Employee Spotlight: Alona Patsiuk-Allen
Meet Alona Patsiuk-Allen, Product Manager at LoopMe — Alona talks about why adtech suits her, why she enjoyed working on LoopMe’s measurement integration with The Trade Desk, and her interest in gardening.
Why did you decide to work in this industry?
I never planned to work in tech. I did not really know it existed when I was choosing a career. I was going to build something in restaurants and hospitality. Then I moved to Poland, that path turned out to be complicated, and Google’s outsourcing partner in Kraków was hiring Ukrainian and Russian speakers to work on AdWords. AdTech turned out to fit the way my brain works, somewhere between people and systems.
What motivates you to come to work?
People, mostly. I know the usual line is that working with people is the hard part, but I am an extrovert for roughly nine tenths of my day, and a team is genuinely the thing that gets me through. The rest is that I like doing a good job. When I know what needs to happen and how, I am very motivated. When I am standing at a crossroads with no clear answer, less so, so I solve it, and the motivation comes back with interest.
What project or event has been your favourite at LoopMe?
The Trade Desk integration for our measurement services. It had everything I enjoy in one project. A genuinely strong team drawn from several different functions, a technical area that was new to me since it was built on API work, and enough real decisions to mean that I could not coast. It was also properly cross-functional, which meant negotiation, alignment and problem solving alongside the technical work. Those are the muscles I have spent my career building, and it was very satisfying to use all of them at once.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I am originally Ukrainian, from Donbas, and I came to Poland in 2012, back when there were very few of us here. That scarcity is actually how I got into Google, since they were collecting Ukrainian and Russian speakers from across the country and bringing them to Kraków. Fourteen years of Polish life have shaped how I read situations, and since my husband is English, there is a third culture in the house. The question “Where are you from?” whilst traveling usually gets me thinking. I feel more like a European with a Polish postcode.
Do you have any hobbies?
The official answer has always been sport, yoga, meditation and books, and all of that is true. The recent realisation and proper answer is gardening, which has been with me since I was about five, following my mum and both grandmothers around their very overpopulated windowsills. Every time I move to a bigger balcony, the plant count rises to match. Everyone around me knows that a gift card for a garden centre will be used within the week. It takes a lot of time and sometimes I question if it’s worth it, but seeing the beautiful results of your work is amazing.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you choose and why?
I can partly say I already do. I arrived in Poland in 2012 only to have a look at Europe, fell for Wrocław, and stayed. But things are changing with time. I visited Singapore last year and it got me completely. Greenery everywhere, hot weather, which I love, and clean, safe streets. For someone with my plant habit it felt like paradise. So Singapore is the one I think about now.
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