There is a particular kind of fatigue that shows up in tech leadership.
Not burnout.
Not loss of ambition.
A quieter frustration.
The sense that growth now requires more effort than it used to. That progress feels heavy. That every gain seems to demand disproportionate energy.
Targets haven’t changed. The team is capable. The market still exists.
Yet momentum feels harder to generate and harder to sustain.
When leaders talk about this privately, the language is revealing.
“It shouldn’t be this hard.”
“We’re doing all the right things.”
“We’re busier than ever.”
They are usually right.
And they are usually looking in the wrong place.
The illusion of effort as progress
As organisations scale, effort becomes easier to see than effectiveness.
More people.
More activity.
More tools.
Work expands to fill the system around it. Output increases. Calendars fill. Dashboards light up.
From the inside, this looks like commitment.
From the outside, it often looks like friction.
The mistake leaders make is assuming that if effort is high, the system must be sound. When results lag, they conclude that the answer is more intensity.
Push harder.
Move faster.
Add capacity.
This rarely restores momentum. It usually accelerates exhaustion.
Why growth becomes heavy before it stops
Growth almost never collapses overnight.
It thickens.
Decisions take longer.
Messages require more explanation.
Deals need more justification.
Small inefficiencies accumulate. Minor misalignments compound. What once felt intuitive now feels procedural.
This is not because the market suddenly became hostile. It is because the go-to-market system no longer flows naturally.
GTM friction shows up first as effort, not failure.
The hidden ways GTM works against you
When GTM starts working against the organisation, the signals are subtle.
Sales conversations feel harder to steer.
Marketing messages need constant qualification.
Product value takes longer to land.
No single function is failing. Each is compensating.
Sales adds context that marketing didn’t provide.
Marketing broadens narratives to cover gaps.
Product stretches roadmaps to satisfy edge cases.
Heroics increase. Clarity decreases.
This is how capable teams become tired teams.
Why leaders misinterpret the problem
Most leaders have been trained to respond to friction with action.
If something is hard, apply pressure.
If progress slows, add resources.
These instincts are useful in early-stage companies. At scale, they can be counterproductive.
The real constraint is rarely effort. It is coherence.
When GTM logic is unclear, effort turns into noise. More motion does not create momentum, it creates drag.
The organisation feels busy but not effective.
The emotional cost of misaligned GTM
This is where the conversation often turns inward.
Leaders begin to question themselves.
Teams lose confidence.
Second-guessing creeps in.
Growth feels personal again, but in the wrong way.
What once felt like a shared mission starts to feel like individual strain. People work harder to protect outcomes rather than advance them.
Left unchecked, this erodes trust internally as much as externally.
What changes when GTM is working with you
When GTM is coherent, growth feels different.
Not easy, but lighter.
Decisions are quicker because assumptions are shared.
Conversations are shorter because meaning is clear.
Execution accelerates because fewer things need explanation.
Effort still exists, but it compounds instead of cancelling itself out.
Teams feel progress even when results take time.
This is the difference between pushing a system forward and being pushed back by it.
Why this is a leadership responsibility
GTM does not drift into dysfunction by accident.
It drifts because no one owns it as a system.
Sales owns targets.
Marketing owns channels.
Product owns delivery.
But GTM sits between them, shaping how value moves from idea to revenue.
When leaders do not take responsibility for this connective layer, it fragments quietly. Everyone compensates. No one redesigns.
That is how growth becomes hard without anyone being at fault.
The question leaders should ask themselves
Instead of asking, “Why isn’t this working?”, a better question is this.
“Where is our GTM making growth harder than it needs to be?”
That question shifts attention from performance to design.
It invites leaders to look at clarity, coherence and trust, rather than volume, pressure and activity.
It also opens the door to fixing the right problem.
Growth is not meant to feel this heavy
Growth will always require effort. It will always involve uncertainty.
But when it feels relentlessly hard, something is misaligned.
In most cases, it is not the team.
It is not the product.
It is not the market.
It is the system through which all of those interact.
GTM, when designed deliberately, reduces friction. When left to accumulate accidentally, it becomes friction.
The difference is not ambition or execution.
It is leadership attention.
And when leaders reclaim that, growth rarely becomes easy.
But it does become possible again, without exhausting the organisation in the process.
