Most GTM failures I've seen weren't failures of strategy. The strategy was usually fine. The positioning was thought through, the timing made sense, the team was capable. What broke was the execution layer — the handoffs, the dependencies, the twenty small decisions that needed to happen in the right order by the right people.
That's a different problem than "we didn't have a plan." It's closer to: the plan existed in a slide deck and a few people's inboxes, and when the quarter got busy and capacity got thin, the gaps started showing.
GTM Ops sits at the intersection of Marketing, Sales, and Product — which sounds like a privilege until you realise it means you're the person coordinating across three teams with three different prioritisation systems, none of which were designed to talk to each other. Campaign assets depend on Product timelines. Sales enablement depends on campaign assets. Field events depend on all of the above. When one thing slips — and something always slips — the whole sequence compresses.
What I've found is that most GTM teams aren't under-strategic. They're under-documented. The campaign brief exists but the execution checklist doesn't. The launch timeline exists but nobody owns the dependencies. The post-mortem happens but the learnings don't make it into the next launch process.
Coming from marketing, I used to bristle at the idea of systematising creative work. It felt reductive — like turning a campaign into a conveyor belt. What I actually found is the opposite. When the coordination layer is documented and owned, the creative work gets better. You're not spending your best thinking on remembering steps. You're spending it on the work that actually needs your judgment.
The GTM Ops playbook is being built for operators who are good at their jobs, working with good teams, and still finding that launches feel harder than they should. Not because anyone is dropping the ball — but because the ball is being passed between four people with no defined handoff.
That's a process problem. And process problems have solutions.