Life at MAN - Dave Naughton, Technology Product Manager
As a passenger travelling through Manchester Airport, you interact with technology from the moment you arrive at the airport, to the moment your plane leaves the runway. Much of this is so commonplace in today’s modern world that we barely stop to think about it – but a large and diverse team of people at Manchester Airport works on managing, developing and maintaining the technological innovations and systems that get your journey off to a flying start.
Dave Naughton, a Technology Product Manager, explains how these systems are constantly developing and improving to create a seamless passenger journey – and also explains why Singapore is at the top of his travel wish list.
How long have you been working at Manchester Airport?
I’ve been here for three years now.
What does your job involve on a typical day?
As a Technology Product Manager, I manage the use of technical products and services in ‘landside’ areas of the airport, i.e. from leaving home to entering a terminal, up until you reach check-in. By technical products and services, we mean things like how we manage car park bookings, how we provide digital wayfinding for our passengers to navigate the campus, and how we manage digital assets such as cameras and barriers across our estate – but also all the systems that sit behind those and allow them to operate.
My days can be varied, I help to solve problems and find ways to improve the passenger experience by identifying processes, data, and technology areas to improve, and looking at where we can deploy technology in new ways to make passengers’ and colleagues’ lives easier.
Most days I will start by checking in with the delivery teams on progress of projects we are working on, reviewing multiple metrics to understand how the area of landside is performing, and making sure all our assets are working as they should be. I also work with our external partners who manage some of these services day-to-day, monitoring performance and planning to continually evolve and improve what they offer to our passengers and colleagues.
Looking to the longer term, I spend a lot of my time working with the airport leadership teams to understand what technological improvements they would like to see and why. My job is to then assess these needs and provide feedback on potentially suitable products that are out there in the market.
What skills are needed for the role?
A detailed understanding of the products I manage, having experience in operational leadership and day-to-day management of the landside area have really helped me to understand the need and requirements for innovative technology and technical products. To work in our team, you must be passionate about finding new, innovative ways to improve the service we offer to passengers, and be able to see the journey through the eyes of the customer, picking up on areas of improvement and understanding how people, process and technology all align.
What kinds of technology is the airport using to help improve passenger experiences, and what developments are being made on this?
There are lots of technological advancements being made in the landside areas. Currently we are working on removing the reliance on old physical servers for our car parks by moving to cloud hosted systems, which give us better performance whilst also ensuring we are always running the latest software.
A huge development has been made on how we use data, and we are now building landside dashboards that will bring together a whole host of data from various locations and then present this in a user-friendly format that can be used by our airport operations teams. We want to empower them to make proactive, data-based decisions on how to run the day-to-day airport services that passengers rely on, and this approach will help them spot potential issues arising much earlier, maybe even before they occur.
How has the use of technology at the airport changed in your time working here?
I feel that the use of data is much more prominent these days. It is human nature to do things the way you’ve always done them – however, we now have such vast amounts of data available to us that we can start to think differently and be more data-led. We can be smarter and predict what is going to happen, when, where and maybe even why! Having the ability to see data in a user-friendly way rather than huge Excel files, or downloads, makes it much more accessible and means we can support the teams on the ground to run the airport in a smooth, efficient way, which ultimately benefits our passengers.
What do you enjoy the most about working at the airport?
I thrive on the environment, all the hustle and bustle, there is never a dull day! From talking through concepts right through to large scale civil works, I get to see the outcome of my work, and there’s a lot of job satisfaction from that. I am also very fond of looking over the airfield whilst eating lunch, thinking about where our next family holiday could be.
What one piece of advice would you give to someone considering a career in the aviation industry?
Working in the aviation industry is incredibly rewarding. Aviation is a vital part of the UK’s national infrastructure, so naturally with that comes a lot of job opportunities. A career in aviation can take you down so many paths – you can choose to build an expertise in one field or be very rounded in many fields. A solid skillset of good customer service, teamwork and collaboration, combined with a desire to learn and grow, will give you a great standing in anything from technology to commercial, or airport operations to retail – the sky is the limit (pun intended!)
What do you like to do when you're not at work?
Family days out, walks with the dogs and as much time on the golf course as possible – even in winter!
Which destination that we fly to from Manchester do you most want to visit?
I have always wanted to visit Singapore, it looks truly amazing. Many years ago, my uncle led on the network and infrastructure of the mass rapid transit system there, so it would be cool to see that!