Employee Spotlight: Sharon Xiang

Can You Tell Us About Your Role at GlossGenius?

I’m currently the sole member of the Research team as a User Researcher. My role is to gather and synthesize insights from our target users that directly inform our product roadmap and GTM initiatives. 

GlossGenius is Customer-Obsessed. What Does This Mean in Practice to You, and How Does It Show Up in Your Work and the Initiatives You Oversee?

Research wouldn’t exist if we weren’t customer-obsessed! My day-to-day involves chatting with our customers and prospects to better understand how GlossGenius can better serve those in the beauty and wellness industry. Business owners in this industry are so creative and my role is to represent them in every meeting I sit in. I love chatting with and learning from those in our industry; I live by the principle that every conversation contains an important learning.

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What Are You Most Excited to Build, Solve, or See Come to Life at GlossGenius this Year?

One of my main initiatives has been to build out our Research team 0-1, which is an extremely cross-functional effort. I’ve enjoyed a close relationship with our Product, Design, and GTM teams as I work to situate where Research sits in the org as well build out internal operations to help support research projects across departments. I’m super excited to position Research as the place to go at GlossGenius for deep insights into customer and industry needs as we grow upmarket and expand our presence across beauty and wellness.

A huge wall we face with research in our industry is that it’s really hard to recruit research participants – our prospects are extremely busy business owners who have little free time in their day, so one of my goals is to figure out how to tap into business owner communities and chat with customers we hope to be able to serve. I have a lot of ideas for how we’re going to achieve this, so I’m excited to experiment throughout the rest of this year.

What Drew You to Join GlossGenius in the First Place?

I have a unique journey at GlossGenius because I interned here during college when the company was just three people and two interns in a WeWork. It was my first ever internship and I was extremely inspired by Danielle’s vision and am honored to call her one of my earliest mentors. Since then, it’s been super exciting to see how much the company has grown and evolved in the years since I was an intern. When I graduated college, I moved to LA to pursue my dreams of working in TV, but when I decided to leave this career path behind, Danielle was the first person I called and I haven’t looked back since!

What’s Something About You that Your Coworkers Might Be Surprised to Learn?

I speak 4 languages (English, Chinese, French, and Spanish)! My Spanish is admittedly rough but I can muddle through it. I grew up speaking Chinese at home and visiting China almost every summer, so I feel very close to my Chinese roots. My parents put me in French when I was in 5th grade and I’ve since fallen in love with all things French.

GlossGenius is actively hiring across many departments – check out our open roles here.  

Additionally, below is some recent press you may be interested in:

• TechCrunch: GlossGenius Increases Valuation, Raises $28M in Series C Round of Funding
• GlossGenius Named a Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startup 2023
• GlossGenius Named to the Forbes Fintech 50
• GlossGenius Named a 2023 BuiltIn Best Places to Work Winner
• BeautyMatter: GlossGenius and the Power of Customizable Beauty SaaS
• Fast Company: The 10 Most Innovative Retail Companies of 2022

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