Zanna Balarin

University of California-Berkeley, Haas School of Business

“Math major turned product manager—drawn to problems with too many variables and no obvious answers.”

Hometown: Berkeley, CA

Fun Fact About Yourself: I’m fluent in Croatian.

Undergraduate School and Major: UCSB: BS, Applied Math, minor in Spatial Studies

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Shopify, Senior Product Manager

Berkeley Haas is founded on four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Which principle resonates most with you and why? Confidence Without Attitude resonates most with me. The smartest people I know—and the leaders I admire most—are as humble and open as they are intelligent. They listen, learn, and lead without ego. That kind of grounded confidence earns lasting trust because it creates space for honesty, dissent, and learning. It creates leaders and teams that care more about getting it right than being right. It’s a quality I deeply respect and consciously strive to embody myself.

What excites you about earning your MBA in the Bay Area? It’s an exciting moment to be in tech—especially with the pace of innovation being accelerated by AI. When I decided to pursue an MBA, I knew I wanted to stay close to the heart of it. Earning my MBA in the Bay Area gives me the chance to deepen my connections in Silicon Valley while sharpening my skills in a classroom.

As someone born and raised in Berkeley, I’m very excited to be back and reconnect with Berkeley and the greater Bay Area in new ways.

What was the key part of Berkeley Haas’ MBA curriculum or programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? A key part of what led me to choose Haas was the ability to take classes across Berkeley’s broader graduate ecosystem. I was especially excited about the opportunity to learn from faculty at the Institute of Transportation Studies and the School of Public Health, two communities doing cutting-edge work on the kinds of complex, systems-level problems I’m most drawn to.

In my application, I wrote about how solving hard, interdisciplinary problems is what makes me feel most alive. The ability to combine Haas’ rigorous core curriculum with coursework in areas like infrastructure, mobility, and public health felt like the ideal foundation for where I want to go next. It made Haas feel like more than just a business school—it felt like the place that could stretch me most.

What course, club, or activity excites you the most at Berkeley Haas? The Haas Transportation & Mobility Club. I’ve always been drawn to transportation tech—it sits at the intersection of systems, infrastructure, and equity—and I was impressed by the caliber of speakers and events the club hosts. Learning about the club, and hearing firsthand from a former member, helped me see a path at Haas for myself.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Launching USDC, a stablecoin payment method on Shopify, stands out as my proudest accomplishment. The project was a strategic partnership between Shopify, Coinbase, and Stripe, aimed at bringing crypto into mainstream e-commerce. I led cross-functional work across Shopify’s checkout and payments teams, collaborating with Coinbase’s Base and Commerce orgs and Stripe’s payments team to build a seamless buyer experience that felt intuitive—even for a new financial paradigm. It was a complex initiative that required balancing five product teams’ standards, dividing ownership clearly, and maintaining a unified experience across company lines. Despite the complexity, the cross-team collaboration ended up being a blast, which made this project hold additional value.

What makes this project especially meaningful to me is how much I had to grow. I came in with experience in building buyer experiences—but was a complete crypto newbie. I had to ramp up fast, learning the mechanics of crypto while shaping a future-facing product strategy. It taught me to think beyond immediate product-market fit, anticipate emerging user needs, and lead with both clarity and flexibility in a space that was evolving quickly.

At this point, what do you hope to do after graduation? After graduation, I plan to dive back into the tech industry as a product leader—this time focused on technology that changes how we use physical space and time. I’m especially drawn to the transportation industry, where there’s enormous potential to reduce friction in how people move, build a greener future, and design systems that give people back time in their day.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into Berkeley Haas’ MBA program? Be genuine. When applying to anything—especially something as selective as an MBA program—it can be really tempting to mold yourself into what you think an “ideal” candidate looks like. Resist that urge. Use the prompts and the process to reflect honestly on why you want an MBA, and why Haas specifically. Keep coming back to that “why” as you work through your application, and an authentic narrative will emerge.

Ultimately, an MBA is a deeply personal decision. Admissions teams aren’t grading your application—they’re looking for fit. They can only assess that fit accurately if how you present yourself and your “why Haas” is honest. Knowing that my application was not performative and was authentically me has given me a lot of confidence in my decision.

DON’T MISS: MEET THE UC BERKELEY HAAS MBA CLASS OF 2027

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