Introduction#
The Go-To-Market landscape is at an inflection point. Inboxes and social feeds are overwhelmed with low-quality automated outreach and AI-generated content, making it harder than ever to send 'the right message to the right person at the right time', or just stand out on any distribution channel.
Simultaneously, products have never been easier to build thanks to no-code and AI, flooding virtually every niche with like-for-like competitors with much faster time-to-market, making differentiation harder and increasing overall market risk.
In B2B SaaS land, companies like Ramp, Rippling, Gorgias, and Samsara broke new records with their growth trajectories by leveraging innovative growth strategies. They were early adopters of automated outbound, personalization at scale, and the use of signals and intent data — long before these became 'democratized' with the likes of Clay, RB2B or Cargo.
However, as these tactics become commonplace, the competitive advantage they once offered has diminished. Volume-based outreach has led to crowded inboxes, desensitized prospects, and stricter spam controls, making it increasingly difficult to stand out.
So how can the next generation of startups learn from the likes of Ramp and effectively break through the noise and drive sustainable growth?
This new breed of challenges demands a new breed of talent — with a different mindset, set of skills, and tooling — the Go-To-Market (GTM) engineer. This post is about why, what great ones look like, and how you can become one yourself (if you wish to!).
The case for GTM engineers#
For us at Hypergrowth Partners, we've been making the case for GTM engineers for years already — we've been evangelizing this growth mindset in growth teams of the likes of Ramp, Gorgias, Vercel, Drift, and more.
The case for GTM engineers is clear to us — however, the AI revolution is making it even more important. Let's unpack some of the key root causes.
ZIRP, tech layoffs, and AI
In today's hyper-competitive market, every product category is saturated.
Even groundbreaking innovations like OpenAI face numerous competitors such as Anthropic, LLama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Cohere, and Grok. The post-ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era, coupled with widespread tech layoffs and the rise of AI, is intensifying pressures on productivity, efficiency, and revenue per employee.
Companies are being pushed to "do more with less," necessitating rapid execution and adaptability. In this market, only the teams that embrace this tempo and productivity demanded by the market will stay ahead of the curve. Otherwise, you'll drown into a sea of undifferentiated, like-for-like average players; or simply go bust.
GTM SaaS-ification
The explosion of GTM SaaS — Marketing, Sales etc. — is productizing entire job roles through vertical and or horizontal SaaS tools.
For example, carrying out lead generation and qualification operations once required teams of SDRs that would manually create lists of potential customers, calling them one by one to verify potential fit, and then pass them onto the sales team to start the sales cycle.
Now, you can use various intelligence platforms to collect signals within and outside your properties, and predictably score and qualify them — and automatically reach out to them on the right channels with a hyper-tailored messaging. All without lifting a finger!
→ source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOgx9CJgUyU
The same is slowly happening in content marketing, SEO, performance marketing, sales, PLG, and more, with specialized tools and AIs that are enabling better outcomes with much less resources.
Examples include:
Content: byword.ai, AirOps, EasyGen, Writesonic, Engyne, Synthesia, Ideogram, HeyGen
Sales engagement: Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, LaGrowthMachine, Sendspark, Apollo, Salesloft, Letterdrop, Outreach
TAM/List building: Keyplay, Ocean, Common Room
Enrichment: Fullenrich, Common Room, Waterfall, BuiltWith, Zoominfo, Clearbit, Cognism, Clay, Warmly
Signals: Common Room, RB2B, Madkudu, Pocus, Unify, Koala
Research: Tome, Poggio, Endgame
Product Marketing: Octave, Humata, Relume, Gamma
Website: Mutiny, Userled
SEO: Ahrefs, SERanking
Paid marketing: DemandBase, NRich, Smartly, Metadata, Primer, RollWorks
Sales intelligence: Orum, Gong, Nooks, Attention
Training: Hyperbound, Blue
Revenue Orchestration: Cargo
Lifecycle: Userflow, Customer.io, Crisp, Intercom, Refiner
In the most extreme scenarios, we're seeing solopreneurs who can setup, maintain, and even scale multiple go-to-market workstreams — content, outbound, and SEO — by just leveraging a set of AI-powered tools.
Operationalization
Operationalization has become another byproduct of this shift. Every GTM function now has its own "ops team" — marketing ops, sales ops, dev ops, product ops.
These teams are quickly gaining more and more popularity in tech startups, and for good reason. They're:
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Both technical and business savvy: they combine understanding of the customer journey, ICP, and business model, with technical skills of data and SaaS management.
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Data management: Know how to collect, clean, and mine customer data from large datasets, and use them for business purposes like messaging personalization and distribution — tying them to real business impact.
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SaaS stacking knowledge: Can comfortably jump into, learn, and master multiple SaaS tools — setting up custom workflows that reflect the customer journey — stacking the right tools together based on the company stage and needs, while also imbuing data into each of them to guarantee personalization at scale.
Operationalization means data and tooling knowledge — and the ability to leverage both across the entire customer journey — are becoming critical traits of modern tech talent that yields above average results, faster, and with less resources.
Cross-functionalism and use-case focus
Cross-functionalism is another critical factor that makes the case for the GTM engineer. Since the first Reforge course came out back in 2016, lines between core GTM functions — product, sales, data, and marketing — have been blurring, requiring professionals to build more and more T-shaped skill sets.
As we mentioned above, GTM teams must zoom in and out of the entire customer journey, wearing multiple hats and plugging into different skills to address problems wherever they arise in the funnel.
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Monetization: customers are not upgrading from our free trial. Is it a pricing model problem, a UX/UI problem, or a product one that is preventing customers from monetizing?
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Retention & Engagement: customers are not combing back with the product. Is it a UX/UI, feature parity, messaging, or targeting problem?
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Acquisition: customers are not signing up. Is it an awareness, messaging, UX/UI, targeting, or channel problem?
These problems relate to the key use cases of a tech business — how to acquire, engage, retain, and monetize their users — and transcend the typical problems that relates to the function of the business — marketing, product, sales, etc.
Customers are buying products via a multi-touch and cross-channel experience. To effectively cope with this mindset, tech teams need to transcend their siloed view in terms of a company function — from marketing, product, and sales — and instead embrace a cross-functional use-case view of the business — to acquisition, retention & engagement, and monetization.
This requires modern teams to be able to understand and manage the end-to-end customer journey, strategize experiments throughout it, and quickly switch gears to solve different types of problems. This adaptability makes modern talent more of generalists with knowledge in 2-3 key areas.
Growth mindset
In this new, fluid and fast-paced landscape, mindset outweighs hard skills.
While hard abilities remain important, soft skills like risk-taking, adaptability, rapid learning, modular thinking, lean operations, speed, and execution are now more paramount than ever.
That's why experience in early- or growth-stage startups — where the speed of growth forces teams to undergo massive change and fast learning curves — become most formative and in-demand. Because it's what helps forge the growth mindset as we define it at Hypergrowth Partners.
It's easier now to see how the case for the GTM engineer is clear.
- ZIRP, tech layoffs, and AI are putting pressure on teams to be smaller and more productive
- GTM SaaSificiation is enabling small teams to achieve better outcome with less resources
- Operationalization puts the focus on tech stacks and data knowledge as critical skills
- Cross-functionalism is forcing smaller teams to own the full journey and wear multiple hats
- All of the above make execution and mindset more important than hard specializations
Now that we've made the case for the GTM engineer, let's dive deeper into what great ones look like, and how they differ from other common profiles we've been seeing in growth teams in the last few years.
What makes GTM engineers different
GTM Engineers represent a new paradigm in growth teams, distinct from more 'now traditional' positions like growth marketers and growth engineers. Before understanding what a GTM engineer is, let's make some distinctions as to what it's not.
GTM engineers vs. Growth marketers
Growth marketers focus primarily on customer acquisition. Their objectives revolve around attracting new users through channels like SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, and social.
Their focus is on top of the funnel and related topline metrics, like traffic,
signups, and activations. To do so, they rely on tools such as web analytics,
social platforms, SEO and paid ads software to set up, optimize, and scale
campaigns
In some cases, their remit extends to the signup and activation flows, including landing page and UX/UI optimization for the top-of-the-funnel. Their mindset is centered around channel tactics, A/B testing, ICP knowledge, and messaging.
In contrast, GTM Engineers go beyond just acquisition to encompass the entire customer journey. They act as system orchestrators across all stages — from awareness to revenue, retention and churn.
They integrate multiple SaaS tools, set up end-to-end custom workflows, and handle large datasets to create a seamless and personalized experience, with or without code. Their holistic approach integrates a solid RevOps and data fluency, while also being knowledgeable in messaging and ICP more typical of growth marketers.
GTM engineers vs. Growth engineers
Growth engineers are software programmers focused on growth product experiments. Their goal is to build or scale experimental features that drive engagement, retention, or revenue.
They work closely with growth PMs and growth designers to "build" out these experiments, track their impact via A/B or multivariate tests, and validate them before passing them onto core product and engineering teams.
To do so, they use a mix of Python, JavaScript, and SQL too. Their mindset is deeply technical yet scrappy, focused on building aggressive and scalable solutions.
GTM Engineers differ by not being confined to the product itself. Differently from growth engineers, they integrate expertise in the user journey, ICP, messaging, and business acumen (e.g. pricing, forecasting, etc.).
Like growth engineers, they can code, but can also quickly jump into managing multiple SaaS, connecting them together, managing data pipelines, and ensuring alignment between GTM teams.
GTM engineers vs. Growth Product managers
Growth PMs focus on scaling growth by managing a pipeline of product growth experiments. Their objectives include analyzing product data to mine growth opportunities, coming up with hypotheses for experiments, and prioritizing them on a roadmap to drive engagement, retention, or revenue.
They work with growth designers, growth engineers, and growth analysts — and tools like product analytics, user feedback platforms, and A/B testing software — to run these experiments. Their mindset balances product, design, and UX/UI with business growth.
While Growth PMs concentrate on the product's evolution to stimulate growth, GTM engineers adopt a more comprehensive scope. Unlike Growth PMs who focus on product experiments, GTM engineers focus on integrating product, marketing, and sales strategies as one, unified growth system.
They leverage cross-functional data and insights, intertwine multiple (custom) tools to ensure that every aspect of the customer journey is cohesive and effective.
GTM engineers vs. Growth hackers
The term "growth hacker" often suggests a focus on quick, overnight wins through unconventional tactics. This mindset can set false expectations, positioning the role as one that seeks shortcuts rather than sustainable strategies.
GTM Engineers differ significantly in this regard. They prioritize building robust systems and processes over short-term hacks. Their approach is iterative, thoughtful, and scientific, emphasizing scalability through automation and sustainability by working back from business forecasting.
By avoiding the "hacking" mentality, GTM Engineers aim for long-term growth and scalability.
GTM Engineers: The Holistic Growth Orchestrators
The challenge now lies in defining and recognizing these professionals. Titles like Chief of Staff, Head of Growth, GTM Ops, RevOps, or Special Projects have been used, but none fully capture the essence of this role.
Let's examine even more what their day-to-day looks like, deep diving into their background and real-life examples.
Goals
Concretely, GTM Engineers own pipeline and revenue growth. They're able to forecast and workback from key business metrics and build workflows and systems — across every customer touchpoint that reliably and directly tie into the business bottom-line.
Ownership
GTM engineers own the entire buyer journey, from identifying the right Ideal Customer Profile to building pipeline and converting it into revenue.
They find the most cost-effective ways to turn accounts into dollars, whether through AI, automation, off-the-shelf tooling, product experiences, data vendors, paid programs, or traditional sales. What matters is that it works efficiently.
Their responsibilities include setting up signal-based, cross-channel demand generation programs — such as outbound, paid, content, and SEO — and extending their influence to the bottom of the funnel through lifecycle marketing, expansion, cross- and up-selling, and churn prevention.
In the early-stages, they set up and execute on setting up these workflows from scratch with a focus on sustainability, repeatability and scrappiness. Then, as the organization matures, they switch into optimization and testing, by coming up with hypothesis-driven experimentation typical of growth teams.
Cross-functional expertise
They embody the cross-functional convergence of marketing, sales, product, engineering — and business! — acting as the link between every functional GTM team. They integrate a unique, T-shaped blend of:
- ICP, user behavior, and messaging knowledge
- End-to-end customer journey
- Business forecasting and modeling
- (Semi)-technical knowledge of coding, SaaS, data, and APIs
Because of that, they don't think as 'marketers', 'PMs', or 'engineers', but can switch gears to solve system-level problems of 'acquisition', 'retention', or 'monetization'.
Combining technical and creative skills
Standing out requires a blend of technical prowess and creative acumen. Smaller, leaner, cross-functional GTM teams are becoming essential, composed of individuals who can connect the dots across various functions and embrace allbound strategies.
These are the "Internet plumbers"—cross-functional generalists who deeply understand each stage of the funnel, are fluent in the latest technology and automation, and can orchestrate large, modular growth stacks. They're more comfortable in tools like Clay than traditional CRMs like Salesforce, and their favorite acronyms are ICP rather than MQL.
Combining large datasets — first-, second-, and third-party signals — with messaging testing, and SaaS tooling, they blend technical and creative skills to build scalable and modular systems tailored to the ICP and the customer journey.
Growth mindset
Because of their cross-functionality, fluency in AI and SaaS tooling, and system thinking, GTM engineers can comfortably operate within lean, small teams, wearing multiple hats and taking full ownership of pipeline metrics.
They stay abreast of the latest tools and maintain a growth mindset that prioritizes fast-paced thinking, risk-taking, and execution excellence.
Hands-on in building custom tools and integrating systems, they develop
high-impact solutions tailored to their organization's needs. Operating. They
can work closely with:
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Sales & CS: as their work tie directly to revenue and business impact
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Marketing: as they have deep understanding of the ICP and messaging
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RevOps & Engineering: as they know how to code, use, and interlink multiple SaaS and AIs
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Product: as they operate also on the bottom-of-the-funnel, at churn and expansion
In shorts, GTM Engineers bridge strategy and execution across the entire funnel. Sounds hard or close-to-impossible? And it’s exactly that rarity that makes this type of talent extremely valuable.
Background
This new breed often comes from two, opposite backgrounds:
Technical marketers and business operators with a creative flair, such as Hank Taylor, who combine marketing savvy with technical skills and branched out in more cross-functional, GTM role roles.
Engineers who have developed a keen interest in revenue generation and GTM strategies, like Rory Conroy and Raman Hundal, leveraging their deep understanding of tech and SaaS to drive revenue initiatives.
Then there are 360° GTM professionals like Sylvain Giuliani, who seamlessly integrate multiple disciplines, embodying a full-spectrum approach to go-to-market strategies. In essence, leading GTM Engineers are versatile problem-solvers who bridge the gap between technical execution and business growth.
Real-world examples of GTM Engineering teams
Gorgias
Consider Gorgias' approach (they have one of the best GTM engineering teams on the planet) — their objective was to understand why Zendesk users were migrating to Gorgias.
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A traditional growth marketer might listen to Gong calls and manually extract insights—a time-consuming and less scalable method.
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In contrast, their GTM Engineer developed a script using prompt engineering and natural language processing to analyze these calls automatically. They extracted core reasons for migration, applied these insights strategically, and integrated the findings into GTM systems. When specific signals were detected, they fed personalized, AI-crafted emails at scale.
Gorgias also utilized Cargo to optimize their email outreach. They replaced static segmentation with dynamic, AI-driven content generation, built conditional logic flows for real-time email customization, and integrated with the Instantly API for automated email dispatch.
This sophisticated orchestration led to a 70% increase in conversion rates compared to previous sequences.
Datadome
Similarly, Datadome exemplifies the GTM Engineer's impact by building a systematic pipeline for lead generation.
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For each closed-won deal detected in their CRM, they automatically generated lookalike accounts.
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They retrieved key information from the original deals to craft resonating messages for these similar accounts.
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The GTM Engineer identified and enriched the right stakeholders within these accounts, allocated them to sales, and pushed them into a sequence where the first email was drafted using deal information combined with AI.
In essence, leading GTM Engineers transcend traditional functional roles by integrating scalable tech, workflows, data — as well as messaging, creatives, and business logic — into complete GTM strategies, resulting in increased efficiency, personalization, and revenue generation.
Top GTM engineers to follow
Here's a list of top GTM engineers for you to connect with and learn from:
- Trevor Fox
- Hank Taylor, HyperGrowth Partners & Laravel — ex Vercel, GitLab
- Gaurav Vohra, Superhuman
- Sylvain Giuliani, Census
- Rory Conroy, Gorgias
- Jeff Ignacio, Keystone AI
- Diego Martinez, Pigment
- Marcel Santilli, HyperGrowth Partners & GrowthX Labs — ex Deepgram
- Guillaume Aubert, Gorgias
- Raman Hundal, Rhombus
- Vincent Bonjean, Qobra
- Aurelien Aubert, Cargo
- Maxence de Villepion, Cargo
- Keerthivasan C, Omni
- William Borges, Veriflow AI
- Nicolas Druelle, The Revenue Architects
- Callum Hamlett, Arquit
How to become a GTM engineer
So, you want to become a GTM engineer? There are multiple pathways to do so.
If you come from an engineering background with an interest in revenue and go-to-market strategies, you can leverage your technical skills to build custom data and SaaS architectures that operationalize GTM programs like personalized outbound, lead scoring and routing, or signal-based plays.
If your background is in marketing or sales, you can acquire the necessary technical skills to transition into a GTM Engineer role by attending coding bootcamps like Ironhack, Le Wagon, or Codesmith.io and get equipped with knowledge in AI, automation, data operations, and programming languages like JavaScript.
Companies to consider joining:
- Ramp
- Vercel
- Ashby
- Together.ai
- AirOps
- Attention
- Clerk
- Pigment
Also, joining the #1 GTM engineering community allows you to network with like-minded professionals and stay updated on cutting-edge developments. Finding a mentor who specializes in growth engineering can also accelerate your journey, offering guidance and insights that refine your skill set.
Conclusion
The future of GTM engineering lies in the formation of smaller, tech-enabled teams that leverage AI to drive efficiency and revenue growth.
As AI increases revenue per employee, the need for large, specialized teams diminishes, making lean, cross-functional teams of GTM Engineers the new norm.
Sales roles will evolve accordingly, with sales representatives becoming key touchpoints within a technology-orchestrated customer journey rather than sole drivers of the sales process.
This shift paves the way for GTM Engineers to emerge in leadership positions; future CROs and CMOs will need both technical and strategic expertise, and GTM Engineers are natural fits for these evolving roles.
Implementing GTM engineering in your organization is not just a competitive advantage — it's becoming a necessity. Embracing this shift will position your company at the forefront of industry evolution, ready to outpace competitors and capture new market opportunities.
MaxNov 29, 2024
