Collision Levels
Four depths of go-to-market collision, from a process fix to a change in what business you're in.
Human truth
Companies don't break because people are lazy. They break because sales, marketing, CS and ops are working from different versions of reality, and when they finally collide, the fix is usually aimed at the wrong depth.
The parts
L1 Tactical
The fix is changing a process. Something in how the work moves is broken, and a better process repairs it.
L2 Strategic
The fix is changing what teams are measured on. Each team is doing its job well, and their goals point them at each other.
L3 Fundamental
The fix is changing how the company is built. The structure itself keeps producing the collision.
L4 Market
The fix is changing what business you're in. The company is executing well on a market that isn't there.
The rule for using them: match the intervention to the depth.
When to reach for it
Teams keep running into each other right after everyone agreed. You've found a collision and need to decide how big the fix should be. A fix went in and the same problem came back.
The essay
F
or years I called it silos. Now I call it collisions.
A collision is the moment misaligned motion does real damage. A lost deal. Burned pipeline. Wasted spend. A customer who leaves. Collisions rarely come from people disagreeing. They come from the illusion of agreement: a team leaves a conversation believing it shares an understanding, and each person has quietly filled in the gaps with their own assumptions.
When I started building majorGTM to find them, I learned where they hide. I pointed it at customer calls first, and it found one collision. People act aligned in front of customers. Then I pulled in the internal updates, and it started finding dozens.
Finding them turned out to be the easy part. Knowing what to do with one is harder, because they don't all go the same depth. So I sort them into four levels.
At level one, the tactical level, a process change fixes it. At level two, the strategic level, you have to change what teams are measured on. At level three, the fundamental level, you have to change how the company is built. At level four, the market level, you have to change what business you're in.
The way I picture it: at the first level, the navigator can't read the map. At the second, we're heading east when we need to go north. At the third, we're in the desert when we should be in the tundra. At the fourth, we've mapped the desert beautifully, and nobody lives there.
The rule is to match the intervention to the depth. A new process won't fix a collision that lives in the comp plan. A reorg is a lot of pain to spend on something a process change would have solved.
Collisions also leave signals before they land. Left alone, a signal becomes a collision. The goal is to stop reacting after the crash and start managing the signals before it.
This isn't a people problem. It's a systems problem.
The levels are the model, and the spectrum is stable. What sits inside each level is still being worked out, and it will change as I learn more. That's why this page says Named Model and not Framework. It has earned a name. It hasn't finished teaching me. ■
Where it came from
Collision Levels is Jason's own model, from 2026 and the work behind majorGTM. It grows out of Silo Syndrome and gap-first thinking: the same customer-felt gaps, traced back to the moment two teams run into each other. The canonical version of the four levels dates from 2026-09-09.