How to Become a GTM Engineer: A New Career Path for Developers

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Matt: Developer job titles are changing. One role I'm seeing more and more of is a GTM engineer, a job that combines code, automation, data, and AI with a very direct goal: help the company make more money. That direct connection to revenue really, really does matter these days. No role is layoff-proof, but during a reorganization it is much easier to defend work that can point to more pipeline, better conversion, stronger retention, or lower acquisition costs.

So today we're breaking down what a GTM engineer actually does, why the role is growing, and how an existing developer can transition into it without restarting their career all from scratch. So Mike, you actually are the one that wrote this episode. Uh, we were looking at some GTM stuff before we started recording, so why don't you take it away with a bit of an intro and, and kind of lead us into this episode?

But [00:01:00] before we do that, 'cause I made a mistake, if this sounds interesting to you and you wanna support the show, you can go check us out on that Patreon, leave a review or rating on your podcast app. Join us in our Discord server or share this with your friends. And if you wanna learn how to code and take some courses to do so, you can get up to 20% off a Scrimba Pro plan.

You can use the link in the show description and in the show notes with full details on how it works in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com. And now, Mike, you may begin your descent.

Mikhail: Heck yeah. Heck yeah. Okay. So, I think one goal that I have in mind, uh, with HTML Things, and in general when I w- like when we were creating this, was to help people in the web developer space, right? Like that's one goal. It's a little bit crazy out there right now, and I'm trying to find out how I can help people, because before that was, you know, tutorials, talking about different technologies.

We still do that to a certain degree, right? Like we still talk about different technologies so that you, you have, you know, [00:02:00] the, the, the verbiage and the vocabulary top of mind, you can ask the right questions. Like I think that's important. What really isn't helping right now is me like giving you a tutorial on how to do a full web development project in like straight JavaScript or something like that, or Svelte, or me talking about frameworks.

That doesn't help you as much as it did, you know, a year or two ago. So I'm trying to figure out where I can fit into this spot, and I think where I can-- what I can do is I can look at the industry as a whole. I have a pretty good insight into there. I have a lot of people that I talk to in the industry, and I can see where the shift is happening to and what you should start focusing on as an engineer to differentiate yourself, to look for a new role if you're in that spot, right?

Like if you've been laid off or you're thinking a layoff is coming, where you should be looking, what you should be doing, what skills you should be developing. So that's where I wanna come at this from. Uh, there's a lot going on in the industry, and new roles are kind of popping up all over the place. We talked about some of those roles actually in a [00:03:00] previous episode.

I'm gonna have a link to that episode in this, in this, uh, in the show notes on htmlthings.com, so you can check that out. But essentially, there was like, you know, forward deployed engineer. Uh, there was, uh, you know, AI evalu- like prompt evaluations and stuff like that. Like there's a, a bunch of different roles around AI that started to pop up.

But this is not directly related to AI. It's kind of side related, like you can use, use AI. This is more related to being closer to the revenue, this role. And I wanna kind of dive into that a little bit, uh, what I mean by being closer to the revenue. In an org, as we're seeing right now, a lot of what's happening is trying to minimize costs. They're trying to show bigger profits, right? To get their stock to go up. And for doing that, they're a lot of times having to lay off people, because that's the fastest way to show bigger [00:04:00] profits. Less people means less payroll. Payroll is usually the biggest line item on, on a, uh, a corporation's books for costs, and so less payroll means more, uh, total profits. To, put yourself in a position where you're not you know, cut, in my opinion, what really helps is you having to be directly related or closer to the revenue, closer to maximizing profits. If you're on a team that has a direct correlation to profits going up, Like, if you're on a team that is developing the most popular product of the company that people are buying like crazy, right?

And you're a part of the team that's actually making it so that your sales went up by 10%. The chances of you being cut are much lower than if you're on a team that's, like, two steps removed from profits. For example, like a developer experience specialist, [00:05:00] right? So, like, you're on a team that's supporting the developers that actually making the products that are making the revenue. It's a lot harder to make that direct line to revenue, direct line to profits on that team. I'm not saying that team's not, not important. It is important. That's why it existed, right? Like, 'cause, like, at some point, someone made that correlation. They're like, "Well, we need this team to help our engineers to make more profits," right?

To help these guys that are the more direct line to revenue. The problem now is that those secondary relationships to revenue and those, like, bigger bets, like le- less revenue-adjacent jobs, becoming harder and harder to justify in these reorg discussions that corporations are having. So to put you-- to put it into perspective, I think you need to start putting yourself in a position where you're closer and more directly correlated to a revenue of a company. That's really where this discussion is coming from.

Matt: Well, I, I mean, I've personally seen this [00:06:00] and, I mean, m- uh, any IT person has, has honestly personally seen this if they've worked for a larger company because there is a, there was a growing concern, I don't know if it's growing or if it's segmenting now or, or what have you, but a lot of Companies that have internal IT teams are generally concerned for their wellbeing in the company during a reorg, uh, or during any sort of economic downturn or, like, a localized economic downturn for the company they're working for because the IT team is a big old stain it looks like on the balance sheet.

The IT team is far from revenue, especially if it's a large company. It is ... It doesn't generate any revenue. It supports everybody. It deploys laptops to make sure the networking's working. The list goes on and on. There's lots of stuff that IT does, but unfortunately, that does not translate to profits, and someone who comes in might say, "We can just outsource this.

We can outsource this to [00:07:00] a, a, a country that has a, a currency discrepancy in which we'll- we're gonna pay 60% less by outsourcing it. We don't need on, on location people. We can have someone just be over the phone, and that person can be in, in some sort of call center that's miles and miles and miles away, and that person can then, you know, ship laptops to us or what have you."

They're outsourcing it, or they're outsourcing it in, in a, even to a local company, but they don't wanna be the one that deals with all the employee stuff like employee benefits, uh, doing, uh, dealing with things like maternity leave, dealing with sick days, dealing with HR concerns, dealing with ... They don't wanna deal with any of that stuff.

They're looking at it as, "Okay, maybe IT is, or IT is a necessary evil to this balance sheet, so let's outsource it. Let's get it out of here," local or otherwise, right? Um, and unfortunately, you see, you know, time and time again that IT teams get outsourced, internal IT [00:08:00] teams get outsourced. And you can see that because you can see there's a whole bunch of service, uh, service offerings, a whole bunch of businesses that are offering IT services to large businesses saying, "Hey, I, uh, we can give you a team of five.

We can give you a team of six. We can deploy this. We can deploy that." Some of these people have, some of these companies have people locally in various jurisdictions, but then will also have a call center in, again, a, a country that has a, a c- a currency discrepancy there so that they're, they can save money.

Um, it's, it's, it's something that happens. It's, it's, it's absolutely something that happens, and, and if you're ... It is stemmed directly from not being close to the revenue, and IT is not close to the revenue. And engineering, as Mike is saying, is oftentimes not close to the revenue. It, it's just, it is just not.

But they do get, obviously they do get props because many companies that ... And it really depends on what they're selling, to be clear. But if a company is selling an app, if they're [00:09:00] relying on the subscriptions to some sort of mobile app that they make, obviously they might look at the devs and say, "Okay, like, obviously you're getting credit for all this all these subscriptions that are coming in and, like, we're, our whole company's balance sheet is in the black because 'cause the devs are doing this.

So I would say that that is quite close to the revenue. But when it's buried, so sometimes a dev team can be r- literally in the IT team if the IT is large- IT team is large enough to sort of split talent like that, um, or even split into separate teams. You might have somebody who's making a whole bunch of internal tools that are very complex, need a lot of maintenance, need to be updated, new ones are constantly in demand.

But again, you're gonna be a red blotch on the balance sheet, and then you might get outsourced again, unfortunately, just like the IT team would

Mikhail: Th- this is exactly, yeah, exactly what I'm saying. So like, y- you need to figure out a way to put yourself or, or make a justification for yourself to be closer to the [00:10:00] revenue. And one way to do that, um Is through different roles that are kind of popping up now. It seems that, like, some companies are starting to realize this, and they're trying to almost justify engineer hires because they still need them. Or maybe it's internal. I, I'm not sure what's actually going on, on, on that side, but there's more roles. GTM engineer, so go-to-market engineer, is one of those roles. That's the one I'm gonna be talking about here. It's very similar, and it kind of can be talked to, talked about in the same way as a sales engineer. a sales engineer and a GTM engineer can do the same things. They are slightly different. Uh, but there's all, uh, there's a lot of these, like, kind of similar-sounding roles: revenue systems engineer, rev ops engineer, growth engineer. Like, there's a bunch of these names for this role. And essentially what it means is it's a of some sorts that's sitting [00:11:00] inside of the sales team almost and inside of the data team and figuring out ways that they can connect data, so from, like, data from, like, a sales dashboard, a CRM, customer usage data from, like, the actual platform, like u- analytics data from the platform, figuring out correlations, figuring out systems that will detect leaks, that will detect ways that, uh, you can improve a process.

For example, like, hey, your sales team needs to find more leads. if you have all this data about where, who your customers are, what your customers are doing, plus all the sales data of, like, who your previous customer... Like, how much money your previous customers spent, how likely they are to re- reup, and stuff like that.

And if you can combine that data into something usable and find some correlation with that data and then build a system where it can, like, you know, t- go to a sales, sales guy or saleswoman and figure out a, way for them to [00:12:00] find the right customer, like find the right lead, so it'll automatically generate them, like, five leads for the day on all this information.

And these are solid leads because, again, it's connected to the data. And if it can convert, know, ev- every day they get five and, you know, once a, like, you know, a- after the month you, you see that it their sales by 10%, 20%. You are now directly correlated to the revenue, uh, what is what, like, the goal of this whole operation is, right? And, and it's great for the company. That's why the companies are doing this, because their, their justification for you is very, very high because you're now increasing the revenue Or not, not adjacently, directly, rather than being, again, a cost vac- a, a cost vector in an IT department or a cost vector in just an engineering department.

So they're finding ways to put engineers to work in smarter variations of revenue generation. And that's good for the engineer, and it's good for the company. [00:13:00] So this is why I think the-- you-- like engineers that are currently transitioning to a different role or currently looking for something new, kind of recommend you to look at these roles.

These roles, if you can get to a good spot, seem like they're, be pretty safe for a little while. 'Cause again, if you can, can prove out that you're making money for a company, they're gonna be very hesitant to let you go. Now, there's obviously risks with this. Like you can, you know, you could generate a, a bunch of systems, and all of a sudden everything's great, but then why are you...

Like, are you really required to continue that? Y- you can make arguments that you can make the systems better and you're supporting them, and like, you know, the systems do become bigger, and they need support and stuff like that, so as long as they're generating, you know, they're increasing revenue, it's still worthwhile to probably keep you on.

So

Matt: I would like to add something quickly to your point too, Mike. One thing that absolutely happens in, in cor- in a corporate environment is a team will steal the credit for something.

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: that a tech team does that supports the sales team, the sales team might have in, [00:14:00] in all their reports so that they did it.

So like let's just say for example, something like you're one of these, you know, GTM engineers and you've analyzed all this data, all this website data and all these other sources, and you've determined that you really should have a chat bot on the website. So then the chat bot, you, you know, you, you either you install it or someone else does, whatever.

The chat bot gets released, and then the chat bot ends up giving a 10% boost to sales. The sales team might say, "Oh, we have a 10% boost to sales," right? Whether it's d- whether it's malicious in them doing that, uh, or whether it's just them saying, "Hey, we actually legitimately got 10% more sales," do whatever you can to ensure that you are...

it is known that you are the reason

Mikhail: Mm-hmm.

Matt: that the sales went up. And, and it's easier said than done. I mean, it's awkward to just constantly like, constantly, you know, bring up like, "Oh, this is the stuff I do," or whatever. But, uh, like leadership needs to know that you are the one that helped [00:15:00] determine, and indeed potentially install a, a chat bot that led to 10% more sales.

It wasn't just the s- the sales people are doing an amazing job. I mean, maybe they're doing, maybe they are doing an amazing job and you just supported them with a 10% buff. But you, you need to make sure that they are aware that you're getting the 10% buff. Because here, here's the thing, is if you're filling that gap, you're the one helping, and the sales team is either maliciously or not maliciously, they're just sort of do, you know, reporting their numbers, and a reorg happens and you get cut, now there's actually a gap in the company and the company's worse for wear if you're truly that valuable.

So- N-- I'm not saying necessarily gloat or whatever, but if you're in meetings and they ask what you do, bring that up and say, "Hey, I, I built this, I built that, I do this, I do that." I've personally made the mistake of had, like, director meetings where it'll- they'll come in and they'll... [00:16:00] They'll come in and there's, like, a whole bunch of people.

It's like 50 people, and they'll, they'll basically wanna be introduced to each part of the team. And in the beginning, for the first couple of those, I was brand new as, like, a co-op. But I would just kinda explain the tech I work with or whatever, and it's not very exciting. But what I started noticing is people would start to talk about the things that they, that they're doing that generate results, and especially if it was, uh, something that was either revenue-facing or, uh, something that would improve a metric that we were concerned with in our con- partic- specific department.

Obviously, the person that's in the, a higher level of administration is gonna be looking over the metrics of his domain, if you will. And, "Oh, like, you're- you raised this by 12 points. We've been trying to raise it by 12 points forever. Like, how'd you do it?" Is better than, "I install Windows on servers."

Mikhail: Угу

Matt: it's much better.

And so I, I learned that, and then eventually started talking about stuff like that and, and any extracurriculars as well. We used to do some [00:17:00] extracurriculars, test devices internally and stuff for them when we had extra time, and I would bring up those extracurriculars. I would say, "Oh, I'm assigned to this lab, but I also do this whenever we have some downtime or whenever we're waiting for an update to complete," or whatever the case may be.

Not gloating, not taking up minutes and minutes and minutes or hours of someone's time, but just ensuring that they know, hey, this person is valuable and is expanding their skill base and is helping the team

Mikhail: That, that's a really good point. Uh, documenting your successes and documenting what you've done for the company from a very, like, again, revenue perspective. Like, hey, I- if you've increased revenue by, by 10%, yeah, you should be shouting that from the rooftops. That should be in the company Slack. That should be, you know, your manager should be very we- well aware of it.

Like, if you have one-on-ones, that should be something you bring up to them and make sure that they note that down. If you have performance reviews, for sure, like, keep that in a note somewhere. Like, this is really important information to have to propagate out to the world. And keep-- And [00:18:00] put that on your resume too, by the way. That's a really important thing too is, like, if you've, if you've managed to find workflows that increase revenue directly, then that's something you put on your resume. And most likely in an interview, a company will ask you a direct question about that, so m- make sure you're prepared to answer it. But that's a very good conversation to have with a company. Like, "Hey, you, you, you, on your resume, you, you noted you increased revenue by 15% by introducing a, you know, an analytics pipeline here and connecting it to the sales process. How did that work? Can you explain that a little bit?" And you, you know, giving a very concrete answer. That's a really, really good indicator for a, for a company to hire you.

Because again, you're tied to the revenue. Like it's-- It becomes an, a no-brainer hire if you can make more money than you're costing. always how it is

Matt: The thing too is you can stealthily, uh, i- tell people things too. Like, if you don't have those one-on-ones like Mike mentioned. So one of the things that I would do is, is as a co-op, I wasn't necessarily, uh, told to or it wasn't mandatory that I [00:19:00] log in on weekends, but sometimes I would log in to just do something in, in prep for Monday, 'cause it would just be some big, whatever, data entry or something where it's just kind of like bogging down in your mind, and you have an hour and I'm like, "I could do this in front of the TV with a laptop.

I'm gonna log in and do it." I would always DM my lead hand or my l- my tech lead. I would always DM him when I did it, and I'd be like, "Oh, hey, like, I just got that stuff prepped if you, you know, see anything new in the database. I got that stuff prepped for Monday." And then he would see it on e- on the weekend, and then I got a couple messages.

He's like, "You're logging in on weekends now?" Now that's known. I'm not necessarily saying you need to log in on weekends. I know that's a whole other debate, work-life balance, yada, yada. My point is, is that's a stealthy way, right? In that particular team, I did not have one-on-ones with the tech lead because the tech lead was managing, like, multiple teams, so that's just not something that happened there.

Uh, but I, I just, you know, just snuck that in, like, "Hey, man, I'm doing this above and beyond thing. I'm helping the team on this, on this thing," just so that they're aware

Mikhail: No, uh, that's [00:20:00] a really, really good advice, honestly. Like, if you're doing something above and beyond in a, in a, in a bubble, no one's gonna notice. You have to put out something that you're actually doing that, especially in a large organization. Like, no one's ever gonna notice that kind of stuff unless you, unless you do exactly what Matt said. Uh, just some more information about GTM engineers, right? Um, the, the reason that I'm talking about this even is that we're seeing a significant growth in job postings. So I, I have some links on, in the show notes that you can check for, for some details. But the analysis is showing that, uh, an- analyzing about 491 unique listings, you know, uh, of GTM engineer, it seems like, in the past 12 months. grew from 16 in December 2024 to about 402 in May 2026, about GTM engineer and GTM engineer adjacent roles, right? So we're seeing some significant growth there. Companies are seeing value in this, and there's consultants coming in to [00:21:00] companies asking them to create whole departments of GTM and stuff like that, and GTM engineering.

So we're-- I'm starting to see this pop up. I, I, you know, I, I actually... This might be a two-parter episode, the second part being with an inter- an interview with a sales engineer or an, a GTM engineer. I'm just in the process of setting that up right now. Uh, so stay tuned for that. But I, I, I wanna dive deeper into this kind of stuff.

I wanna get, you know, you know, actual people talking about this to you, to the audience, so that you understand what these roles entail and you understand that there are engineering, like, jobs, not just in, you know, software development and, you know, you're creating an app. There's a lot of these new kind of opportunities popping up that we should all be aware of in a very competitive job market

Matt: I, I would like to say something here too, is that a lot of the concern that I hear from software engineers outside of the, the obvious of, "Oh my God, I might get laid off 'cause of AI," [00:22:00] some of the AI concern is that they signed up for solving problems and kind of solving those puzzles, putting together the puzzle pieces, making sure everything fits, and then kind of shipping that, and that was, that was like, like a payoff for those people.

They were solving pro- these, these complex issues. With a GTM engineer, y- you're back to doing that to an extent. It may not be... It's not gonna be perfect necessarily, especially if the A- if the company is very AI-pilled, I suppose you could say, because you may not be just coding everything. But you are looking at multiple pieces of the puzzle in many cases.

You're looking at the sales numbers. You're looking at the SEO potentially. You're looking at the internal numbers if you're making internal tools. You're ma- You're looking at internal reports. You're talking to people internally. You have to talk to the salesperson, and you're t- you're, you are taking bits and pieces all from all over the place, customer-facing, internal, et cetera, putting them all together and then engineering a solution and shipping it.

And I, I could, I would estimate that that hopefully would scratch the itch for [00:23:00] some people as well. And again, this allows them to still exercise or still get that problem-solving desire, the complex problem-solving desire while not completely restarting their career doing something else like plumber or something like some people are, are doing, which I mean, are still fine jobs, but some people don't wanna do those jobs.

They specifically signed up for coding in order to solve these spec- these, I guess, digital problems, these technical issues, and this is a way to sort of start doing that again. Even if the bits and pieces are AI-touched, AI-pilled, whatever you wanna say, you are still the one that's bringing it all together.

So I, I don't know if it's any solace to anyone, but I would imagine there's gonna be some people out there that might find this quite attractive, not only for the potential, and it is a just a potential, it's not guaranteed, the potential higher job security, but also for the fact that they're able to start taking pieces of puzzles and putting, putting them together again.

Mikhail: Yeah, [00:24:00] and, and the other part of it is, like, you'll see number go up. A lot of engineers never see that, like, other than, like, analytics of, like, their, you know, user base or, or a Stripe, you know, a, a, um, you know, SaaS subscription number go up, which is al-always great. But this is an even more direct indicator where, like, you implement a process, you analyze that process, and all of a sudden revenue goes up. I bet that's a satisfaction that people will, will receive. Like that-- I bet you that will lower your, you know, risk of burnout and stuff like that. Now, on the other side of things, obviously you can implement something and number won't change, and number might, like, you know, there's potential for my number to go down, I guess.

I don't know. But like, you know, there's potential for that in everywhere. You're, you're essentially putting yourself in a situation where you have the ability to impact revenue, and that's, I think, the right move in the current market. Whereas a, a position where you have no chance of doing that gives you much less visibility, much less impact in a company.

So it's always gonna be a risk, [00:25:00] obviously, with all of these new jobs. We-- They're not very defined. That's the other thing is, like, one company will have GTM engineers doing one thing, one company will have GTM engineers doing another thing. It's very early on in the stages of how they're being used. AI is putting a bunch of stuff into it where, like, not only are you making these, um, workflows, but you're probably also part of the, you know, teaching the salespeople how to use the AIs to their advantage process as well.

Like, so you're trying to create AI workflows for the sales team, so it's a whole other part of being a GTM engineer right now especially. Um, you might be sitting on meetings with the salespeople, uh, just to see how customers are using different things and figuring out ways. Anyway, there's, there's so many different variations of what y-your tasks are gonna be. It's not gonna be a cookie cutter approach in, like, in some cases, right? Like, you know, if, if DevOps, you know, you're, you're constantly working with servers and you're doing, you know, you're making it so that apps deploy in different ways. [00:26:00] Uh, here it's much harder to define exactly what you would be doing on a day-to-day other than trying to impact revenue.

Matt: Well, that's also gonna be exciting for some people too. They're getting, they're gonna get to see those different numbers go up, like you said, but also that if they have any interest in potentially opening their own business, starting their own side hustle, what have you, they may be able to sort of get some of that studying done on how to do those things at work.

I mean, if they... You, you have a section here which you're, you're gonna get into, like how can a developer transition into GTM engineering? But there's mention in this section, I'm just kind of pulling some kind of keywords out of here, but sales funnels, you know, lead qualification, customer acquisition, how to retain customers, sale- you're talking to those sales and marketing teams like you said.

Uh, you might, you might sit in on those calls like you said, those sales calls to see how customers are using things, but the sales team might also be using you as well. They may say, especially if they're in sort of a more technical company, if they're trying to sell sort of a, a more technical product, [00:27:00] s- oftentimes what'll happen is someone technical from the customer side is there.

They'll ask a question that goes beyond the scope of the sales, and then the sales has to go and reach out to the, to the, to the, uh, the tech company, and either there's another meeting that occurs or a message gets passed along. But if you're playing this sort of middleman, hey, you know, you're right there.

You might be on that call and they might be like, "Hey, like, how do I do this?" And then you get pulled in and, "Oh, this is how I would try it out. What other systems do you have?" You get to learn about their systems, they get to learn about yours, you're answering questions, and y- you're more involved. A- a- and so, hey, like if you, if you can start a...

If you wanted to ever start that, start that side hustle or you, or you were getting bored of just doing the same old, like sit in one, sit at your desk, open your IDE, code some stuff up, right? I'm oversimplifying it obviously, like coding is not easy by any means. But if you were getting bored because you've been doing that forever and it is becoming [00:28:00] mundane despite its complexity, this might be something that, you know, you might find interest in, and then it, it could even propel your potential side hustles or business ventures in the future.

Mikhail: Yeah, these are hugely valuable skills. I wanna make that very clear. Like, being able to sit in a sales call, talk to customers, and talk to them both from an engineering side of things, but also from their own side, like how to-- Like, listening how a salesperson actually sells your product I think, beneficial for everyone.

And I, I almost, like, implore you to try to get on calls if you can. That's part of, like, how you can transition from a developer, like from, from traditional development to GTM engineering, is like, put yourself in a position where you're closer to the customer, where you're closer to the sales team. Go out of your way to, like, talk to the sales guys and be like, "Hey, like, would it benefit you?

Like, I know all the systems. Would it benefit you from adding me to, like, a call a week or something like that? Maybe I can answer some questions on the call, or I could just listen and you can just say, you can just introduce me [00:29:00] as a developer." A lot of times customers will be very happy to have a developer on a call, and developers typically, traditionally don't like to be on calls, so salespeople don't usually do that But if you go out of your way to put yourself in that position, that could be huge.

And, uh, th- they're at... Like, the name for that role is a sales engineer, or at least, like, that's part of the sales engineer role. Traditionally, though, that's pretty much all they did was they would sit on calls, answer questions, help with some integration stuff and stuff like that. Now if you can put yourself as a sales engineer with some, you know, GTM part, so like now you're helping the sales team create pipelines and you're part of their sales process, it's a double whammy. 'Cause if you're part of their sale, s- a lot of times sales engineers get credited and maybe even make commission on a sale that the sales p- uh, sales person would create, plus you're helping them on the actual revenue side by increasing their sales. Like, is the type of mentality that I think is required [00:30:00] right now, like trying to figure out how you can get closer to the money, trying to figure out how you can use your skills in different ways because AI is, like, creating this opportunity to actually make this a little bit easier.

Like you're no, you're no longer having to take weeks to write these scripts. It might be day, uh, a day or two, or maybe even hours, right? So you, you can take advantage of that to really impress the salespeople to try to generate actual, like, business results and stuff like that. So there's, that's one way you can get in to the GTM role. There's, you know, other ways like maybe like if you're, if you're not in a job right now, then building a portfolio around a real revenue problem, around funnels, around leads, right? Like building a portfolio project that would help in those p- particular cases of like a lead generator, for example, or a risk assessment for a compa- or like a, a customer acquisition generator.

I don't know, like so- something in that space. about your portfolio and your [00:31:00] resume in that approach can help you land those roles whereas like again, you apply to a GTM engineer and you only list business outcomes in terms of engineering outcomes like, "Hey, I increased my, the development pipeline by 5X. I, you know, I made a, the app load 10 times faster." That kind of stuff is good and you're gonna need it, but you're also gonna need to think of ways that you actually did impact revenue on your resume, right? Like, and you can most likely do that even with your current experience you probably did in some adjacent way.

Just you, you might have to connect those dots a little bit on the resume, but try to put in like, "Hey, I, I did this so that, uh, therefore it increased revenue by X amount." It can be rough estimate, maybe it can be just increased revenue. I don't know how, how, like how accurate it, it would have to be. Like I, I'm not a huge proponent of te- of lying on a resume. Um, slight embellishment is okay, but you have to be able to justify it. You have to be able to answer [00:32:00] those questions because when someone sees something like that, they might ask you that in an interview because it's something that's good for them, especially if you're applying to a GTM engineer role.

If I was doing an interview, I would ask you specifically about how you increased that revenue. And if you're gonna tell me bullshit during that interview, I'm probably gonna call you out on it. So again, try to figure out ways that you actually did impact revenue. I'm sure that you can find them, um, and put those on your resume, put those on your portfolio, create that portfolio project around revenue generation, lead qualification, customer acquisition, retention, all that stuff. And that is a way for you to take that step in towards GTM engineering and then just being more social in your company, being willing to talk to the salespeople, being willing to put yourself-- 'Cause not-- A lot of companies won't have this role. That's another thing is like this is a newish role, and you can put yourself in a place where you can actually transition to this role without it ever being listed in your company. [00:33:00] So if you're in a, in a spot where you're doing like developer tooling or you're, you're, you're, you're worried about your job, maybe it makes sense to start, like, trying to figure out how you can get closer to the re-revenue even if the role doesn't exist, You can talk to your managers, you could talk to other people's managers, like a, you know, skip one manager. You can, uh, you can talk to the salespeople, like figure out what they could, what they could use. So again, it requires a little bit of out like, um, out, out the box thinking to get to maybe land a role that doesn't exist in a company. Like that's not easy like by any means, but I think it's doable and again, it could be beneficial for both you and the company

Matt: What, what I think is refreshing about this too, this, this sort of transitioning to, to GTM engineering is it doesn't necessarily even need a, uh, a, a new title. I know we're calling it GTM engineering obviously 'cause we have to kinda label it for something on a podcast. But if you're working on a team and you're not completely overwhelmed all the time, not every single minute of your [00:34:00] day is filled with, filled with work, you don't have to, you know, stay, stay online, uh, working on weekends and all these things.

Like, you just talk to your colleagues and try to inject yourself. You're at work, maybe have an hour or two downtime a week, start talking to the sales team, start talking to this and that. You know, maybe go to that lunch that you always ... that, that's optional and you never agree to. Go to that lunch, talk to the sales team, figure out that they're having a heck of a time with their ticket system.

Maybe you guys could fix their ticket system, make it faster, make it better, build a whole new one, and bring that up to, bring that up to the appropriate stakeholders, the appropriate administration. This is probably gonna be easier the smaller the company is because it's ... You're gonna be a, a couple degrees away from somebody with a smaller company, whereas in a larger company, people might just be more like drones unfortunately, where they just say, "Well, we use this software and it's garbage.

It'd be nice to have a new one, but [00:35:00] administration didn't say that we can have any, so I guess I'm just using this," and like that's it. And I'm, I'm, again, I'm not trying to talk that type of job down. That's a vital, vital job and it's a part of a company growing, 'cause it's impossible to micromanage each individual employee when you have thousands of employees.

It's a growing pain. But if you are at a medium business, if you are at a small business, I think that getting into GTM engineering and, and getting more Credit for helping sales, helping revenue is likely gonna be easier for you because you're gonna be able to talk to the sales manager. They might literally right- be right beside you in another cubicle, or they might just be one DM away, and they'll be open to talking to you.

And it won't just be, "Well, we gotta talk to six directors and get their approval because this team's not supposed to work on A4 projects," or like whatever, right? And all that nonsense, like the bureaucracy hasn't been set. And the reason why I said it, this is refreshing is you're doing this at work.

You're not, you're [00:36:00] not staying up, you know, staying up all night doing a bunch of r- doing a bunch of stuff. 'Cause what I find with a lot of dev stuff now, especially like trying to make yourself look good to get a job, it's, it's just a bunch... I'm sorry, but it is a bunch of nonsense. It's like, oh, you have your resume, you have your cover letter, you have this, you have that.

You're logging into all these systems, and then upload your resume. Okay, now fill in all the things that are on your resume into this form. You do all this stuff. You're going through multiple rounds of interviews. You're going through... You're studying these, these various things for the interview. Uh, you're trying to do side projects and contribute to open source so that you even get interviews, and there's all this stuff, and most of the stuff I just said, if not all of it, is like after work, or it's on your own personal time.

It's unpaid or barely paid. And it's, it, it's... And it sucks. But this stuff is you're kinda pushing into a new frontier while you're at work. I'm not [00:37:00] saying it's gonna be perfect. Maybe you spend an extra hour at the office or something here or there, but you're at work. You're not, you're n- you're not doing hours and hours and hours of prep, and hours and hours and hours of coding for free doing silly, like, sorry, but like silly little take-home projects that are even- are...

that they had no intention of hiring you anyway in some of the cases. Or they're gonna take your code and use it and be like, "Thanks for the free work," and then they just bugger off. Like, that sucks. But this is something where you can be like, "Hey, you know what? I wanna be a little more hands-on. I wanna get...

I wanna inject myself into various places. I wanna, I wanna see what, uh, opportunities are there," and I have to do it at work 'cause it's at work

Mikhail: That's right. Yeah. I, I, like, it's difficult for me to give direct recommendations all the time like this because I don't know the outcome of, of someone switching into a GTM engineer. It's too new. But it just seems-- I, I've went through experiences recently where I [00:38:00] think I could have made a lot more headway there was more revenue generated direct, uh, relations to an engineer, right?

Like if you're, if you're trying to justify something, a project, uh, a, a person in, on your team, it's much easier to justify them if I can point that to a number that's going up, right? where this kind of idea came from. It's I want other people to start thinking that way protect themselves in a very difficult job market, and this is one of those approaches.

There's probably many more that you can think of. Again, it doesn't have to be just revenue. Uh, it could be like if your, if your, um, goal of the company is to just increase usage of a platform, then you could start thinking about how you can directly impact usage or how you can g- move to a team that actually like works on usage, like impactful things, right?

Like maybe it's a y- you know, onboarding team. Maybe it's a developer. Like maybe it's a, um, you know, a t- a, a, a team that i- is in charge of the, [00:39:00] you know, the, the, the demo of the application because those things can impact usage of the app, right? So whatever metrics your company values highest is what you really want to be a part of as close as possible. Like it, it doesn't alw- it's not always re- revenue. Obviously revenue's probably gonna be up there, but there's maybe other metrics that you can look at.

A lot of companies will post things called OKRs, which are like the T, the highest value metrics of a company, right? Um, can't remember what the O stands for for some reason right now. It's just slipped my mind, but the KR is a key result, and you wanna be as close to that key result and as impactful to make it go up and to meet expectations or exceed expectations as possible to justify yourself a lot of times in a, in a corporate environment, 'cause that's what people are gonna be looking at in reorgs.

Matt: objectives and key results. I just looked it up

Mikhail: There

Matt: 'cause I also forgot.

Mikhail: Yeah. It is what it is, yeah. It's, there's too many, there's too many a- acronyms. Like, I can't remember them all. I don't [00:40:00] have the best memory, to be fair. Um, so I've,

Matt: Well, big companies have their own glossaries.

Mikhail: Yes,

Matt: It, it, it- we're starting to get out of control here. Like, this is... We can't... There's no way. It's... E- even, even, I mean, slight tangent, but even just talking about tech stacks or talking about tech services that people use, someone will come up to me like, "Mike, you told me..."

This was a couple years ago now. You're like, "Oh, yeah, like, we're gonna work with Intuit." And I was like, "What the hell is Intuit?" You're like, "Are you, are you kidding me? We have an Intuit account. It's where we do our, our accounting." I was like, "You mean QuickBooks?" He's like, "Oh my God, I forgot they're run by Intuit."

I can't remember all this crap. Working with eight...

Mikhail: owns who?

Matt: You know, I'm working with eight companies just to run someone's small business WordPress

Mikhail: Nie

Matt: It's like, oh, we have this, and it pipes into this, and it pipes into that, and the pipe is called something else. It's like, what are we doing?

Mikhail: Sounds about right. Pipe

Matt: Too much

Mikhail: pipe into that pipe. But yeah, no, um, I think that's it though for this episode. Uh, hopefully you found some value in it. Maybe if it, if it ever, if it helps you, [00:41:00] let me know. Um, if you find yourself like transitioning to a GTM engineer and you're liking it, let me know.

If you're not liking it, let me know. Yeah, um, again, I'm-- this is the early phase of it. I do wanna create a-- I do wanna have a second part to this where we actually talk to a sales or a GTM engineer and, I wanna give that as much information as I can to the audience so that they can make a good decision

Matt: In the meantime as well, we will have linked, uh, in the show notes as well, a couple of related episodes if you want some similar listening or some int- interested... listening that you might be interested in, if I could speak. Um, me speaking is an OKR. Anyway, uh, it is the two episodes I've- I'm referring to is AI Isn't Just Taking Jobs, It's Creating Weird New Ones.

Again, link in the episode show notes. And also, Can You Have a Career in Web Development? That's gonna be another one. Uh, hopefully you enjoy those two. I will link those again in the show notes on [00:42:00] htmlallthethings.com. But that's it. That's the episode. Like Mike said, let us know what you think about GTM Engineering.

Are you gonna try it? Are you gonna do it? Uh, do you agree with it, disagree with it, hate it, love it, et cetera? Please let us know. And remember that we are on Patreon if you wanna support episodes like this. That's patreon.com/htmlallthethings, just like these fine people did. Tim from the Web Hacker on thewebhacker.com.

Jason from Geek Life Radio via geekliferadio.com. Garrett Segall, Level Up Financial Planning via www.levelupfinancialplanning.com. Magnus from Yes We Have via yeswehave.se. Syntaxify from the HTML All the Things Discord server, and Stacy Mosler from the website swinworthydesigns.com. And remember that we'd also like to give a shout-out to Michael Larocca.

He's a contributing author on htmlallthethings.com. Michael, Michael is the author of Self-Taught: The X Generation blog at selftaughttxg.com. And remember that if you wanna learn how to code, go check out some courses using their interactive media player code editor. Lets you pause the lesson, play with the [00:43:00] code live, and then just press play and continue the lesson after you've done some playing and some testing and try to crack the examples that are on the screen.

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