What world-class GTM looks like in 2026 | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel, Stripe, Google)

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser frames go-to-market as the full customer-and-revenue lifecycle, not merely the visible pairing of marketing and sales. At Vercel, her remit also includes technical sales, post-sales platform architecture, customer success, support, and partnerships. These functions often pursue overlapping but inconsistent segmentation and goals, so she expects today’s highly specialized GTM roles to converge around a single orchestrated journey from first awareness to long-term, high-lifetime-value use.

The starting mix depends on the product and initial market. A company may begin with sales, or with marketing and product-led growth, then add sales-assisted and sales-led motions as it moves upmarket. Grosser says consumption pricing made selling more consultative because the first deployment is only the beginning of a customer’s journey. AI intensifies that need: customers know they must change but may not know what to change, creating room for forward-deployed engineers who work inside the customer’s environment and feed generalizable lessons back into product and engineering.

The emerging GTM engineer extends that shift by applying technical judgment, better data, and AI to commercial workflows. The role is less about adding another narrow specialty than about redesigning the path from prospect to retained customer, with personalization at scale as a central goal. The conversation presents this as a response to more crowded markets, where bringing a product to market and differentiating it have become strategic capabilities in their own right.