Your marketing teams aren’t aligned — and it’s killing your launches.
That’s the uncomfortable truth Christina Lang has seen play out at every scale, from 20-person startups to 5,000-person enterprises. In this episode of Run The Play, Christina — former VP of Global Marketing at Mozilla, with senior marketing leadership roles at Twitch and Meta — breaks down the exact go-to-market process she used to fix cross-functional chaos at some of the biggest platforms in tech. This conversation is essential for anyone building or fixing a go-to-market strategy.
The real problem isn’t process — it’s communication
David and Christina worked side by side at Twitch during its post-Amazon acquisition growing pains. Siloed teams, competing priorities, and a lack of shared language were derailing launches left and right. But when Christina diagnosed what was actually going wrong, she discovered the root cause wasn’t a missing process doc or a broken workflow — it was communication. Teams weren’t failing because they didn’t have a playbook. They were failing because they didn’t have a shared understanding of what mattered, who owned what, and how decisions actually got made.
Christina rebuilt the GTM system from the inside out, and the approach she walks through in this episode is something any marketing leader can apply — whether you’re inheriting a broken process or building one from scratch.
Find the power center first
One of the most tactical takeaways from this conversation is Christina’s advice on where to start when you’re the new operator walking into organizational chaos. Her answer: find the power center. Before you redesign a single workflow, figure out where decisions actually get made in the organization. It’s not always where the org chart says it is. Understanding the real power dynamics — who influences whom, whose buy-in actually matters, and where resistance will come from — is the difference between a process that sticks and one that gets ignored.
Earn buy-in without putting your name on it
Christina’s philosophy on change management is refreshingly honest: the best process operators never get praised — and that’s the point. She explains why the most effective way to drive organizational change is to make other people feel like the new process was their idea. It’s not about ego. It’s about adoption. If you slap your name on a new GTM framework and mandate compliance, you’ll get passive resistance. If you embed your ideas into existing conversations and let stakeholders shape the output, you get lasting change. This approach connects directly to how fractional CMOs operate — driving transformation from within, not from above.
The three-step GTM framework that actually works
Christina’s non-negotiable GTM framework simplifies the entire go-to-market process down to three stages: planning, alignment, and launch. That’s it. She argues that most organizations over-complicate GTM with too many stages, too many approval layers, and too much documentation. The result is a process so heavy that teams route around it — which means you end up with no process at all.
Her key distinctions: decide who actually needs approval authority versus who just needs visibility. Not everyone needs to be in the room for every decision. And documentation matters — but over-documentation kills adoption. The goal is a system lightweight enough that people actually use it.
Micro changes beat big transformations
Perhaps the most powerful concept in this episode is Christina’s philosophy of “micro changes.” Instead of announcing a big process overhaul that triggers organizational antibodies, she advocates for small, incremental adjustments that let you transform a system without anyone noticing. By the time people realize the process has changed, they’ve already adopted it. It’s change management for people who’ve been burned by change management.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- How Christina diagnosed GTM dysfunction at Twitch during its post-Amazon acquisition phase
- Why the first move in any new role should be finding the organization’s real power center
- The three-step GTM framework (planning, alignment, launch) that replaces bloated processes
- How to earn buy-in without putting your name on the change
- Why documentation matters but over-documentation kills adoption
- The “micro changes” philosophy for transforming processes without triggering resistance
- Who actually needs to be in the room — and who just needs visibility
Listen to the full episode above, or find Run The Play on YouTube.
About Run The Play
Run The Play is a podcast from Field Vision, a fractional CMO and growth marketing firm for digital media, entertainment, and creator economy startups (seed to Series D). Hosted by David — former Global Head of Audience Development at Amazon and Senior Director of Global Integrated Marketing at Twitch — each episode features conversations with senior marketing, brand, and talent leaders on the strategies behind the world’s biggest brands and boldest ideas.