How the JetBlue digital roadmap sets flight to innovation
Learn how JetBlue’s portfolio management team leverages Airtable to streamline its roadmap, enhance collaboration across departments, and maintain its edge in the competitive airline industry
Every year, JetBlue delivers millions of people to loved ones, new adventures, untapped opportunities, and fresh corners of the globe. As passengers, our experience of JetBlue is all about the destination. But for those behind the scenes, JetBlue isn’t about the destination at all.
It’s about the coherency and ease of the JetBlue experience. Moving people and their luggage from one place to another. Keeping all crewmembers (employees on the ground and in the air) working in sync. And ensuring that every initiative aligns with the company’s overarching mission and contributes to every passenger's next arrival.
“As a consumer, you just see new flight destinations to Europe, but there's so much operational complexity and IT work that goes into delivering that experience,” says Amanda Luna, IT Portfolio Manager at JetBlue, who uses Airtable to streamline her team’s IT roadmap.
“We have to constantly reinvent ourselves.”
Delivering the JetBlue experience demands excellence in operations and agile coordination between people, processes, and technology. “The economic dynamics of the airline industry are changing—sometimes weekly, and especially coming out of Covid,” says Tracy Bink, Director of IT and Strategic Programs.
“We have to constantly reinvent ourselves and dig deep to rethink: Who is JetBlue? Who do we want to be? What sort of product offerings do we want to put out there for customers?”
To achieve this agility, the JetBlue IT organization—more than 400 people, split between IT technology and IT product departments—uses Airtable to prioritize and re-prioritize initiatives in coordination with company goals and changing market conditions. Amanda’s team is responsible for this prioritization, and owns the processes that enable the rest of the IT team to power customer experiences and streamline frontline operations.
“The IT side of the business needs to move really, really quickly,” Amanda says. “Airtable has allowed us to create a roadmap that fits us and the nuanced way we work. It’s the first tool that has, for lack of a better word, allowed us to be ourselves.”
“We found ourselves doing a ton of exporting and importing.”
Before Airtable, the IT team at JetBlue was struggling to centralize requests, prioritize initiatives, and share progress with the executive team.
“There wasn't a single source of truth,” Tracy says. “This limited us from delivering different reporting and hindered us from making decisions quickly. We were unable to define timelines, and we were creating a bottleneck within the enterprise.”
Each manager had their own excel spreadsheet of ongoing and planned initiatives. And though the team had a roadmapping tool, so much critical information lived in disparate places, it was difficult to connect strategic initiatives and work toward shared goals.
“We found ourselves doing a ton of exporting and importing into different systems,” Amanda says. “Really, the roadmapping tool was just a location; it didn’t enhance how we worked.
“In comparison, Airtable has been an addition to our knowledge base, rather than just an entry point.”
“It once took days to prioritize a roadmap of 400 initiatives. Now, it takes minutes."
JetBlue has always been a trailblazer in customer experience—from carrier size, to in-flight entertainment, to free wifi and baskets of snacks. Today, the company is under new leadership with a renewed focus on operations, and people like Amanda are using Airtable to expand that customer-first innovation across every workflow, every team, and every customer touchpoint.
“We're getting people on an airline with amazing customer service and amazing in-flight service—our technology is auxiliary to that and we need a roadmapping tool that we can adapt and evolve,” Amanda says.
“In Airtable, we can change how we’re prioritizing investments with a click of a button or an addition of a column, while still maintaining the integrity of our data.”
Tracy adds: “It's been really incredible to watch Amanda pull everything together in Airtable so that we can deliver this end-to-end roadmapping solution for our teams.”
Now, with a shared, prioritized roadmap living in Airtable, cross-functional partners have immediate access to what initiatives are prioritized and their timeline for completion. This means that reporting has gone from a multi-week process to a 30-minute interface build.
“Previously, if our leaders needed reporting rolled up into a board-level view, we probably needed two to three weeks, maybe even a month, to pull that information together,” Tracy says. “With Airtable, I can now see how all our 400 IT initiatives align to our four strategic pillars and I can spin up an executive view in 30 minutes.”
This ability to move quickly while keeping every crewmember in sync is essential to innovating the JetBlue experience, and to keeping the company competitive in an ever-changing market.
“I think we've always felt like ‘the little airline that could’, and we're always competing and trying to make space against the legacy carriers,” Amanda says. “The flexibility of Airtable means it can move and evolve with us in such a dynamic industry.”