Alex, tell us about yourself and what you do at Avinode Group.

I’m a Senior Product Manager with Avinode Group, part of our US-based Product and Engineering team. I work primarily with our flight operations solution, Schedaero. Most of my colleagues are based in Portland, OR, but I’m based in Florida. I love the sunshine, water-related sports and activities, so I’m in the right place.

I was so excited to join Avinode Group, since this job combines my background in both private aviation charter and software development. It’s the perfect combination of these two passions of mine.

That background must help you understand the challenges of our customers.

Yes, I believe it does. It gives me an inherent understanding of some of the problems that our customers face.  I love being able to relate to the end user and give them a tool that makes their lives better. I’ve worked with everything from fueling aircraft, to flight scheduling, in a broker company and as Director of Charter Sales. I also worked with development of the Satcom Direct product, so I have seen many different parts of the industry.

What are some of the challenges you would like to help solve?

Communication between the front office of a flight department and the pilots is a very common challenge. Information and details are often dropped when there are constant updates going back and forth. We have several updates planned for our crew app, that will make it a tool you can’t live without.

Charter operations is complex with many moving parts and many systems inherit that high complexity. It requires a lot of training to run the operation smoothly. That’s why I’m excited to work with the user interface of our products. We have a clear ambition to provide an easier day-to-day workflow with an intuitive user interface in our platform.

What is a typical working day like in your role as PM?

The day to day changes – the consistent aspect of every day is a development team standup. I love to sync up and check-in with the teams that work on the improvements and new features we are building, Also talking to customers and working with our amazing customer success team to help understand the end users wants and needs, is really wonderful.

What surprised you in the Avinode Group work culture?

It’s impressive how we manage to stay connected between teams, especially considering that we are mostly working remote. We have fun ways to share information over Slack and bring individuals closer that wouldn’t typically work together. In Zoom meetings I’ve noticed that everyone have their camera switched on. It helps our social culture and relationship-building to see all the smiling faces!