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Maria Jiang

AMA: Upwork Director, Product and Solution Marketing, Maria Jiang on Market Research

June 11, 2024 @ 9:00AM PT

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Maria Jiang

Director of PMM

👋 Hi! I'm Maria from San Francisco

💼 Formerly @ Upwork, Meta, PagerDuty, Zendesk

👀 I'm open to product marketing leadership opportunities in B2B SaaS

🤝 I specialize in the hardest parts of product marketing — translating complex products into clear market narratives, building GTM strategies that actually convert, and aligning cross-functional teams around a shared story. My core expertise: new product launches, messaging & positioning, persona development, and cross-functional leadership across enterprise and mid-market B2B SaaS

🍦 My favorite ice cream flavor is mint choco chip!

  1. How much time should be dedicated to Research before a launch?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 2y

    Before a new product launch, I would hope that you've already done all your research by then as launch should be all about the actual GTM motions. Things I like to test right before a launch is putting drafts of GTM assets in front of prospects for their reactions/feedback. For example, I had invested on creating a short promotional video for launch day. When it was nearing its final stages of production, I shared it with a small number of prospects to get their feedback. I believe that any majo ...Read More

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    2 requests

  2. What research do you do upfront to inform your plan for opening new markets?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 2y

    For opening up new markets, the first upfront research would be market sizing! Before you even build an execution plan to go after a new market, you first need to figure out if there is a market opportunity worth pursuing and understand market potential. This will ensure that you're setting up the right revenue goals for the business and entering the right market. There are a number of ways to calculate total addressable market, but the easiest and most accurate way is a bottoms-up analysis wher ...Read More

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    1 request

  3. How do you recommend researching on a very limited budget?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 2y

    When I was working at startups, I have done really scrappy qualitative research by doing cold outreach to people directly on LinkedIn and simply asking for their time. You would be surprised at how many people are willing to help and share their expertise (even better if you can offer a small monetary incentive or a donation to a charity of their choice). Conducting as little as 8-10 interviews can help you identify common themes to inform product decisions, develop a POV on the buyer persona, o ...Read More

    2,051 Views
    2 requests

  4. How do you organize/synethize data for creating personas?

    I am in the process of developing personas, and the data will come from multiple sources such as reviews, interviews, and internal insight. Do you have a tool, template or best practices for organizing all these data points to make sense of it and then turn it into a persona?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 2y

    I recommend starting out with the end result and working backwards from there. In other words, create the buyer persona template and then start synthesizing your data / insights into those buckets of data. For buyer personas, I like to keep it simple and break it into the following key questions: 1) What are your responsibilities? 2) What are your biggest challenges? 3) Who are your main stakeholders? 4) How is your success defined/measured? 5) How do you learn about new technologies?

    2,481 Views
    1 request

  5. What type of market research is most important for product marketing?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 2y

    I'm a firm believer that product marketing's role is to be the voice of the product in the market and the voice of the market in the product so while there is no magic bullet to the one most important type of market research, I think the most important thing to do is to talk to your prospects and customers and understand their needs, wants, pain points, preferences, and interests. In order to add value to the product and echo their voice to our x-functional team members, we must know the audienc ...Read More

    1,218 Views
    1 request