Everyone is hiring a GTM Engineer.

It’s the new magic bullet, the consensus answer to slowing growth and rising acquisition costs. Leaders see the title and think they’re hiring a person who will “do the automations” and “build the outbound machine.”

This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

You are not hiring a person; you are attempting to install a new operating system on your revenue organization. A GTM Engineer (GTME) isn’t just an operator; they are an architect and an agent of change.

But you cannot install a new operating system on incompatible hardware. The “hardware” in this case is your company’s culture, its processes, and its unwritten rules.

A GTM Engineer is an amplifier. They will take whatever you already are and make it faster, bigger, and more intense.

• If you have clarity, they will scale it.
• If you have discipline, they will automate it.
• If you have chaos, they will scale the chaos.
• If you have bureaucracy, they will be crushed by it.

Before you write the job description, you must diagnose your own organization. These three litmus tests have nothing to do with your tech stack and everything to do with your company’s DNA.

Litmus Test 1: Do you write the system down?

If it isn’t documented, it cannot be automated, delegated, or improved.

GTM engineering sits on top of your operating system. If that OS lives only in people’s heads or inside “how we’ve always done it,” there’s nothing to engineer. There is only improvisation.

What you’re really testing

Ask yourself, honestly:

• Do major processes exist anywhere except in chat threads and people’s memories?
• When a campaign works, does someone write down why it worked and how to repeat it?
• When something breaks, do you have written post-mortems, or just blame and stories?
• If a key person disappeared for 30 days, could someone else follow their steps from a doc and get 70–80% of the result?

If the answer is “no” to all of the above, you don’t have a GTM system. You have folklore.

A GTM engineer cannot automate folklore. They can only watch it fail faster.

What it looks like when this is a “yes”

You don’t need perfect documentation. You need living documentation.

In organizations where GTM engineering actually works, you see:

• Simple, ugly docs over beautiful, missing docs.
  Google Docs, Notion pages, internal wikis that are clearly “v1” but in use.
  
• Decisions recorded, not just made.
  “We are pausing this segment because…” written somewhere everyone can see – not only said in a meeting.
  
• Campaigns described as flows, not blasts.
  There is at least a rough map of: source → enrichment → routing → messaging → follow-ups → handoff → measurement.
  
• People refer to docs in meetings.
  Not because someone forced them, but because it’s actually easier than re-explaining the whole thing.

This doesn’t mean you are “mature.” It means there is a minimum surface area for a GTM engineer to work with.

Why this matters for GTM engineering

A GTM engineer does not start by “adding tools.”

They start by:

• Tracing how leads actually move
• Finding the points where reality diverges from the slide deck
• Turning recurring patterns into repeatable flows

Without documentation, every change depends on oral history and personal memory. That means:

• No reliable inputs
• No baseline to compare improvements
• No way to hand off what they build

Result: you hire a GTM engineer, they build some clever workflows, a few people understand them, and then everything decays the moment they get sick, quit, or touch another project.

If you do not write things down, GTM engineering will at best create one more fragile dependency.

Litmus Test 2: Do you reward learning more than being right?

Every organization says it is “open to feedback” and “supports experimentation.” Most are lying to themselves.

GTM engineering is, by definition, a discipline of controlled experiments: new segments, new triggers, new motions, new workflows. That means some bets will fail. Not because the person is incompetent, but because the point of the role is to explore the edge of what you don’t know.

If your culture punishes that, GTM engineering will suffocate.

What you’re really testing

Look at the last 12–18 months and answer:

• When a project failed, what happened to the people who led it?
  
  • Were they trusted with another attempt?
  • Or quietly sidelined to “safe” work?

• Do people still raise uncomfortable truths in meetings, or did that phase end after a few career-limiting examples?
  
• Has anyone, in the last year, run a deliberate experiment that:
  
  • Didn’t have guaranteed ROI,
  • Was allowed to run long enough to learn,
  • And was written up as a learning asset even if numbers didn’t look good?
    
• Do you encourage side projects, learning time, or cross-functional prototypes that don’t map to a Q1/Q2 target?

If the only work that survives is work with a clear, immediate ROI story, you do not have an experimentation culture. You have a short-term fear culture with good PR.

Moonlighting, L&D, and “no-ROI” work

A surprisingly accurate proxy for this litmus test:

• Do you get nervous if your employees build things on the side?
• Is “learning and development” a slide in the deck or an actual calendar event?
• Have you ever funded something that:
  
  • Did not have a direct revenue forecast,
  • But clearly increased team capability or insight?

GTM engineering thrives where people are allowed to think beyond the current quarter’s dashboard.

If every hour must be justified by direct dollar attribution, GTM engineering turns into glorified admin:

• “Fix this sheet.”
• “Patch this integration.”
• “Automate this report.”

You don’t get a revenue engineer. You get a ticket taker.

What it looks like when this is a “yes”

In organizations where GTM engineering works, you’ll see:

• Failures documented, not buried.
  “We tested X, it didn’t work, here’s what we learned, here’s what it changes.”
  
• Leaders taking blame, not pushing it down.
  The tone from the top is: “We took this bet, here’s why, here’s what we’re changing,” not “who approved this?”
  
• Side projects being referenced.
  That internal tool a sales rep hacked together last year? Someone noticed. Someone funded a better version.
  
• Non-ROI work that clearly improved the system.
  Internal playbooks, internal workshops, shadowing, deep-dive research – not as “extras” but as part of the job.

In that environment, a GTM engineer can:

• Suggest uncomfortable changes
• Test new signal combinations
• Build non-obvious systems
• Admit when a hypothesis was wrong

because the unit of value isn’t just “booked meetings,” it’s compounding intelligence.

Why this matters for GTM engineering

GTM engineering is 80% controlled failure. Testing hypotheses that don’t work. Building workflows that break. Running campaigns that flop. A GTM engineer is paid to be wrong in public, faster than everyone else, and to turn that into direction.

If:

• People are punished for failed experiments,
• The only acceptable story is “we hit the target,”
• Leadership cannot tolerate a controlled loss in the service of learning,

then every GTM engineering initiative will be politically unsafe.

What you’ll get instead:

• Only safe projects
• Only obvious bets
• Only incremental changes

And soon you’ll say “GTM engineering didn’t move the needle for us.”

It didn’t. You didn’t let it.

Litmus Test 3: The Bureaucratic Latency Test

GTM Engineering is, at its core, about velocity. It’s about compressing the time between insight, execution, and learning.

That means new tools, new campaigns, new data flows, new rules, new definitions of “what good looks like.” If one person cannot push these changes through the organization, the role turns into “idea generator with no teeth.”

Bureaucracy is a velocity killer.

This test is simple: How long does it take to get a “yes” for a small-stakes decision?

• If an SDR believes a new $50/month data tool could unlock a new segment, can they get approval this afternoon? Or do they have to fill out a form, get three quotes, and wait for a quarterly procurement review?
• If your team identifies a new campaign angle based on a call that ended an hour ago, can they get a landing page and a small ad budget live by end of day? Or does it require a cross-departmental meeting and a two-week sprint cycle?
• When employees demand new tools, new consultants, or coaching, is the management’s default outlook one of trust (“Interesting, prove the value”) or suspicion (“Justify the cost”)?

What you’re really testing

Take a simple scenario:

A GTM engineer discovers a promising new segment and wants to:

• Test a new campaign for 200 accounts
• Use a new research tool with a small seat license
• Spin up a one-off landing page
• Route responses slightly differently in the CRM

Now walk through the reality in your org:

• How many approvals are needed?
• How many weeks does procurement take for a $99/month tool?
• Does IT/security block everything unfamiliar by default?
• Can marketing ship a landing page without a 45-day queue?
• Does sales ops allow experimental routing, or is “the process the process”?

If you’re exhausted just imagining this, a GTM engineer will be exhausted living it.

Job descriptions and rule updates

Another sharp indicator: how you treat your own job descriptions and rules.

• Are JDs copy-pasted from competitors and slightly edited?
• Do they list buzzwords instead of a clear “day in the life” and success definition?
• When a role evolves, does the JD evolve, or do you just keep pretending it’s the same job?

GTM engineering itself is a new role. If your org cannot even describe what success looks like in writing for pre-existing roles, that’s not just a hiring problem. That’s a system problem:

• Vague roles become vague expectations
• Vague expectations become vague accountability
• Vague accountability becomes quiet resentment

A GTM engineer needs:

• A clear mandate
• A clear owner to report to (someone who owns the revenue number)
• A clear zone of autonomy

If they’re “kind of in ops, kind of in marketing, kind of in product,” they will be pulled into everyone’s backlog and allowed to change nothing fundamental.

What it looks like when this is a “yes”

In organizations where one person can actually change things, you see:

• Fast, small approvals.
  A defined budget or sandbox where they don’t need sign-off for every micro tool or test.
  
• Local autonomy with global visibility.
  They can make changes in a constrained slice of the system (e.g., one segment, one play), as long as they document and report back.
  
• Processes updated in writing.
  When something works, SOPs and playbooks get updated quickly – not “next year when we redo everything.”
  
• Leaders willing to say “We’re changing this.”
  Not “let’s see” for 6 months. Clear yes/no, and backing in front of other teams.

This doesn’t mean chaos. It means managed change: bounded, documented, measured. 

Why this matters for GTM engineering

A GTM engineer will, by design, ask for:

• New tools nobody has heard of
• New ways of structuring campaigns
• New data flows that cut across team boundaries
• New definitions of what a “good lead” or “good account” is

If:

• Procurement treats every SaaS trial like an ERP implementation,
• IT treats every tool as a threat,
• Legal gets involved in every minor contract,
• Sales/marketing leaders treat changes as attacks on “how we do things,”

then the GTM engineer is dead on arrival.

The market moves in days. An opportunity to target a company based on a specific trigger event is perishable; it’s gone in a week. A GTME must operate at the speed of the market, not the speed of your internal processes.

If it takes three weeks to approve a tool, the opportunity is lost. If it takes four meetings to launch a campaign, the competitor has already captured the market’s attention. This isn’t just about inefficiency; it’s about a fundamental misalignment of speed. You cannot hire a race car driver and then force them to obey a 10 MPH speed limit. They will either quit or, worse, they will just start driving 10 MPH.

How to read your own results

After walking through these three tests, your answers will roughly fall into one of three patterns.

Pattern A: Strong “yes” on all three

• You write things down.
• You reward learning.
• One person can actually change things.

You are ready for GTM engineering to work.

Your main risk is under-scoping the role: treating it as a fancy title for tactical ops. If you give the mandate and the access, the environment will support the work.

Pattern B: Mixed answers

Maybe you document well but are slow on approvals.
Maybe you experiment a lot but nothing is written down.
Maybe one team can change things but others are frozen.

Here, GTM engineering can work only if you’re honest about the constraints and commit to fixing them.

Sometimes the right sequence is:

1. Clean up documentation and decision rights in one GTM area.
2. Then bring in GTM engineering with a very specific scope.
3. Use early wins to justify broader cultural changes.

But you cannot skip step 1 and expect step 2 to rescue you.

Pattern C: “No” on most or all

• Processes live in people’s heads.
• Failure is career damage.
• Approvals are slow and political.
• Job descriptions are vague and copy-pasted.

In this environment, GTM engineering will become:

• A buzzword on the careers page
• A frustrated operator stuck in tickets
• A short-lived experiment you’ll declare “didn’t work for us”

And truthfully, it didn’t stand a chance.

The fix is not “find a better GTM engineer.” The fix is changing the system they would have to operate inside.

The Real Mandate: Beyond the Litmus Test

So, what if you read this and realize your organization fails all three tests?

Failing doesn’t mean you cannot hire a GTM Engineer. It means you must be brutally honest about what you’re really hiring them to do.

You are not hiring someone to build revenue systems. You are hiring someone to wage a polite, internal war against your own company’s dysfunction.

This requires a different kind of hire and, more importantly, a different level of sponsorship.

This person cannot report to a mid-level manager. They must report directly to the CEO, COO, or Head of Revenue; someone with the political capital and the mandate to break things.

• They will need agency to bypass procurement.
• They will need resolve to navigate the internal politics that will try to pull them down.
• They will need air cover from leadership when they champion a failed experiment that cost money but yielded a critical insight.

And remember, a GTME is not a lone wolf. They orchestrate. They will still need your internal copywriter to write better sequences. They will still need your team to build a landing page for a new hypothesis. They will still need a budget for the new tools they discover.

Hiring a GTM Engineer isn’t a solution. It’s a statement. It’s a statement that you are ready to challenge your own assumptions and re-engineer your go-to-market from the ground up.

If you’re not ready for that transformation, save the money. You’re not buying an engineer; you’re just buying a future scapegoat. And my fellow GTMEs, gauge the opportunities based on these tests; your success will define how other GTMEs will be accepted by businesses in general.