People sometimes ask how someone ends up in GTM engineering from where I started, and the honest answer is that it doesn't look like a straight line. I can see the line now that I'm looking back, though.
I started in electrical and computer engineering. That led me to automation work at a factory in the US, the kind of job where you fix things that are physically broken: a PLC that wouldn't talk to a machine, a machine that wasn't doing what the code said. I liked the satisfaction of it. I didn't like how rigid the field felt, so I moved on.
Next came floor operations at a cinema, a very different kind of floor, with people instead of machines. Then I worked at a clinic as a researcher and a social media marketer, which sounds like two jobs because it was. After that I worked in the field of gender as an expert, and then as a project manager. Then I landed a GTM ops role, and from there I grew into GTM engineering.
Along the way I've lived and worked in Namibia, the US and Pakistan. I've worked in a factory, a clinic and a cinema, on the ground in different parts of Pakistan and in different states in the US, and remotely. Remote is what I do now.
Moving between countries and jobs has meant starting over a lot, with new teams, new tools and new vocabulary each time. I used to see that as the cost of never settling. Now I think it's the reason I'm comfortable walking into a system I don't understand yet and asking it questions until it starts to make sense. Most of what I do in GTM comes down to learning a business quickly and finding what's quietly broken in it.
When I list it all out, it looks scattered. The thread is simpler than the list, though. I fix things. With a PLC or a machine, it's obvious what that means. With people, it meant trying to understand why someone thinks or behaves the way they do, even if I only ever reached a small part of that. With a system, it means finding where the work is leaking and closing the gap. The tools were different every time, and the question stayed the same: what's broken here, and how do I make it better?
GTM engineering turned out to hold most of what I'd picked up. The engineering is in it, and so are the psychology, the operations and the project management. I don't think I could have planned this route, tbh.. every step looked like a detour while I was on it.
Right now the thing I fix is a system, and I'm happy to keep fixing it for as long as it keeps teaching me something.