Maria Jiang

A SaaS startup's first marketing hire should be a generalist who can wear multiple hats across different functions of marketing and has a founder mentality to move fast. Whether you hire someone who is more senior or a junior executor will depend on the skills of the founding team, the size of the marketing budget and the playbook you want to execute. Assuming your startup has reached some level of product-market-fit, you'll want to hire someone who has digital marketing experience and knows how ...Read More

There's a couple of tactical ways in which you can start building trust with PMs. It all starts with knowing the product. I would get to know the product intimately by using the product and talking to customers to understand how they are using it. Armed with this knowledge, I would offer these insights to PMs and give them ideas of what are the features that customers love, point out where there might be product confusion/friction, and offer up ideas based on asks/requests for new features or fu ...Read More

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

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

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

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

Owning a product launch would be a great way to get started in setting up the role of product marketing and defining the responsibilities of that role. By bringing together different x-functional stakeholders across sales, product, customer success and the rest of the marketing towards a launch date would be a concrete way to show the value of PMM. If you don't have a new product to launch, you could also simply create a launch moment of a product that's already been in market to boost its perfo ...Read More

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

I would start by meeting 1:1 with your leadership team (CEO, Founder, CMO) to understand each leader's interpretations of the PMM function. You can probe with questions like, "How would you describe PMM's primary role within our company today? What does success look like for you? What are your most important metrics that PMM can own and influence?" You want this to be a conversation so be ready to listen, but also be prepared to offer your POV based on your personal experiences and different typ ...Read More