#35 - AirAsia Super App Transformation and Lessons from COVID-19 Pandemic - Pablo Sanz

“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking on platforms. And I think that’s the foundations of the super app."

Pablo Sanz is the CTO of AirAsia. In this episode, Pablo shared with me the tough challenges that AirAsia had to go through during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has to pivot and transform in order to survive. He explained what the AirAsia leadership team did to align the company vision and steer the business and technology roadmaps during the challenging situations while keeping the people’s morale high. Pablo also shared the recent AirAsia ambition and transformation as a company from being a traditional airline company into becoming a digital platform and ASEAN super app, and how he envisioned to build a data-driven product engineering culture within AirAsia and to continue coming up with innovations based on data-driven hypotheses.

Listen out for:

• Career Journey - [00:05:09]
• Changing Career into Tech - [00:07:08]
• AirAsia Recent COVID Challenges - [00:11:18]
• Transforming Into Super App Platform - [00:14:03]
• Aligning Vision - [00:18:31]
• AirAsia Data Platform - [00:21:02]
• Aligning Technology Roadmap with Business - [00:27:07]
• Keeping The Morale High - [00:29:35]
• Critical Things of a Super App - [00:33:24]
• Integrating with Partners - [00:35:38]
• Frequency of Deployments - [00:38:59]
• Data-Driven Product Engineering Culture - [00:40:45]
• From Gut-Based to Data-Driven - [00:42:50]
• Recent Interesting A/B Tests - [00:46:30]
• Embracing Innovation Mindset - [00:48:19]
• 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:50:52]

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Pablo Sanz’s Bio
Pablo Sanz is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at AirAsia. He is a product and technology enthusiast, leading an awesome team to scale all product, design, engineering, and data, while transforming an airline into the definitive ASEAN super app.

Follow Pablo:

• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablo-sanz-69409619
• Email – pablosanz@airasia.com

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/35.