Recent news article about the airlines report how they are looking at flying slower to save fuel costs.
Consider these numbers from the above article …..
$42 million – Southwest Airlines will save in fuel this year by extending each flight ONE to THREE minutes.
$13.6 million – Jet Blue saves by adding about TWO minutes to a flight
$600,000 – Northwest Airlines saves a year by adding FOUR minutes to flights to and from Hawaii
and so the list goes on …
ONE TO FOUR MINUTES and this much payback?
As a product manager, here is what I took away – small nuggets of change could result in big payback. It does not necessarily have to do with the product, it could be in operations as well – whether it is making tech support calls efficient, whether it is how you optimize your software packaging to save shipment costs etc.
Important thing is to think out of the box and leave no stone unturned – not just the big stones, but many small ones as well – you never know what small nuggets you will find.
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 
In any market where the core products are considered ‘commodities’ it is operational and service innovations that can really help build customer value or reduce costs. A pet pain point for me at the moment is my bank.
This is not because of the competitiveness of their interest rates, but instead the awful time that I have performing the simplest of tasks. They take a good core product and make it terrible with poor service and operational support.
So this should be an easy fix right? Well not really. There may be all sorts of technical issues that make it a challenge but these are not the barriers. The main problem is that fixing little things is just not sexy.
Can you imagine being the product manager who suggested flying the planes slower? That would have been a tough project to sell in a high paced industry. Bravo!!
–nick coster