gtm-engine

GTM Engine

Overview

Transitions from launch mode to operating mode by building repeatable, scalable growth systems. Covers retrospective analysis, sprint-based experimentation, funnel optimization, growth loop engineering, strategic narrative development, content engines, and email automation.

Core Principle: The hardest transition in go-to-market is from heroic effort to a system that runs. Consistency beats quality. A good system executed weekly outperforms a brilliant strategy executed once.

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Why This Skill Exists

Launch week was exciting. The team worked eighty-hour weeks. Everyone was aligned. Something shipped. And then it stopped.

Two weeks after launch, the team returns to normal. Nobody owns growth anymore. The marketing person is back on brand work. The sales person is back to calling. The founder is back to product. Growth was supposed to be automatic. It was not.

What separates the companies that compound from the ones that plateau is this: whether growth is a system or a person. If growth lives in one person's heroic effort, you are toast. That person will leave or burn out. If growth is a system, it runs without heroes.

This skill builds that system. It codifies what works. It turns guesses into hypotheses. It runs experiments on a schedule, not when someone feels like it. It builds loops that feed themselves. It creates narrative so every piece of content serves the same shift.

The result is not usually a 10x month. It is a 1.1x month, every month, month after month, which compounds into the 10x that looks like magic.

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Role

You are a growth architect, not a motivator. Your job is to help the user build a system that runs without them. You create the structure. The team runs the engine.

You are not satisfied by "we are going to grow faster." You are satisfied by a system with metrics, a schedule, and a feedback loop that tells you whether it is working.

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Input Contract

Input	Required	Notes
Launch data (what worked, what did not)	Required	Post-launch metrics and channel performance
Current customers and retention	Required	How many are staying, and why
Team resources (people, budget, time)	Required	What is available to run the system
Growth goal and timeline	Required	What does success look like?

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Output Contract

Output	Always	Notes
Launch retrospective with findings	Yes	What worked, what did not, strategic adjustments
Growth sprint framework	Yes	Two-week experimentation cycles with backlog
Funnel optimization backlog	Yes	PIE-scored experiments for highest-leverage conversion stages
Growth loop design	Yes	Assessment of viral, content, and paid loop fit for your product
Strategic narrative	Yes	Three-layer story that positions your shift as inevitable
Growth metrics dashboard	Yes	What to track, who owns it, how often to check

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Context

You read launch data. You understand what channels worked and which did not. You know the customer. You know the product. You do not assume growth systems exist yet.

Reads profiles/client-profile.md if it exists, as the starting evidence: Company, ICP Definitions, Buyer Personas, Value Propositions and Proof Points. Treat what is already there as claims to test, not facts. What this skill validates is meant to be written back into those same sections, because the profile is what the 14 GTM skills in skills/ run on. That write-back is how the strategy layer reaches the daily motion. If the profile has a ## Growth System section (this skill's CUSTOMIZE.md writes it), read that first.

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Quick Reference

Module	Output	Time	Best For
GTM Retrospective	Channel-by-channel analysis with strategic decisions	2-3 hours	Understanding what the launch taught you
Growth Sprint Framework	Two-week experimentation cycles with ICE-scored backlog	2-4 hours	Setting up repeatable experiment structure
CRO Experimentation	Funnel map with drop-off analysis and PIE-scored backlog	2-4 hours	Optimizing conversion at highest-leverage stages
Growth Loop Design	Assessment of loop fit and detailed design of primary loop	2-4 hours	Building systems where growth feeds itself
Strategic Narrative	Three-layer narrative positioning your market shift	2-4 hours	Creating a story all content builds on
Content & Channel Engine	Content pillars, publishing calendar, and channel expansion plan	1-2 weeks	Scaling content as your growth lever
Email Automation	Four sequences (welcome, nurture, activation, re-engagement)	2-3 days	Building relationships through email

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Epistemic Rules

• Consistency beats perfection. A mediocre system run every week outperforms a brilliant tactic run once.
• Experiments have hypotheses, not just outcomes. If an experiment fails, what did it teach you? If you do not know, you are just trying random things.
• The bottleneck is the highest-leverage lever. In any system, one constraint limits everything else. Find it. Optimize it. Ignore everything else.
• Growth loops compound. A viral loop where each customer brings two new customers doubles your user base every cycle. Find the loop for your product.
• Strategic narrative ties everything together. If all your content tells the same story, it compounds. If content is random, it is just noise.

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Core Workflow

Step 1. Run Launch Retrospective

Analyze what happened in launch. Channel-by-channel breakdown. Volume, conversion, quality, cost.

Four-question analysis: What worked? What did not work? What surprised you? What would you do differently?

Strategic decisions: Double down on these channels. Experiment with these. Cut these. This informs your entire growth system.

Step 2. Set Up Growth Sprints

Build a two-week sprint cadence. Monday planning (1 hour). Two weeks execution. Friday retrospective (30 minutes). Backlog grooming (30 minutes).

Experiment template: Hypothesis, success metric, timeline, resources needed, result, learning.

Create initial backlog of 10-15 experiments. Score with ICE: (Impact + Confidence + Ease) / 3. Run highest-scored experiments first.

Step 3. Optimize Your Funnel

Map the current funnel with conversion rates at each stage. Identify the biggest drop-off. That is your highest-leverage optimization target.

Generate 5-10 experiment ideas per stage. PIE-score: (Potential + Importance + Ease) / 3. Start with highest-scored experiments.

Step 4. Design Your Primary Growth Loop

Evaluate three loop types:

• Viral: User → invites team → teammates invite more
• Content: Publish → ranks in search → attracts signup → users create content
• Paid: Customer pays → revenue funds ads → ads acquire customers

Which fits your product best? Design the loop step by step. Find the bottleneck (lowest conversion rate). Optimize it.

Step 5. Develop Strategic Narrative

Build a three-layer story:

• Layer 1 (The Shift): What is changing in the market that companies cannot ignore?
• Layer 2 (The Stakes): What happens to companies that do not adapt?
• Layer 3 (The Promised Land): What does the new world look like for those who get it right?

Every piece of content should trace back to this narrative.

Step 6. Build Content Engine

Define content pillars (topics your ICP cares about). Build publishing calendar. Identify channel expansion (what channels beyond your current ones make sense?).

Design four email sequences: welcome (deliver the asset), day 3 (problem narrative), day 7 (community invitation), ongoing (value delivery).

Step 7. Set Up Metrics Dashboard

Define the metrics that matter for your growth system. Retention, unit economics, channel performance, experiment outcomes.

Assign ownership. Set review cadence (weekly, monthly). Make the dashboard visible to the whole team.

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Examples

Worked Example 1: Growth System Without Metrics (Growth Failure)

Stated goal: "Grow 10% per month"

Current system: Ad hoc experiments. Some people try things. Results are not tracked. No consistent motion.

Fix: Build a sprint system with ICE-scored backlog. Track every experiment. Publish results weekly. Run the same experiments every two weeks so you can measure improvement.

Worked Example 2: Funnel Bottleneck (Growth Success)

Funnel: Website visitors → Signup → Activated → Paying

Conversion rates:

• Visitor to signup: 5%
• Signup to activated: 30%
• Activated to paying: 10%

Bottleneck: Activated to paying is the constraint. Fix this and you 3x revenue without new traffic.

Experiment: Add weekly check-in email for non-paying activated users. Show usage case studies. Highlight the specific feature they are closest to needing.

Result: Activated to paying improves from 10% to 16%.

Learning: Activation without engagement is useless. Email nurture works.

Worked Example 3: Strategic Narrative (Growth Success)

Narrative shift: Home health agencies are losing hundreds of thousands a year to claim denials because they track eligibility and documentation in spreadsheets and email.

Stakes: Agencies that keep using spreadsheets will face payer audits, cash flow gaps, and a disadvantage when referral partners compare them.

Promised land: Agencies that build documentation checks into intake get predictable reimbursement, audit confidence, and an edge with referral partners.

Content from this narrative:

• Blog: "How home health agencies lose $X per year to avoidable denials"
• Case study: "How [agency] cut denials by fixing their intake process"
• Email sequence: "The real cost of spreadsheets for your reimbursement cycle"

All traces back to the same shift. Compounding.

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Troubleshooting

Problem	Cause	Response
"We ran experiments but nothing moved the needle"	Experiments are too small or targeting the wrong bottleneck	Run ICE scoring on the backlog. What is the highest-confidence, highest-impact experiment? Start there. You are probably optimizing the wrong stage.
"Growth was good last month, flat this month"	System did not scale or seasonal effect	Look at the retrospective data. What changed? Did you stop the experiments that worked? Did the channel saturate? Seasonal effects are real, plan for them.
"Our narrative does not resonate"	Story is about you, not the market shift	Rewrite. The narrative should be about the market changing, not your product existing. Customers should nod in paragraph 1. If they nod in paragraph 3, the sequence is wrong.
"Content engine is too much work"	Scope is too large	Start small. One content pillar. One piece per week. One email sequence. Scale when rhythm is established. Consistency beats volume.

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Best Practices

• Kill experiments that do not produce signal. Stop at 30 days with no progress. Redeploy the budget to winners.
• Retention is your foundation. You cannot grow if customers are leaving. Fix retention before scaling acquisition.
• One metric that matters most. At any given time, one metric is the bottleneck. Find it. Make it the focus. Ignore everything else.
• Automate what you can. Email sequences, content schedules, metric reporting. The more automatic, the less depends on heroic effort.
• Review weekly, adjust monthly. Weekly to see what is working. Monthly to make big changes. Both matter.

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Integration With Other Skills

• O15-gtm-discovery, O14-gtm-positioning, O13-gtm-launch produce the launch. This skill takes the launch results and compounds them.
• O11-context-os-setup stores your growth findings so future cycles do not re-derive the same insights.

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Changelog

• 1.1.0 (2026-09-29): Context section now names the client profile sections this skill reads and writes back to.
• 1.0.0 (2026-09-28): Initial release. Retrospective analysis, two-week sprint framework with ICE scoring, funnel optimization with PIE scoring, three growth loop types, three-layer strategic narrative, email automation. Adapted from Maja Voje's GTM Strategist methodology (Phases 10-11).

Credits

Adapted from the GTM Strategist skills by Maja Voje (github.com/GTM-Strategist/gtm-strategist-skills), used under the MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Maja Voje / GTM Strategist. Frameworks named in this skill (April Dunford positioning, Van Westendorp and Gabor-Granger pricing research, ICE and PIE scoring) belong to their authors.