What I’ve Learned About GTM Engineering in 2025
An Industry Dispatch from the Eye of the Storm
It’s loud out there.
LinkedIn is flooded with flowcharts and flashy demos.
Twitter’s full of threads promising “25 GTM automations you can copy in 5 minutes.”
Everyone’s posting screenshots of their n8n flows, agents, Airtable zaps, and GPT wrappers.
And they’re impressive until you try to run them in production.
Then they break. Or don’t scale. Or worse: no one on your team knows how they work.
We’re witnessing something important:
The GTM stack is being reimagined in public. But it’s also unraveling in real time.
Here’s what I’ve learned in the trenches with founders, operators, and CROs about what’s really happening in 2025 GTM.
1. The Noise-to-Value Ratio Is Getting Dangerous
AI + GTM has created a gold rush of point solutions.
Everyone’s shipping something. Few are solving anything.
The average revenue team today is being pitched:
10 new “autonomous SDR” tools
15 Notion + Zapier outbound agents
7 different intent enrichment add-ons
Buyers are overwhelmed.
Smart ones are cautious.
Most are still demo-ing, not deploying.
The result?
More experiments, fewer results.
And the side effects?
Trust is eroding. Teams are burning cycles evaluating tools that look great on X, but crumble under real-world conditions.
2. AI Demos Well. But GTM Still Breaks at the Seams.
Let’s be honest.
You can fake a lot in a Loom video.
But what happens when:
The AI sequences a lead from the wrong territory?
Your routing logic sends a $100K deal to an intern?
Your agents trigger spam filters and no one notices for a week?
“Looks great in demo” has become the new “just one line of code.”
Buyers are realizing that most GTM automations weren’t built to survive messy human realities: bad data, half-trained reps, unclear handoffs, shifting ICPs.
The real work isn’t in automation. It’s in orchestration.
3. The Stack Is Fragmented. Founders Are Playing GTM Engineer Themselves.
Because point solutions aren’t cutting it, smart founders are rolling up their sleeves.
They’re:
Building n8n flows at 1 a.m.
Stitching together Notion + Posthog + Hubspot
Deploying GPT agents inside Slack to watch deal rooms
Writing their own enrichment rules
And honestly? Some of it’s working.
There’s a new generation of GTM-native founders ones who see go-to-market not as a function to outsource, but a system to design.
But it’s exhausting. It doesn’t scale. And it’s not what they raised capital to do.
4. The Valley Is Asking a New Question: What Is GTM Efficiency?
VCs aren’t just asking “what’s your CAC?” anymore.
They’re asking:
What’s your GTM payback window?
How fast can you spin up a new motion?
How much revenue do you generate per GTM headcount?
We’re moving from a world of “growth at all costs” to “growth that lasts.”
And the metric that’s emerging as king?
Dollar Efficiency how many new dollars of revenue you generate per $1 spent on GTM.
GTM Engineering isn’t just about scale. It’s about physics: reducing friction, increasing force, and keeping momentum in motion without human brute force.
5. Churn Is Now a GTM Problem, Not Just a Product One
In 2025, bad GTM systems don’t just cost you pipeline.
They cost you customers.
SDR automation without qualification = bad-fit logos
Misaligned promises = early churn
Product blindspots in onboarding = lost expansion
Founders used to say: “We’ll fix retention later.”
Now they’re saying: “Why did we even close this deal?”
Flywheel GTM flips the model:
Start with the user loop
Map return paths
Design signals that surface intent and long-term fit
This isn’t just sales ops.
This is system-level GTM architecture.
6. Everyone’s Building a Custom Stack. And No One’s Owning the System.
Even in well-funded teams, here’s the pattern I keep seeing:
SDRs own sequencing
Ops owns routing
Success owns onboarding
Founders run special outbound “hacks” in Notion
AI agents float in the middle, half-governed, half-forgotten
No one owns the full motion.
No one is asking: “Where does this loop break? How does the system learn?”
The GTM motion of 2025 is chaotic, overlapping, decentralized and no longer manageable with old-school RevOps alone.
Which is why the smartest teams I know are hiring not just “Growth,” but GTM Engineers system builders who think in flows, not functions.
Final Thought: The Map Is Being Drawn in Real Time
This moment feels like 2009 for marketing automation.
Or 2013 for PLG.
Or 2017 for product-led onboarding.
We don’t know what “best practice” looks like yet.
The stack is shifting too fast.
But here’s what I do know:
Point tools will give way to flywheels.
Agent orchestration > agent proliferation.
GTM systems must be designed, not just operated.
Real innovation will be quiet, resilient, boringly reliable.
And the teams who survive this noise?
Will be the ones who engineer momentum, not chase trends.
If your GTM feels like a lab experiment or a beautiful mess let’s compare notes.
Gia’s still in the loop. hello@agentic.it