Where GTM comes from
- You will learn: which methods GTM borrows from, and which real project shaped it.
- Reading time: 2 minutes.
- Before this: Positions, for why GTM credits its sources at all.
GTM borrows openly. Each idea below came from another method, and GTM kept it because it spares your attention or the team’s context. The links lead to the original work.
Which methods does GTM borrow from?
BMAD-METHOD
BMAD-METHOD brought scale-adaptive entry doors: the idea that the size of the change picks the process, which became the Fix, Feature and Milestone sizes. GTM also ships a copy of its two method libraries, 108 brainstorming techniques and 71 elicitation methods, under BMAD-METHOD’s MIT licence, with its copyright and trademark notice kept next to them. Roles read a few rows by name as reflexes.
GitHub spec-kit
spec-kit brought the constitution, which became your project’s one-page brief, a marker for anything a spec must not guess, and tags for the tasks that can safely run in parallel.
superpowers
superpowers brought a fresh context for every task, a review against the spec before the review of quality, and verification before anything is called complete.
compound-engineering
compound-engineering brought the compound step: each solved problem is written down where it feeds the next plan, which is what the logbook does.
Agent OS
Agent OS brought small standards injected on demand, which became the conventions files a role reads only when its task needs them.
Kiro
Kiro brought a fixed sentence form for a spec’s acceptance lines, so that each line turns directly into a test.
taste-skill
taste-skill (MIT) brought a method for design taste: name the category’s default and leave it, and judge the rendered picture, which shaped the crafts and the taste score.
awesome-design-md
awesome-design-md (MIT) brought references: the
art director may read its public DESIGN.md files to learn how a system is built. None is copied
into GTM.
Which project was GTM distilled from?
GTM was distilled from Belay, a self-hosted offline-first training app built milestone by milestone with the roles, workflows and briefing format GTM now packages. No Belay code or document is copied into GTM.
Belay exercised seven delivered branches, with a design loop for every screen change, specs with decision tables, and plans tried in scratch copies for migrations and sync. Each task had its review, with security, data and screen specialists called in when it touched their ground, then a final review per branch, and a logbook per milestone whose lessons fed the next plan.
What GTM generalised from it: the role prompts, with the project’s rules moved into the .gtm/
files; the two workflows, with agent types and triggers moved into arguments; the design
guideline, with tokens and patterns moved into placeholders; and the logbook, now one file with
one line per entry.