I've Sat in Four Chairs Around the GTM Table. They All Disagree.

5 MINS

I've worked in software engineering, product management, presales, and product marketing — usually in that order, and usually for the same kind of B2B financial services buyer. What that means in practice is that I've been in the room when the same launch was described in four completely different ways, and every description was technically correct.

This is the fundamental tension of GTM that most operating models pretend doesn't exist.

What each chair actually thinks

Engineering thinks the launch is about a system that has to keep working under load and regulation. They are anxious about dependencies, edge cases, and the long tail of customer-specific configuration.

Product thinks the launch is about a problem that finally has a defensible solution. They are anxious about whether the value is legible to a buyer who isn't already convinced.

Presales thinks the launch is about a demo flow, an objection map, and a sales team that needs to be confident in front of a customer next Tuesday. They are anxious about the gap between the deck and the live behavior.

Product Marketing thinks the launch is about a category position, a story, and a set of analysts and influencers who need to repeat the same sentence back. They are anxious about whether the narrative survives translation into customer language.

All four are right. The launch is all of those things. The problem is that no single artifact — the deck, the demo, the data sheet, the press release — can carry all four loads at once.

What I now do differently

After bouncing across these chairs, two habits have stuck:

Write the failure story first. Before any positioning doc, I write a one-page version of "this launch failed. Here is the post-mortem." It surfaces, in five minutes, what each function is privately worried about. The narrative is whatever survives that exercise.

Force a single source of truth, not a single document. Every function gets to keep their own artifact. But there is one shared paragraph — usually 4-5 sentences — that every artifact has to be reducible to. If the data sheet, the demo, and the analyst briefing all map back to the same paragraph, you are aligned. If they don't, you have four separate launches pretending to be one.

The deeper lesson

When I was an engineer, I thought marketing was where the truth got lost. When I was a presales lead, I thought product was where decisions got delayed. When I moved into product marketing, I realized every function feels that way about every other function. The chairs disagree by design.

The job of a GTM leader isn't to get everyone to agree. It is to make sure they disagree about the right things — the ones that genuinely shape the outcome — and to absorb the friction on everything else.

The shorter version

If you've only worked in one chair around this table, your model of GTM is too clean. It has to be. It's hard to imagine the constraints of a chair you've never sat in.

The only way I've found to get a fair answer is to keep moving chairs and to remember, in each one, that the others are also right.

AI in AML: The Three Honest Questions Every Buyer Should Ask

Why AML Marketing Doesn't Sound Like Marketing (And Shouldn't)

Anup skipped presentations and built real AI products.

Anup Gunjan was part of the March 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 17 other talented participants.