Abby is an Engagement Manager at Alloy. She joined Alloy’s Vancouver office in 2019 as a Client Solutions Lead, and was recently promoted to recognize her excellent work with many of Alloy’s customers. Previously she was a consultant at APT, a SaaS company acquired by Mastercard. She holds a Master’s of Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK and is originally from the UK.
Client Solutions is a really varied role, and that’s one of the things I love about it. In a nutshell, my job is to manage my customer accounts and help them ‘get value’ from the software.
Some days this means discussing strategy with customer execs and figuring out a plan to address challenges and business goals using analytics. Some days I’m in the weeds of data architecture with the CS technical team or testing new features with the product team. And other days the focus is on our own team, developing processes to allow the team to operate at scale, in line with the broader company vision.
I’ve recently gotten involved with the ongoing ‘Vendor Managed Inventory’ project, where we’re developing a new solution in Alloy to automate order recommendations. We’re moving steadily from the world of analytics and insights into recommended actions and automation, and it’s exciting to be part of this innovation. The nature of the project has been particularly cross-functional, collaborating with the customer team, and working closely with the product and solution architecture teams at Alloy.
It’s been a really rewarding experience to work with and learn from this fantastic group of people.
Finding the right balance between the ‘urgent’ and the ‘important’. There is always so much that could be done in a start-up team, and you constantly have to juggle, prioritize and let some things go. The tricky part is setting aside the ‘urgent’ things for long enough to get to the ‘important’ pieces, such as figuring out a strategy and team processes for scaling the business.
There’s a lot of autonomy at Alloy, so if we see something that needs building or fixing, the answer is normally ‘go for it!’ It’s been a challenge dedicating time to the right projects to really shape the future of the business – an exciting challenge. The fact that we’re growing quickly means it requires some vision to design processes for the team that we will be in a year!
I grew up focusing on math and science in high school, but I’ve always been interested in business too, and I enjoy working with people. For me, analytics is the perfect intersection for those interests; it’s quantitative which satisfies my ‘mathsy’ side, but it’s powerful when applied with business context.
Analytics is so broadly applicable, that it’s also exciting thinking of the possibilities in my future career. I probably wasn’t aware of ‘analytics’ as a career path when I was in high school, but as I entered the working world it quickly became clear how important this industry is, how much it’s growing, and how big the opportunities are.
Open, supportive & collaborative. The culture is something that really stood out to me during my interview process. Everyone was so welcoming, and I remember there being a focus on ‘How can we help you get the most out of Alloy?’
That supportive culture has really made Alloy a great place to work. Whilst the work itself has been fast-paced and at times demanding, it’s manageable because of the awesome and unwaveringly helpful team that I’m surrounded by.
Anything in the mountains – they’re what brought me to Canada! I love hiking and skiing, and in the summer I enjoy biking or playing beach volleyball. There’s been talk of setting up an Alloy team to play in the mornings before work. Vancouver is an awesome city for an outdoor lifestyle.
Last weekend I did a crevasse rescue course, so next on the agenda is planning some glacier tours and practicing those skills!
The global confectioner mitigates waste, improves service levels and controls costs by connecting digital supply chain visibility with POS analytics.
Keep readingHow to take an iterative approach to digital supply chain transformation with real-time alerts that motivate teams to collaborate on issue resolution
Keep readingUnderstand how gaps between systems, teams and processes are keeping you constantly firefighting and hurting your supply chain resilience
Keep reading
