About Alli Blum
About Alli, The Professional Bio Version
Alli Blum is an innovation commercialization strategist, product manager, and qualitative research. She helps founders and their teams figure out how to sell what they’ve built and how to build what will sell.
Alli co-founded the Autobooks Hub, an enterprise FinTech analytics and back-office tool used by thousands of financial institutions to drive portfolio performance across the Autobooks Small Business product lines. As the principal product leader, she owned the vision, strategy, and roadmap for 4 years, evolving the platform from a system of record to a system of engagement and sales expansion.
Prior to her 0→1 launch, Alli worked in a variety of growth roles across the spectrum of innovation commercialization. She trained and coached researchers and experience designers, redesigned onboarding experiences of use and purchase, identified and mobilized positioned strategies, and designed messaging to drive acquisition, activation, and retention in product led growth and enterprise environments for companies like MURAL, Codecademy, Atlassian, EnjoyHQ, and the Autobooks Small Business product suite.
Alli is a practitioner of the Jobs To Be Done theory of innovation. Her discipline entrepreneurial generalist expertise spans conversion copywriting, user and customer research, UX, design, product management, and technical fluency cultivated in a 2-year software engineering apprenticeship under the direction of a principal engineer.
She founded Meet The Market after observing that the growth problems she was often hired to solve were almost always a symptom of something upstream. Each leaky funnel, each page of underperforming copy, and each poorly adopted product could be traced to a single source: a team that didn’t understand who they were selling to and building for with enough clarity for their new innovation to survive first contact with their customers.
Alli holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing and a Certificate in Mandarin from the University of Pennsylvania.
About Alli, The Narrative Story Version
I spent 4 years leading a product I launched from 0->1
In many ways it was the culmination of a decade-long quest and achievement of a long-time dream.
I graduated from college in the midst of the Great Recession as an English major, Mandarin minor, and History connoisseur. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my working life. But I did know that I wanted to be a part of something new and that I was good at writing. So I took early jobs in PR and marketing.
And I loved the work I got to do in PR. I loved developing stories and narratives with brilliant communications strategists. I loved seeing my boss’s name in the Wall Street Journal because I put it there. It was a thrill to hear narrative beats my team had developed in a conference room broadcast on a major event’s main stage.
But in between writing press releases and white papers, I found myself wanting to be part of the action, yearning to be a character in the stories I was writing.
One day I happen upon a product insight that I can’t apply from my PR strategist’s chair, I decide it’s time to get closer to the action.
”But we have so much data to back up this idea, surely the client will want to hear about it!” I have found what I believe to be a breakthrough and am pleading with my boss to share it with the client. He explains with great patience, “It’s not our job to change the product, it’s our job to tell the story.”
He’s right and I know he’s right. I surrender. And I start looking for a seat where I can have an influence on the product, which seems to be the most powerful place in the org. I start with learning something new that still feels familiar (conversion copywriting).
What I loved about new user onboarding is how many parts of the business collapsed into this moment. Onboarding involved messaging strategy for emails and product strategy. It involved engineering to get our tracking schema tidy and sales to make sure we were bringing the right folks in the door.
And yet, I still found myself encountering the same problem. I learn something, I want to apply it, I can’t do it from my seat.
“Hire a conversion copywriter you’ll be doing change management in 2 weeks!”
That’s a “joke” I started telling to new clients after I find myself showing up to teams saying I’ll write their onboarding emails, asking them to tell me about their ICP, asking if they really know what kind of business they’re in after all, asking if they’d be open to tearing everything down and starting over.
“Ma’am, we hired to you write 20 emails.”
Would you believe the average client who hired me to do a job didn’t want me to do the other job I was asking to do, just the same as it happened in PR? Twas a shock to me.
Having discovered the copywriter’s chair isn’t the right place to advocate for wholesale business re-orgs, so I decide to up my technical and growth skills to do more of the work I’m asking others to do.
I build on my learn sales copywriting, user research, UX, product strategy. I re-invent myself every 18 months, learn the fundamentals of proper UX, launch a product, apprentice as an engineer, get on the horn with finance to figure out how to launch 3 different products, and partner with enterprise sales to figure out how to support their sales efforts..
I get to the end of the departmental journey and start to wonder if maybe i’m looking at it backwards. Maybe I’m not finding the answer in any one department because the answer isn’t in one department, but in how the departments collide. Or maybe in one strategy, executed a layer or two up from day to day, quarterly OKRs, and even annual planning.
Even if we humans usually sit in one department, the work that drives me sits across departments.
The work that drives me, which is to say the collision of ICP, positioning, GTM, product, UX, and sales strategy, which is to say "Innovation Commercialization" work stretches across organizational departments.
The problems we solve with our keyboards and our dashboards and our CRMs and our google docs are only as solvable as the ones solved one layer up, with a sound strategy for deciding how we will commercialize our innovation at launch and ongoing.
The onboarding emails we write, the product we build, the sales motions we push forward, heck even the code we ship to production and the data schemas underpinning our tracking! And of course the PR stories we tell: the foundation underpinning our success does not live in one department.
And yet, how many product marketers have had an ICP project foisted on them? How many PR teams have had to come up with a story, from scratch, in a conference room, with lots of market research because the exact audience has never been defined? How many product people have fought with sales leaders about whether we should build something for a compliance officer who will never log in?
How many projects didn’t land because we just didn’t agree ahead of time what problems we were solving and for who?
And that’s the problem I’m excited to solve: how innovation commercialization strategy mobilizes across departments.