CASE STUDY · INFLUENCE WITHOUT AUTHORITY
Got 16 senior leaders to run GTM on a rhythm I built and drove.
Sixteen senior leaders across product, sales, and marketing were working on separate tracks, with no one owning the forum where GTM actually got decided. The job was to build that forum and get leaders I did not manage to keep showing up.
The situation.
Sixteen senior leaders across product, sales, and marketing were operating on separate tracks. Decisions made in one function surfaced too late in the others, and the org was losing months to the gaps. No one owned a forum where GTM direction actually got decided across the three functions.
The constraint.
I had no authority over any of these leaders, and they had full calendars and zero appetite for another low-value meeting. Anything I stood up had to earn its place on the first session or be the first thing they dropped. It had to be a durable operating rhythm, not a one-off offsite.
The decision I made.
I built the program and drove it. I set the agendas, curated the content, and owned the follow-through between sessions so each one produced decisions, not status updates. I treated the discipline as the product, because that is what made leaders keep showing up to something I had no mandate to require.
What I shipped.
A cross-org interlock program convening 16 senior product, sales, and marketing leaders on a standing cadence.
Curated agendas and pre-reads that kept each session decision-focused.
A follow-through discipline that carried commitments from one session to the next.
The result.
Eliminated roughly six months of accumulated misalignment and turned a group of leaders I did not manage into a standing decision-making rhythm they kept returning to.