Yesterday’s Job, Today’s Expectations (Clay)

Clay has 125,000 customers learning its product, but it doesn’t have a traditional education team.

Yash Tekriwal, who leads the Go-To-Market Engineering Ecosystem at Clay, joined hosts Josh Schachter and Samantha Murray for the [Un]Churned episode, “He Created a Job Title 1,000+ People Now Have.” He talked about the origins of the GTM engineer role, why Clay renamed its education team, and what it looks like to build a learning ecosystem around community and live experience rather than content libraries and completion rates.

---

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Gainsight.com.

Subscribe now and get the [Un]Churned take straight to your inbox.

---

🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: The Job Already Changed. Has Your Title Kept Up?

In August 2023, Varun Anand, Clay’s co-founder and Head of Operations, noticed Yash Tekriwal’s work and pointed out that he wasn’t really doing a traditional salesperson’s job or an operations person’s job. It needed a term all its own.

Clay, a go-to-market (GTM) software platform and data operations canvas used by sales and marketing teams, didn’t create the GTM engineer title just to stand out. The label fit work that was already happening. Yash, now Head of Go-To-Market Engineering (GTME) Ecosystem, was running 30+ sales calls a week, building automated scoring systems, cleaning data, and designing the go-to-market infrastructure. No existing title described all of that. The role came first out of necessity, and the name came later.

Now, GTM engineers have grown in popularity, appearing on job boards and LinkedIn profiles. The entire industry needed the role; they just didn’t know what to call it yet.

The Same Inflection Is Happening in Customer Success

Post-sales and Customer Success (CS) roles have changed more in the past three years than in the previous decade. Many organizations have seen their books of business double almost overnight. Customers are pushing back on QBRs and want more outcome-focused conversations. More and more companies are vibe-coding on top of existing solutions, and need their Customer Success Manager (CSM) to help, not hinder.

Bain’s 2024 CS Practitioner Survey shows that customers view technical assistance as their top priority from CS partners, but most CS teams rank it last. This gap has been growing for years, even though the official CSM job description hasn’t changed much.

Most CS orgs are still structured, measured, and resourced around a version of the job that no longer reflects where the real leverage lives. Now CSMs are expected to read signals before a customer feels pain, exhibit technical fluency, and connect your product directly to a customer’s desired outcomes.

What Yash’s Ecosystem Decision Reveals

When Clay changed its education team’s name to the “Go-To-Market Engineering Ecosystem,” Yash was making a point about structure. If the name doesn’t match what the team actually does, you end up hiring and measuring for the wrong things.

The old name suggested content production, video libraries, and completion rates, which shaped everything from hiring to success metrics. The new name allowed the team to run in-person workshops for prospects, share deal intelligence with sales, manage certification programs that test real skills, and build a talent placement process for certified people. This is a growth function built from what used to be called education, and the change happened because someone let the name reflect the real work.

There’s a clear and uncomfortable parallel for CS. If the CSM role is still based on 2019 assumptions, then commercial skills, data literacy, and technical know-how will seem like extra tasks instead of the main focus of the job.

The Leaders Who Move First

Yash didn’t plan this from the start. Clay didn’t set out to create a new category or structure. Instead, they kept solving real problems, and the solution took shape over time.

“Don’t go out and try to do something abstract and then reverse-engineer your way into it because you don’t know what doing the actual work and solving the real problems in front of you will yield.”

Most changes in CS organizations will happen the same way. Not through a big reorganization, but through leaders who notice the gap between what their CSMs actually do and what their job descriptions say.

---

🎧 Listen for These Moments

Yash gets refreshingly candid about how Clay stumbled into one of the most talked-about roles in GTM, and what he's still figuring out. Listen for these moments in the full episode:

• Why Clay didn’t let students touch the product for the first week of a technical bootcamp — and why it ended up being the most valuable part of the program.

• The case against multiple choice certification — how Yash is using AI role-plays to assess whether someone can actually do the job.

• Why one customer logged 16 touchpoints with Clay before converting — and what that means for how you think about community as a growth channel.

---

🔎 Where to Find the Speakers

• Yash Tekriwal — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashtekriwal/

• Samantha Murray — LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-murray613

• Josh Schachter — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/

📎 Referenced in This Episode

• Alt MBA — the Seth Godin-founded program that Yash modeled Clay’s Alpha Forge bootcamp after

• Clay — the go-to-market data platform where Yash leads the GTM Engineering Ecosystem

---

Wrapping Up

If you had to describe what your CSMs actually do today, would the job description match?

See you next week 🧠