Alison Baum, Championing Fin-Tech's Potential in Latin America

November 9th, 2020

Alison Baum is a Partner and head of Loyalty at ZTech, the corporate innovation arm of Anheuser-Busch InBev that focuses on supporting their retailers, bars, and other SMB customers to grow their businesses via a portfolio of products and technology. Her career has spanned roles across strategy & operations, business intelligence, and product management at companies such as Google, Cloudflare, Formation, and BCG Digital Ventures.

In this feature, Alison shares with us how her early experiences in PM benefitted her career long-term, her advice to focus on career learning rather than career speed, and what excites her most about fin-tech. Read along to soak up her incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.

Early Career

You graduated from McGill University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering & a Masters in Economics and Statistics, and then started your career at Insparq, a 6-person startup. How did your undergraduate majors and first job influence where you are today?

For me, it was less about the specific majors and more about how they taught me to think, and ultimately, the theme of how I pursue opportunities. I love learning about how things work (and sometimes don’t work!) from as many viewpoints as possible to be able to break them down and rebuild in novel ways. My education was a great foundation for that - I love both methodical problem solving in engineering and the theoretical economic reasoning that takes shape from the sometimes fuzzy intersection of humans and numbers. From my first experience as a PM at a small NYC start-up, I was hooked on tech and the ability to build products that reach people anywhere and everywhere. You could be in a tiny start-up office, have a few brainstorming sessions, an engineer would write some code, and suddenly you’ve reached millions of people in no time. My subsequent roles have all revolved around understanding and building product from different perspectives.

In your early career, you switched jobs a few times - Product Manager at inSparq, Strategy, Planning, & Analysis at Google, and Special Projects and then Product Management at Cloudflare. What made you switch roles / companies and what would your recommendation be for individuals considering leaving their role / company?

I’m constantly seeking a balance between learning and impact and gaining new experiences to complement. I enjoy having regular conversations within my network to see what people are up to and where those pockets might be, whether it’s taking a course, attending a talk, or learning within my role/company more generally. Sometimes an interesting prospect has eventually turned into a new role opportunity. Keeping a pulse on what’s happening in the market especially when you’re not looking is a great low-pressure way to learn about what’s out there and put you top of mind for people as roles come up, sometimes even before they’re posted publicly. When I decided I wanted to leave Google for a smaller company, a friend at Cloudflare brought me to the then 100-person startup. I followed one of our engineers to Formation after a few years at Cloudflare. When I moved to NYC, the Formation team helped set me up with a job at BCGDV, and most recently, ZTech was a BCG DV client!

In terms of advice on roles, I’d say to focus on learning. As you figure out what kind of experiences you’re seeking, you develop a sense for whether you can gain those experiences within your role/company, or if it involves a larger change. I would also recommend finding a mentor and speaking regularly with your friends and network to understand their experiences.

You’ve held a variety of roles in finance, engineering, product, and strategy. What transferable skills did you gain through these roles that helped you to advance in your career?

More than specific skills, I think it comes down to the multiple perspectives I’ve gained in building a team/product, and how it’s helped me make decisions that take into account the upstream/downstream impacts, both obvious and non-obvious. Earlier in my career, major role changes have happened internally at companies when I identified a gap, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been empowered not just to identify, but also solve the problem at hand. For example, as one of the early members of the Special Projects team at Cloudflare, I realized we were under-leveraging our internal data to guide business decisions, and I took the lead on building our business intelligence function as a Product Manager. I’ve focused on solving problems by learning a new skill set and/or assembling a team based on a holistic understanding of what it takes to get the job done over a linear upward trajectory - sometimes advancing my career has been switching gears to take on a new role, but the sum of the parts has become greater than the whole over time.

After a few years in Industry, you switched to Consulting at BCG / BCGDV. Oftentimes, individuals will switch the other way around - from Consulting to Industry. Why did you decide to enter Consulting when you did, as opposed to at the beginning of your career?

Digital Ventures isn’t quite traditional consulting - as the corporate innovation arm of BCG, they generate investable business ideas that they then build and launch. I joined Digital Ventures through my previous job at Formation, an SF-based martech startup that had been incubated at BCGDV as a joint venture with Starbucks. I planned to move back to NYC for personal reasons, and it was an interesting idea to go “earlier in the pipeline” to understand how these startups were created. I was also excited at the prospect of learning about unfamiliar industries and stretching my perspective - I gained exposure across fashion, pharma, and fintech, to name a few. Fintech really resonated with me - it has the power to change the world with financial inclusion, and that experience was a factor in me joining ZTech, where we’re building our fintech portfolio.

Z-Tech - part of AB | InBev

You’re currently the Global Director of Loyalty and Strategic Partnerships at Z-Tech. What does your role entail and what is your day-to-day like?

Our current focus is expansion in Latin America, so at least pre-COVID, I was spending a significant amount of time with our teams on the ground locally understanding our customers and the technology landscape to see what made sense to invest in/build. Nowadays, I spend my time working with these same teams remotely as we develop customized loyalty program solutions for our portfolio companies in our Fintech and Marketplace verticals. I also work regularly with vendors and partners to assess whether we should incorporate their technology into our offerings - finding the right match between our customers and nascent startup ecosystems means we can support entrepreneurs on both sides of the equation.

What excites you most about the future of fintech and Z-tech?

I believe that fintech’s ability to democratize financial access regardless of socioeconomic status is reshaping the world, specifically in emerging markets. And the COVID pandemic is actually accelerating fintech in Latin America where cash is king - there is a clear need to rely more heavily on technology for financial services, especially transactions and banking. At ZTech, I get to support bringing that change to Latin America with the backing of Anheuser-Busch Inbev. It’s exciting to be somewhere that has the dynamism of a startup and the reach of a large corporation - the impact potential is incredible.

Advice

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?

The beginning of your career is all about learning, and your first job is not your end-all-be-all. You learn what you like, what you don’t like, what you want to dig deeper into, what you may never want to see again. The worst trap you can fall into is comparing yourself with your peers in career “speed” over learning what works best for you. In a few years, everyone ends up taking different paths anyhow. Careers are long, and focusing on the experiences you want to gain will naturally lead to trajectory. Had I optimized for career speed, I would have missed out on the opportunity to have a firsthand understanding of a variety and roles across companies of varying sizes, experiences that have allowed me to better design multidisciplinary teams and problems.

Who is one woman you aspire to be like?

Jacinda Ardern is my (s)hero. She has proven that good leadership should mix good sense and empathy. From the Christchurch mosque attack, where she was both empathetic and decisive in firearms legislation, to her government’s response to COVID, where she created early interventions and that has led to New Zealand being COVID-free, Ardern shows that there is real power in leading with kindness and decisiveness. She won her second term by a landslide because the people of New Zealand recognize that as well.