Culture, Influence, and the Human Side of GTM:
How Teams Win, or Break, at Launch
Go-to-market is operational, but it is also deeply social. The way teams relate to one another — the culture of trust, influence and shared ownership — is the most underrated capability in any product launch. Our institutions train us to compete: sports, school, career ladders. That conditioning shows up inside companies as turf wars and adversarial posturing. If leaders do not invest in team-building, communication practices and ritualized alignment, GTM becomes a zero-sum game and launches fail for social reasons long before the press release goes live.
The underestimated GTM skill is internal influence: the ability to move legal, sales, engineering, operations and customer success along a shared path. That skill requires storytelling, empathy and the judgment to negotiate trade-offs. Influence can be developed with discipline: clear narratives, shared metrics, rehearsals and visible leadership support. It also requires emotional intelligence.
Templates and checklists are necessary, but insufficient. Launching repeatedly builds discernment; each well-run launch teaches you to recognize the hidden risk signals earlier and to respond with proportionate fixes.
Small misalignments are not innocuous. One tiny bottleneck compounds into operational drag over time, and repeat friction erodes velocity and morale. To protect people during a launch, share responsibility across functions rather than making a single person the martyr.
Measure internal health with real attention, run rehearsals and pre-mortems that surface failure modes, and build post-launch decompression into the timeline so teams can recover. Rituals matter: a live run-through, an escalation plan, and a short decompression meeting are simple structures that preserve culture.
A leader’s true responsibility is to care for people as much as numbers. When leaders invest in their teams, people mobilize to deliver stable, enduring outcomes rather than expedient spikes. If you want better launches, teach influence, build rituals for alignment and measure the human signals as deliberately as the product metrics. That social investment pays off not only in fewer failed launches, but in an organization that learns, sustains and scales.
My latest book, The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, is now available onAmazon. I also wrote the book “Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide” which you can purchase on Amazon.
