WTF is GTM?

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I run Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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Job ads for “GTM Engineer” grew 205% year-on-year between 2024 and 2025.

Head of GTM. GTM Lead. GTM Strategist. Roles that barely existed five years ago are now staples of every startup's hiring list. They're on LinkedIn profiles, in job ads, in Slack channel names. Somewhere between the rise of product-led growth and the explosion of B2B SaaS, "go-to-market" stopped being a phrase and became a function.

But ask people in those roles what they actually do, and you'll get completely different answers. Sometimes from people sitting in the same office.

I asked three friends working across very different companies to give me the unfiltered version. What came back was honestly a lot more interesting than I expected. Their agreement surprised me as much as their disagreement.

Strip away the titles and the day-to-day noise, and all three describe the exact same underlying thing GTM exists to solve.

Will put it even better than I could. "I've always been drawn to the gap between what a product does and how the market understands it. GTM is where that gap gets closed."

The specific language each person used was different, Tania talked about commercial strategy, Braith talked about hitting $1M ARR at launch, Will talked about cross-functional narratives. But they're all describing the same upstream work. ICP clarity. Positioning. A clear answer to why customers buy, or why they don't. Before anyone writes copy or runs a campaign, that foundation either exists or it doesn't.

It's the exact same challenge I work on with clients at Pistachio, understanding who the audience actually is, why they care, and building systems that engage them reliably. We don't always use the GTM label, but the problem is identical.

What also struck me is how consistent the cast of characters is. In every context, GTM sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales, sometimes engineering is in there too. Nobody owns it in isolation. Everybody touches it. That's probably part of why the job title snowballs so much. When a function spans multiple teams, everyone needs a word for it.

Will said there's no GTM department at Blinq, "it's just what we name Slack channels to bring people together around a launch." His job is to get product, sales, and design into the same room around a shared narrative, and to make sure that conversation starts early. "The best launches I've been part of started with everyone asking 'how will this land?' early in discovery, not marketing scrambling to figure out the angle two weeks before we ship."

The consistent core explains why GTM exists. The messiness explains why it looks so different everywhere.

The same underlying challenge shifts dramatically depending on where a company is in its journey. At ten people, GTM is basically founder-led momentum. No department, no playbook, just whatever moves the next customers through the door. Braith's world at Kinso is a good illustration. A four-person marketing team, a launch date on the horizon, two-week sprint cycles, experimenting with every channel and doubling down on what works. The strategy and execution stay close together because there's no room (or time, or resource) for distance between them.

Scale to fifty people and the problem changes shape completely. Execution is no longer the hard part. Getting everyone aligned on the same direction is. Different people start telling different stories, targeting different buyers, running different plays. Tania sees it constantly across the companies she works with, the GTM fundamentals haven't changed, but the contextual organisational friction around them has multiplied. You need a tighter ICP, sharper messaging, and real feedback loops or the wheels come off quietly.

At two hundred people, coordination becomes the bottleneck. The default response is to carve GTM into specialist functions, with a team for each channel, each stage, each motion. It solves the coordination problem but creates a whole new one, too many handoffs, too much misalignment between the people who set strategy and the people executing it. Tania's view is that AI is starting to challenge this model. "The answer I'm more excited by is smaller pods owning outcomes end-to-end, reducing handoffs, increasing accountability." Fewer specialists in a chain. More people who own the whole problem.

At Blinq, Will operates in that cross-functional mode by design. The product marketer sits between product, sales, and design. Will's job is owning the narrative that connects all of them around a launch.

The tactics look different at each stage, but the challenge doesn't.

The most common misread of GTM is treating it as an execution function. The team that writes the launch emails, ships the campaign assets, updates the sales deck. Defined only by the visible output.

It's an understandable mistake. The upstream work that determines whether those outputs land isn't visible. When GTM goes wrong it usually traces back to the same root cause, the downstream work started before the upstream work was finished. The positioning was guessed at. The ICP was assumed. The channel mix was borrowed from what someone else was doing rather than built around what actually matches the buyer.

Tania said "They think GTM equals a product launch. In reality, GTM is the set of decisions and loops that make growth repeatable."

When I asked Braith about misconceptions, he simply said "some people just don't know what it means", which is probably closer to the truth than most people in the industry want to admit. The title has spread way faster than the understanding of it has.

When the upstream work is done well, the downstream work almost writes itself. When it isn't, no amount of good copy saves it.

GTM success is notoriously hard to attribute, which is part of why the function is hard to define and hard to hire for.

When things go well, the credit scatters. Sales celebrates the close. Product celebrates the launch. Marketing celebrates the campaign. The thinking upstream that made all of it possible is invisible. Nobody writes a Slack message saying "great ICP work this quarter."

The metrics themselves vary by context. For Braith at Kinso it's pretty clear, waitlist numbers now, ARR later. Pre-launch with a simple goal, so the measurement is simple too. Tania tracks pipeline created and influenced, funnel conversion rates, win-loss reasons shifting over time.

But the metric she thinks is most underrated is what she calls message pull-through, when prospects start repeating your language back to you in sales calls. "It means the positioning has actually landed. They're using your framing to describe their own problem. That's when you know you've got something."

I find that one particularly interesting because it's a leading indicator that most teams never think to track. By the time pipeline and conversion data tells you something is working, you've already been doing the right upstream work for months. ‘Message pull-through’ tells you earlier.

Ask someone in GTM what they'd hire for and the job description they give you will sound almost contradictory. Strategic enough to shape positioning and ICP. Executional enough to actually ship. Commercially literate. Data fluent. Curious about the product. Comfortable in sales conversations. A builder who can also think.

It's not a narrow profile. Which is probably why, when you look at the backgrounds of people actually doing this work, you won't find a pattern. Tania spent years in product marketing getting pulled out of her remit to solve progressively harder problems. Why deals were being lost, why the ICP kept shifting, why onboarding wasn't converting. Will started in advertising, gravitated toward behavioural strategy, and realised he was more interested in why users dropped off after day three than in writing the next campaign. Braith came to Kinso as a LinkedIn content specialist and ended up building the entire launch strategy because the role needed someone to.

None of them set out to work in GTM. The work found them because they were willing to follow the problem wherever it went. As Tania put it, "GTM was the natural outcome. I get to shape the bet, then drive the execution for it."

That pattern becomes pretty important when you're hiring. The people who thrive in GTM might not be the ones with the most relevant-looking history, they'll more likely be the ones who couldn't stay in their lane. Who’s curiosity pulled them toward the harder questions upstream. Who wanted to understand how the money gets made, not just how their particular channel performed.

When I pushed my friends on what they'd actually look for, they all landed on the same thing independently. Staying close to the work. Not just understanding strategy but remaining genuinely in the weeds of at least one channel or discipline. Someone on the pulse of how attention actually works right now, not someone who last did hands-on marketing three years ago. The GTM landscape shifts fast enough that losing contact with the execution layer means losing the ability to make good strategic calls about it.

That’s why the generalist framing sometimes given to GTM can be misleading. The best GTM people all carry genuine depth in at least one area. Braith on content and AI search, Will on positioning and messaging, Tania on commercial strategy and pricing. The breadth is what makes them effective across functions, but the depth is what makes them credible.

A pure strategist who can't ship won't cut it. Neither will a tactician who never thinks upstream. The rare thing, and the thing GTM actually needs, is someone who can do both, and knows when to do which.

Three people. Three completely different stages. Three day-to-day realities that don't look much alike on the surface at all.

But underneath all of it, the exact same challenge. The gap between what a product does and how the market understands it. The work required to close that gap. The upstream thinking that makes everything downstream actually land.

GTM is growing fast as a function because this problem is hard and companies are getting more intentional about owning it. The titles will keep evolving to sound even more extravagant, but the underlying job will stay the same.

Figure out who you're for. Understand why they should care. Build the systems that reach them reliably.

That's what GTM is. That's what GTM has always been.

If you want help with your own GTM, from the upstream thinking and audience understanding, to the downstream execution and systems that make growth repeatable, that's exactly what we do at Pistachio. So say hey and let’s see how we can get your GTM engine humming.

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