Career Mentoring for GTM Professionals

An accidental manager is someone promoted into a leadership role because they were excellent at their previous job, not because anyone assessed or trained their ability to lead people. It's the norm rather than the exception: most companies don't have a formal leadership pipeline, so being a top performer becomes the only available signal for who gets promoted. The result is a first-time manager with no support, still doing individual work instead of building a team, and often struggling quietly through a first year that damages both their own confidence and their team's performance.

Strong individual performance is necessary but not sufficient. The signals that usually matter more: whether you already informally coach or unblock peers, whether you can explain your own process clearly enough for someone else to repeat it, and whether you're motivated by team outcomes as much as your own number. If those aren't there yet, that's exactly what to build before the move, not after it.

Performing the job well and being ready to lead people who do the job are genuinely different skill sets. The clearest signal is whether you can turn your own instincts into something teachable: a process, a framework, a way of coaching, rather than just doing the work faster or better yourself.

The jump from team lead to VP or Head of typically requires strategic and cross-functional skills that managing your own team doesn't teach on its own: forecasting and board-level reporting, org design, hiring at scale, and influence across product, marketing, and finance rather than just your own function.

Yes, and it's one of the most consistent things people report at every one of these transitions. Most people are promoted into leadership because they were excellent at their previous job, not because anyone taught them how to lead, sometimes called the “accidental manager” problem, and it's the norm, not the exception. It's not usually a sign you're in the wrong role, it's the ordinary cost of doing something you haven't done before.

Have a deliberate one-on-one reset conversation with each former peer early rather than letting the relationship redefine itself through silence. Be explicit about your decision-making style and standards instead of assuming it's understood. And resist the instinct to out-produce your own team to prove you deserve the promotion, your job changed from doing the work to making everyone else better at it.

The core of this work, building a promotion case, learning to lead instead of just perform, managing former peers, closing the confidence gap, isn't specific to any one function, even though my own background is GTM and revenue leadership. Professionals facing the same jump in engineering, product, or elsewhere are also a good fit.

Start by mapping which of your existing skills genuinely transfer, communication, problem-solving, domain expertise, and which gaps are real and need to be closed before you're a credible candidate. Most career changers either undersell what already transfers or try to compete on GTM-specific experience they don't have yet. Both are fixable once they're named clearly.

It depends heavily on your background, but the common transferable skills are structured communication, handling objections or resistance, technical or domain fluency if you're coming from a specialist field, and any prior experience managing relationships or expectations. The gap is usually GTM-specific process and vocabulary, which is learnable faster than most career changers expect.

Negotiate after you have a written offer, not before, and let them name the first number where possible. A competing offer is your strongest leverage, and it's worth surfacing rather than hiding. Expect it to be a normal part of the process: most employers don't expect their first offer to be accepted immediately.

Leadership interviews test different things than individual contributor interviews: how you'd handle an underperforming report, how you communicate a hard decision, and how you think about tradeoffs across a team rather than a single deal or account. Prepare specific, real examples for each of those, not just a rehearsal of your individual track record.

The strongest timing is right after a clear, documented win, not during a scheduled review when budgets are often already fixed. Anchor the number in market data for your role and level rather than personal financial need, and treat it as the start of a conversation, not a final demand.

Build the case before the conversation, not during it: a short written summary of what you've delivered, the added scope you're already carrying, and the specific title or scope you're asking for. Bring it as a planned conversation, not an ambush, and ask what evidence your manager would need to say yes, rather than just stating that you deserve it.

Ask directly for the specific, concrete reasons rather than accepting a vague explanation, and get them in writing or a follow-up email if you can. Give yourself real time to process the disappointment before deciding anything. Then use those reasons as the explicit checklist for the next attempt, or as the honest signal that it's time to look elsewhere.

The clearest signs are no growth in scope or responsibility for a long stretch, no salary movement, and a sense that your work is increasingly handed to others seen as more capable. It's rarely one bad quarter, it's a pattern. The useful next step is separating what's fixable where you are from what genuinely requires a different team or company.

Often, yes. If the role itself is fine but the company isn't, no growth path, chronic understaffing, pay that hasn't kept pace with your scope, the fix is usually external rather than internal. That means repositioning your resume around outcomes rather than tasks, being deliberate about which companies you target instead of applying broadly, and negotiating hard once an offer is actually on the table.

This is built for individual contributors preparing for a promotion to team lead, team leads working toward senior leadership, and professionals moving into sales, customer success, or GTM from a different background. It's probably not the right fit if you're already at VP or C-level and need board-level executive coaching, or if what you want is a structured multi-week bootcamp rather than 1:1 conversations tied to your specific situation.

Generic career coaches are trained in coaching methodology but haven't necessarily done the job themselves. I've hired, promoted, and managed the exact roles I coach people into, Head of Sales at Proton, GTM advisor at Apify and Resistant.ai, so the guidance is grounded in what actually gets someone hired or promoted in this specific field, not a general coaching framework applied to any career.

We talk through where you are, what's stuck, and whether ongoing mentorship makes sense. No slides, no sales pitch, just a direct conversation about your specific situation.

That's fine, say so on the call. Most of this gets figured out together in the conversation, not picked off a menu beforehand.

The intro call is 15 minutes. There's no fixed weekly commitment beyond that, most people book a single focused session before a specific moment, and some move to an ongoing monthly cadence through a longer transition. It's built around your situation, not a fixed-length program.

Yes, for now. Sessions run via ADPList or booked directly while I build a track record. Paid engagement is planned later, priced properly once there's real evidence it's worth it.

Yes. Based in Prague, but sessions run over video call, so location isn't a barrier, I work with people across Europe and beyond. The only real constraint is scheduling across time zones, and sessions are conducted in English.

Yes, see the page for HR and L&D teams for how this works as an employee benefit or a structured cohort program.