Ep. 263 - Jason Birnbaum, SVP of Digital Technology at United Airlines on Innovating During a Crisis - Replay

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Jason and I discuss what it takes to innovate during a crisis and how United continues to adapt to evolving customer, employee, and market changes. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcription of Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Jason Birnbaum. He is a SVP of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Welcome to the show, Jason, 

Jason Birnbaum: It's a pleasure to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Jason, I am excited to have you on the show. You are in an industry that is in the midst of disruption as we all are. But I think the travel industry is even facing more dilemmas. So, I wanted to get somebody on who's focused on innovation in this trying times, to see what it's like to be in the trenches in this world. So, tell us a little bit about what's your role at United and how it deals with it.

Jason Birnbaum: I really am responsible for all of the technology associated with our employees, but also all the customer experiences that you would have at the airport, on board, really anywhere that you're physically involved with United Airlines. 

So, if you like the kiosks or you don't like the kiosk, that's what we do. All the signage in the airports moving you around. That's all part of my team as well. So wide scope, but lots of fun. 

Brian Ardinger: And when we had a chance to be introduced, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because the United Airlines takes a broad approach to innovation. You know, I think a lot of companies focus on innovation and think about it from a, like a product perspective only, but you seem to focused on more holistic. Talk a little bit about how you perceive innovation and what goes into making those particular types of decisions.

Jason Birnbaum: First of all, when you think about the airlines, our product is the airline. And so our product is the employees. And the product is the experience, and so for us, almost every part of it, including people that actually work and fix the airplanes, people that actually, you know, load the bags and all of those are so intimately connected to the whole experience, that we have to think of innovation in a broad way.

And so, when we started thinking about it, we realized that we needed to enable our employees to deliver great service. And connect that to the way our customers traveled. So, a lot of our innovation was really employee focused so that they could deliver great service. 

And when you start thinking about it in that thread, it really opened the door for a lot of really, really amazing innovation, whether it's freeing up employees, so they can actually spend time with customers. Right. Or it's just giving them information or data to anticipate your need, or if it's making that technician able to get the plane going faster. So, you are not late, like all of that fits together. And the way we think about innovation, 

Brian Ardinger: I imagine you get bombarded with new ideas and challenges and problems that are coming from their employees or from your customer set saying, hey, fix this or make this better. What's the process to go about looking at, across the ideas, and doing something about them. 

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a great question. There is a lot and we do get bombarded. You know, I, I think one of the pivots we made as an organization was moving from thinking of more of a traditional information technology organization that really took orders, got prioritization lists, to thinking of the whole group as a really like a product development organization. 

We had a much stronger opinion as to what the next steps were going to be. And really partnered and drove an agenda. And so, for us, the transformation was really about, I have a team of product designers, design thinking experts, people who help us build those roadmaps, whether the product owners are on our team or in some other place, and really lay out, not necessarily a prioritization process, but what's the road map.

And then from there we've moved very quickly to how do we prototype, test the theory, move quickly, move in small pieces, to get to the product. We've tried to get away from two-year projects. Four-year projects. You know, we try to think about how do I solve a problem, get something going, start it and empower.

And I think when a big company, especially companies have been around for a long time, you know, they built a lot of control mechanisms and we've really worked to strip those out and say, hey, if you're the decision maker, if you're in the front, You've got the product. Make the change, see if it works, and let's move forward from there.

Now that's certainly for the customer experience and for efficiency, obviously, you know, when I think about things like safety and those things, obviously all those controls are really important, and we take those very seriously. But there's a lot of places where experimentation can really lead to innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some examples of where you've deployed technology and some of the changes that you've made over the years to make the experience better for employees and customers? 

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, no, we have so many great examples. I'll hit two things. The first thing we realized, and this was a few years ago is none of our employees sit behind a desk. They, none of them have seats. Yet we built all these applications and all these tools for them on a PC. And so, we started to say, well, how do we un-tether is the word we used, our employees from these desks. 

And so, we rolled out one of the first innovations was creating and building a mobile ecosystem for our employees. Where, whether you're a gate agent, a technician, you're on the ramp, pilot, flight attendant, you had a mobile device and that mobile device, first and foremost, gave you tools to do your job. So, you could board a plane, help a passenger, take an order for a drink. That was like the base case. 

Then we said, well we've got this mobile ecosystem, what else can we do? And the second thing we said was how do we give people data to anticipate what they're going to need to do? So now I've got this delivery mechanism. How do I say all right, this passenger is getting ready to reach a milestone on their mileage. So why don't we thank them? Or this passenger has had a couple of bad flights. Take care when you're on this flight. So, we started giving that information. 

And then lastly, and this is where the real excitement came in. We connected everybody via just communications and chat functionality. We created a product, we call it Easy Chat, that connects everybody involved with the flight. The pilots, flight attendants, the gate agents, the catering company, everybody together i...