The Chief Customer Officer of United Airlines, Linda Jojo, joined InnoLead on stage at our Impact conference this October. At Chicago-based United, Jojo oversees digital technology, contact centers, customer solutions, and innovation.
In an interview with Abbie Lundberg, Editor-in-Chief of Sloan Management Review, she talked about deploying AI and driving innovation inside a regulated, operationally-focused business.
“Back in the day, you used to create an innovation team, and that innovation team got to innovate and everybody else had to do all the hard stuff,” Jojo said. “That’s not so fun. Everybody should be innovating. And probably the most important thing as a leader that you need to do is allow people to fail. You just want them to fail fast and fix — iterate and go through. And we’ve done this, in our customer app, through massive A/B testing… We do A/B testing, and we allow our customers to actually tell us where the best place [to put things is,] and have no shame in the fact that the other [suggestions] weren’t the winners.”
An audience member asked Jojo how she hones in on potentially valuable ideas — and supports the teams proposing them.
“I want to trust our developers,” she said. “If you have ideas that prove out the way you say you do, you get to move faster… If you’ve got some things that are wildly off, we bring you back through a little bit more of a process on the next one that comes through, so that you can learn — what were the assumptions you made — so that you can learn how to do that?”
If innovation is about batting 100 percent, people aren’t going to innovate enough.
Linda Jojo, United Airlines
“And again, we don’t penalize you for failing. We just create a learning culture so that you can actually continue through that process. Our customer app, in particular, we do not fund by features or even by projects. We fund it over time, and then we look back and say, ’Well, what have you done with the dollars in the time that we gave you?’”
“…It’s not all about your hit rate. We put things in the app, and we pull them back. Customers don’t usually even notice that they’re gone. But, you know, we pull them back. And so as long as you’re pulling back things that turn out not to work, we let you keep going.
“If innovation is about batting 100 percent, people aren’t going to innovate enough. You’ve got to be failing at the same time. So we want to actually show that process…”
To watch highlights from the session, click “play” above. This conversation was recorded at Impact 2024 on October 25, 2024.
