A Day in the Life of a Performance and Planning Manager at a Global Airline
A Manager, Performance and Planning at a global airline company's daily work involves acting as an "information broker," connecting various teams (revenue management, marketing, sales, etc.) to collaboratively achieve strategic goals, such as improving market share or reaching margin targets. This often includes identifying performance gaps, analyzing data (e.g., "this traffic on average of 25% more lucrative"), and developing action plans with input from multiple departments to address underperformance and optimize market strategies.
Project Management, Problem-Solving, Teamwork, Communication, Data Analysis
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Alex Olafsson
Manager, Performance and Planning
Global Airline Company
Kalamazoo College 2011
UCLA Anderson MBA
Economics
Aerospace, Aviation & Defense
Business Strategy
Scholarship Recipient, Pell Grant Recipient, Took Out Loans, Student Athlete
Video Highlights
1. Connects with multiple teams (Revenue management, Marketing, Sales, etc.) to strategize and find solutions to reach goals.
2. Analyzes data and identifies areas for improvement and growth, such as underperforming markets or channels.
3. Develops strategic plans to achieve targets, collaborating with various teams to implement changes and track progress.
Transcript
What does a day in the life of a manager of performance and planning look like?
That's a great question. One of the things I really love about my role is that I get to do a lot of different things on a daily, weekly, even monthly basis. A lot of what I'm doing is centered around a specific end goal, like achieving a margin target, reaching a market share, or supporting a market launch.
However, we don't always know the exact path to get there. So, a lot of my work involves bringing other teams together to figure out how we can achieve those goals. I sometimes think of what I do as being an information broker.
I connect with the revenue management team and the marketing team. For instance, marketing might need guidance on how to more effectively support some of our markets in Los Angeles. I help identify which markets are key and then work to bring teams together to create a plan.
Another aspect of my role is developing strategic vision. I work with people on my team to analyze our key channels and corporate markets. We might observe that a certain type of traffic is more lucrative, but we're not capturing as much share as we expect.
Then, we figure out where the gaps are and which teams we can collaborate with. We might go to sales and say, "These three companies are underperforming. What can we do to improve it?"
We might also ask revenue management to review our pricing to see if it's competitive or if adjustments are needed. Or we might ask the marketing team to consider additional social media marketing in specific markets to create organic demand. Even talking to the airport to understand if there are reasons for underperformance, like competitive flight times, is part of the job.
We're doing a lot of different things on a daily basis, and that's one of the reasons I really like this job.