The new GTM playbook: Market Engineering
Why the next wave of SaaS growth won’t come from “finding markets,” but from engineering them.
👋 Hi, I’m James. I write Building Momentum to help you accelerate B2B SaaS growth through product marketing, GTM strategy, sales, and marketing.
Over my 15 years in product marketing, I’ve been lucky enough to see the wonderful depth and breadth of our discipline over and over again. I’ve helped launch products, steer company pivots, and build go-to-market motions that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
And I’ve seen colleagues and friends do the same, navigating the ebb-and-flow of startup growth.
But something has always irked me.
SaaS go-to-market, and product marketing is overflowing with fundamental frameworks, playbooks, and lessons learned… but inside most companies they rarely survive beyond a workshop: quickly forgotten, and rarely embedded into how a company operates.
That gap between theory and practice is the real problem.
The result is that product marketing - the people who are trained to help companies go-to-market most effectively! - gets reduced to execution support instead of strategic leadership.
Too many companies still treat PMMs as “the team that makes decks”: tactical translators who step in to polish a launch, support sales, or tidy up messaging.
That might have worked when attention was easier to capture, acquisition was cheap, and growth could be brute-forced with ads, inbound marketing, and hero sellers.
SaaS has changed. Buyers are overwhelmed, markets are saturated, and growth is too expensive to waste on guesswork. Startups and scale-ups need to make definitive moves with more surety, to adapt logically, and generally be more efficient.
But when PMMs are sidelined, the company loses the very muscle built to turn strategy into traction. And that’s why so many startups flounder and fail.
Not from weak products, but from weak go-to-market:
Because the offer didn’t align with what buyers valued.
Because pricing, packaging, and adoption paths didn’t fit how teams actually buy.
Because marketing and sales wasted time on bad-fit customers.
Because too much time was spent chasing unproven assumptions.
And because there were no systems to capture and compound demand… just heroics and hope.
What is a market, really?
A market is not everyone who could, in theory, use your product. A market is:
A defined group → Clear edges. You know exactly who’s in, and who’s out.
With a shared problem → A pain or constraint that feels the same across the group.
With conditions that make it urgent → A trigger (technology, regulation, culture, economics) that makes the old way unacceptable.
Who are ready to pay → If they’re not willing or able to pay, you have an audience, not a market.
We’ve seen markets defined time and time again:
CRM-as-a-service → Salesforce
Team collaboration beyond email → Slack
Multiplayer design → Figma
Commerce for independent merchants → Shopify
Cloud data warehousing → Snowflake
Self-serve marketing automation → HubSpot
All-in-one workspace → Notion
Each of these companies didn’t just launch a product into an existing category or coining a new label.
They defined and won a market: a specific group of buyers, with an urgent shared problem, who were ready to pay for change.
How go-to-market has shifted
Old: Wait for “product–market fit” to appear. Hope the market finds you.
New: Define, shape and capture markets by design, not chance.
Old: Sell to anyone who shows interest. Broader feels safer.
New: Focus ruthlessly on the sub-segments you can win.
Old: Product = the product. Fit means features.
New: Everything is the offer: product, pricing, packaging, messaging and motion.
Old: Convince with vision and conviction alone.
New: Build confidence through proof: insight, testing and validation.
Old: Heroic sellers and one-off campaigns drive results.
New: GTM systems, playbooks and feedback loops create repeatable success.
Old: Set a strategy and stick to it until it breaks.
New: Iterate continuously. Refresh insights, test new levers, adapt as markets shift.
Old: Success judged on decks, buzz, or board optics.
New: The only metric that matters is traction: pipeline created, deals won, revenue captured.
These shifts demand more than slight tweaks. They demand a new discipline: Market Engineering.
What is Market Engineering?
Market Engineering is a natural evolution of strategic product marketing. It is the practice of defining, designing, and deploying systems that capture the markets that matter.
It bridges the gap between market insight and revenue outcomes. It turns clarity into confidence, and confidence into traction.
We don’t just research markets. We engineer them into pipeline.
We don’t stop at positioning. We build repeatable GTM systems.
We don’t measure success in decks or buzz. We measure it in revenue.
Put simply: Markets can be built by design, not discovered by chance.
The 7 principles of market engineering
Markets aren’t found, they’re engineered. Salesforce, Slack, and Figma didn’t stumble into pre-existing markets. They defined them.
Segmentation is strategy. The fastest growth comes from owning a wedge first, then expanding. Broad targeting makes you invisible.
Market–offer fit drives scale. The offer is more than features: it’s pricing, packaging, onboarding, adoption, and support.
Clarity is engineered from evidence. Assumptions don’t scale. Proof does.
Systems make growth repeatable. Heroics don’t scale. Playbooks and feedback loops do.
Markets are dynamic, not static. Strategy isn’t a deck: it’s a loop of listening, testing, adapting.
Revenue is the scoreboard. Vanity metrics mislead. Pipeline, win rate, ACV, and NRR tell the truth.
What this means for PMMs (and founders)
This is a structural change in how product marketing fundamentals shape growth with greater responsibility, direct impact, and sharp accountability.
Supporting launches → owning market definition and traction.
Measured on activity → measured on revenue outcomes.
Static positioning → living, evidence-driven clarity.
Tactical translators → market engineers.
Market Engineers become the owner of the go-to-market system. Without one, you get drift: sales chasing one story, marketing another, product building for a different customer. With market engineering, you get alignment, focus, and traction.
The future is engineered
If you’re a PMM, this is your opportunity. The old label boxed you into tactical work. Market engineering as a discipline gives you the authority and accountability the role was always meant to have: not just to launch products, but to win markets.
If you’re a founder, you can’t afford to gamble with growth built on hopes and dreams. Without market engineering, you’re left with fragments: a positioning deck here, a launch plan there, a campaign layered on top of noise.
Product has engineers. Growth has engineers. Markets, finally, should have engineers too.
P.S. Could we support this with AI-enabled software? I think so.
If any of this resonates with you as a marketing leader or founder, let’s chat: book a call with me.