Hey friend, how’s it going? 🌻
I’ve been quieter on LinkedIn the last few weeks. Not because I ran out of things to say, but because I’ve been heads down figuring something out: I’m moving from a content marketing role into a growth role.
I don’t have this figured out yet. What I have is a clearer picture of what I’m preparing for, and I thought it was worth sharing while it’s still messy, not after I’ve cleaned it up into a neat framework.
Let’s get into it 👇
📌 TL;DR
Growth or GTM isn’t “content marketing but more.” It sits at the intersection of product marketing, content, demand gen, and brand, and that’s a genuinely different way of thinking
The real shift isn’t adding channels, it’s dropping channel-first thinking altogether
Knowing your customer now means knowing their pressure points and trade-offs, not just their job title and company size
AI stopped being something I chat with and started being infrastructure I build on, agents and MCPs doing the repetitive work, so I get the research time back
Why this role, why now
For most of my career, my thinking has been channel-specific. Give me a content gap, and I’ll tell you the blog post, the LinkedIn angle, the newsletter hook. That instinct served me well. Some of last year’s wins came directly from being that specific.
But when I actually sat down and researched what a growth or GTM role involves, I realized channel-specific thinking is not a strength, once you’re operating at this level. This role isn’t about picking better channels. It’s about thinking from the brand outward, horizontal expansion instead of doubling down on one or two channels that already work.
That’s a different muscle. I’m building it now.
Getting inside the customer’s head, not just their persona
Here’s what I would tell anyone making the same move: your product understanding and your sales team’s input have gotten you this far. They won’t get you the rest of the way alone.
I’m now sitting in on every call transcript I can get my hands on. Not summaries of calls, the actual calls.
I’m talking to sales more than I ever have. I’m asking about the customer’s age, the inside jokes that land with them, what makes them anxious, what actually relieves that anxiety, what they’re trading off when they choose us over someone else, or nothing at all.
Those are uncomfortable questions to sit with, honestly. A job title tells you what someone does. It tells you nothing about what keeps them up at night. And a brand that’s supposed to feel emotionally relatable can’t be built on job titles alone.
AI as the GTM engineer, not the chat window
I come from a very human, very manual content writing background, and it took me real time to figure out how to use AI as anything more than a chat box. For the longest time, that’s exactly what it was for me. Ask a question, get an answer, move on.
This role changed that. I now think of AI as a lever for the actual mechanics of the job, what a lot of people are calling GTM engineering. So I’m experimenting daily, mostly with Claude.
I’ve set up agents that track what’s happening across the industry and inside competitors’ worlds.
I’ve pulled in MCPs for tools like Webflow and Ahrefs, so parts of my job run on their own, which means the time I get back goes straight into research and thinking, not busywork.
Maybe that sounds like I’ve cracked something. I haven’t, not fully. But most of the time, having the repetitive 30% automated is enough to make the other 70% feel possible again.
Where I actually am
I’m telling you all this because this exact question has come up in almost every 1:1 call I’ve had recently. People aren’t sure how to move from content marketing into the next stage, and growth or GTM is a real next stage worth considering.
This is how I started. I don’t fully know what comes after this either. But I’ll figure it out as I go, and I’ll keep sharing it here as it happens, not after it’s finished and tidy.
P.S. This probably won’t be the last time I write about this. Consider this issue one of the first entries in a running series as the transition actually unfolds, good weeks and messy ones both 😊
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Onwards and upwards,
Sreyashi