer is someone who identifies a problem, weighs the impact of solving it, and then solves it using the most efficient and elegant way, across the entire lifecycle of the revenue process… from sourcing-to-close-to-retention.

Think about what type of person would want to do all that, much less possess the skills? By simple elimination, it will be someone driven, deeply curious, and forward-thinking. It won’t be a junior or mid-career professional working a beat. It will be someone who commands a premium and expects full autonomy to be a non-negotiable.

Most people are content living inside the first box that happens to fit their size. I only write, I only market, I only sell, I only code, I only manage, I only analyze, I only plan, I only lead, ad infinitum.

Time will reveal that those boxes are not success or safety, they are a type of self-created prison.

Should you hire a GTM Engineer?

Yes, without flinching or thinking twice.

A startup should hire them to lay down a strong foundation and for the sheer value. A mid-sized company should hire them to act as a part role model, part agent-of-change to break inertia.

When looking for one, prioritize the trifecta of driven, curious, and forward-thinking over hard skills.

The “Engineering” in GTM Engineer is used loosely, in fact, some are not engineers in the strictest sense. For example, they won’t necessarily need to know how to write Python if they can prompt ChatGPT to write, test, and debug a script to achieve the intended result.

Every business is going to need unfettered, multidimensional problem-solvers like that. The smarter ones will just act on it sooner.