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Writing

Writing on GTM engineering

Short pieces for people who have to make a decision this quarter. Who to hire, which tool actually carries the weight, what a credential proves, and what a vendor's own documentation says when you read it instead of taking its word for it. Everything here answers one question, names its sources, and shows where the evidence stops.

The rest of this site is built around roles and engagements. This part is built around decisions, which is a different job and needs a different shape.

Most writing about go-to-market engineering is written by people selling into it, which is fine until you need to choose something. Then you want the inconvenient half: the thing the vendor page says in the FAQ rather than the headline, the number a benchmark actually measured rather than the one it gets quoted for, and a clear statement of what nobody has measured yet.

The rules here are why this sits separately from the service pages.

  • Every figure names its source and the date it was read. Including the hedges. If a source says "more than" and names no country, that is how it appears here, because the alternative has already put a misleading number on this site once.
  • What is unmeasured gets said out loud. An absence of evidence is reported as an absence, not rounded down to zero and not quietly dropped.
  • One decision per piece. If something needs the background on a role, it links to the page that owns that ground rather than restating it badly.

If you are earlier than a decision and want the fuller explainers, they live on their own pages: what a GTM engineer actually is, the buyer's guide to hiring one, and the forward deployed engineer explainer for the customer-facing version of the same seat.

Latest

The work · · 13 min read

What a Clay GTM engineer actually does all day

Every demo of this job shows a table filling up with green cells, which is the part that films well and the smallest part of the work. This covers what the hours actually go on: why the order of providers in a waterfall decides the bill, where judgment belongs and where a formula is the wrong place for it, and the settings Clay itself tells you to use to stop work happening on rows that will never qualify.

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Hiring · · 12 min read

How to vet a Clay expert

The first result for this search is a certification page that is not currently issuing certifications, and nothing in the four results around it tells you how to check the person you are about to pay. This covers what the Clay credential proves and what it does not, the two separate meters Clay bills on and why they decide what a badly ordered workflow costs you, and six questions worth asking before money moves.

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Where the longer work lives

Next step

Want the version of this aimed at your own pipeline?

Tell me which system you want built first. You get example profiles and a call with your pick before anything starts.

Placement runs through AYTalent. Engineers are employed and trained on the bench before they start with you.