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Maria Jiang

AMA: Upwork Director, Product and Solution Marketing, Maria Jiang on Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

January 29, 2025 @ 10:00AM 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. When your platform does many things, how do you prioritize your messaging hierarchy?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 1y

    Prioritizing your messaging hierarchy comes down to starting with your target audience/persona i.e. the people you are speaking to with your messaging. If your platform does many things, you should prioritize on the biggest problem you're solving for. Your platform may do many, many things and solve for many, many problems so you need to figure out what your target customer cares about the most and focus on that as the CORE message. If you don't know the answer, then you need to test and validat ...Read More

    844 Views
    2 requests

  2. How does your platform and solutions PMMs collaborate with product-focused PMMs?

    I'm the first product marketer focused on a specific industry across our entire platform while the majority of the team is focused on specific product(s) and/or sales segment.

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 1y

    If you work on a PMM team that has specialized roles between Platform/Solution PMMs vs Product-Focused PMMs, this must mean that you have clear role definitions to distinguish between the two teams so there is no overlap in responsibilities. Assuming this has been established, the close collaboration is most critical in the following 3 areas: 1) Product roadmap planning: Platform/Solution PMMs are focused on specific audiences (by industry, geography, persona, use case) in a multi-product compan ...Read More

    2,122 Views
    2 requests

  3. What is your advice for startup platform category creation? Where have you seen the most success in terms of channels for this type of creation?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 1y

    Creating a new category is hard, and not sure that a channel strategy is what comes first to mind when creating a new category. More often than not, category creation involves breakthrough product or a breakthrough business model. In other words, it can't be up to the marketing team to create a new category by giving them a large budget. Study "category kings" like Gong, Gainsight, Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot. One mistake I see many seasoned marketers make in their quest to create a new ...Read More

    1,602 Views
    2 requests

  4. How do you structure internal messaging documents for different solutions but still tie back to core platform positioning?

    Maria Jiang
    Maria Jiang

    Director of PMM | Formerly Meta, Upwork, Zendesk, PagerDuty • 1y

    At multi-product companies I've worked at (Salesforce, Meta, Zendesk), the best practice was to bundle product releases into big communication moments to increase market impact. As such, we had to align on ALL the features that had a customer-facing element so in order to stay organized and aligned, we used a massive spreadsheet with links to a large repository of internal messaging documents with the benefits/value proposition for EACH feature. All of these features laddered up to the core plat ...Read More

    1,797 Views
    2 requests