Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives

Episode 5: Part 1 - Beyond Checkpoints: Data, Tech, and the Future of Air Travel

• Method • Season 2 • Episode 5

Share episode

In this episode of Build What's Next, Jason Rome interviews Paul Popolo, the Head of Data Analytics and Innovation at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, about the unique challenges of implementing innovation within the highly operational and risk-averse airport environment. The conversation starts with Paul’s experience transitioning from innovation roles in healthcare and finance to the aviation industry. He highlights the key difference in working at an airport: the highly tactical, operational, and risk-averse nature of the environment.

They discuss how much of airport innovation happens behind the scenes, focusing on processing, IoT, and technology that improves the passenger experience without being immediately visible. Paul also addresses the most common request he hears: "Fix the checkpoint!" He explains the complexities of this, given that TSA is a federal entity with its own regulations. The conversation then shifts to the collaborative nature of airport innovation, involving airlines, tenants, and government partners, and how Paul's team navigates this intricate web to implement new technologies and processes.



Josh Lucas:

You are listening to Method's Build what's Next? Digital product perspectives presented by Global Logic. At Method, we aim to bridge the gap between technology and humanity for a more seamless digital future.

Jason Rome:

Join us as we uncover insights, best practices and cutting-edge technologies with top industry leaders that can help you and your organization craft better digital products and experiences the innovation side of things. So, Paul, if you don't mind, give maybe a quick introduction, a little bit of your background, and then we'll dive in here.

Paul Puopolo :

Well, thanks for having me so background I spent about 16 years doing innovation. I started in healthcare and then financial services and then ended up at the airport and always enjoyed building innovation teams and building innovation programs in a highly complex environment and typically a corporate innovation function. So it's been great. It's been challenging.

Jason Rome:

So I'm curious because those are three very, very different realms financial services, healthcare and now we're now working for an airport. I guess what's been the biggest change, going from the financial services, kind of consumer-driven, versus healthcare and now doing it within an airport entity? What was the biggest kind of lesson learned, like oh okay, this is different when you started doing that?

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, I think the biggest difference in an airport moving into the airport industry is that it's incredibly tactical and that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. But it's highly operational and airport environments don't like risk, and that makes sense. None of us want risk in an airport environment.

Jason Rome:

We prefer not to have that.

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, so that generally was kind of the biggest change understanding how you can do innovation with a very operational group. Now all three industries are very regulated, have a lot of security, so there's parallels from an innovation process standpoint, but the operational component was the biggest change for me.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, and just to give people an idea, I guess if I walked through an airport and how much of the innovation is something that I would notice as a passenger kind of going through the airport experience, like how much of it is more invisible and stuff that's happening behind the scenes that maybe I don't see but maybe I benefit from of. Hey, I'm getting out on time, I'm getting the announcement. You know something I might not appreciate for what you guys do.

Paul Puopolo :

You know, that's an interesting question because a lot of things that customers expect outside of the airport, meaning your everyday life you expect that same experience at the airport. So, to answer that question, I would say, probably most of it is behind the scenes, and the reason I say that is because it's around the processing, it's around the IoT, it's around the technology that we're using to make your experience that much more frictionless and stress-free. There are innovations and, depending on how you define innovation, people might say, hey, that digital interactive waterfall might be considered innovative but, that's different for everybody.

Paul Puopolo :

We are spending time more on the processing side of it to try to make your experience when you come through DFW Airport a little bit more frictionless and a little bit more stress-free, which you probably won't see, you know right out, right out in front.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, uh. I'm going to get your definition of innovation a minute, but, uh, when people find out what you do cause, everyone goes through the airport and everyone's got their their favorite knit or idea about airports. What? What's the most common idea that the person on the street tries to get you to do when it comes to airport innovation? If you have one.

Paul Puopolo :

Fix the checkpoint. Fix the checkpoint, yeah, I think and I say that because I think we're all customers but there's a reason why that checkpoint is there. Yeah, and a lot of people don't realize that the TSA process is. That's a federal process and there's government rules and regulations and then there's certain technologies that can be used. So that checkpoint, while it's the main focus, it is probably the hardest thing to try to, not to try to fix, but to try to improve, because it's such an important piece of the process of a traveler, of the process of a traveler.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, and I was going to ask that actually, and since you led that direction, how much of the innovation is kind of self-contained of stuff, that's all inside of your realm of control and kind of working with the airport, versus how much are you working with the TSA? How much are you working with the airlines, other partners that own the lounges and own the storefront? And that'd probably be an interesting thing for people because you know when you're in a bank, everything within your domain you're bringing partners in. You're not kind of forced into that partnership. But for you guys, you know, I walk through an airport and there's tons of brands and there's tons of experiences and like to have it really be a cohesive experience. You're a part of that. So talk to me about how you guys maneuver that and manage that.

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah. So innovation I guess can go across, goes across a lot in the terminal. So, for example, we do work with everybody. We have to work with all our tenants and also our airlines. And you're right, the tenants that come in, let's say, who want to do a retail experience, they control that space and they can innovate within that space. The airlines, they can innovate across their processes, whether it's on the ramp or whether they're changing kiosks out when you check in. That's all the airlines. Where we work with them is okay.

Paul Puopolo :

How do we enable those innovations? For example, 5g private network right, we own the private network and putting in a 5G private network and what's the business model around a 5G private network? It doesn't seem innovative but it is brand new for an airport and access to the CBR spectrum and things like that. So how do we provide that to our concessionaires? How do we provide that to our airlines?

Paul Puopolo :

There are things that we're bringing to the table, meaning autonomous vehicles or autonomous technology, because we're focused on how do we move passengers outside of the terminal as much as inside the terminal. So there's a lot of collaboration between our partners with the TSA. They're great. We have great local partners and we work with them always on the process, and they have an innovation group themselves in the government that is looking at the new scanning and screening technologies, and so we're always raising our hand to say how can we help you bring that to DFW Airport, how can we help you facilitate that, how can we help you test that at a checkpoint? So we work with all our partners, but innovation comes from everybody, and then we would have to try to orchestrate.

Jason Rome:

How do we stitch it all together? Yeah, and some of the examples you gave there. I think that's why, having done a lot of innovation work across different industries and no matter how many design thinking sessions I did where people wanted to have a drone with an ATM machine on it, you know, unfortunately it still hasn't. Hasn't come to life.

Paul Puopolo :

I don't think out there, but you know, working with you know they still want drones to deliver food at the, at the gates, and I'm like I don't, I don't think that's going to happen.

Jason Rome:

But you know, like working with utilities, right when you know LIDARs in play and and all you know, there's all these. You know GIS and mapping and IOT. There's all these cool kinds of things in play. It's one of the one of the fun things about working in this more industrial space. So, uh, you know, since I did promise it earlier, like how, how do you define innovation? I'd be curious.

Paul Puopolo :

You know, it's pretty simple. It's delivering something new and useful for the operation or the business. That's what we do. It's got to be new, it's got to be useful and we've got to be able to operationalize it. If we're not operationalizing something, then it's really not innovation.

Jason Rome:

Once something is operationalized, do you guys still have an ownership stake in that? Are you responsible for that, or is there other groups that you're always handing things off? Because I think that's one of the toughest things right Is who owns the innovation, the POC of the idea versus who owns the incubation and the POC versus the commercialization and the running of that. And a lot of organizations kind of struggle with some of those handoff points and integrating that operating model.

Paul Puopolo :

So how have you guys solved for that? Yeah, there's definitely a handoff, so we hand it off to the operations of the business. So everything we do while we go through it, we always are looking for either, if something is that we're championing, we're always looking for the business partner who, if this works, if we think that this can scale, somebody's going to have to own it and kind of drive it and operationalize it. Or we're working with the business already on a particular problem, so we already have the sponsor. So if it works, they're going to take it and they're going to scale it. We might help with the implementation, the actual implementation, but the long-term ownership of that device or that process belongs with the business.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, and on the flip side of that, I guess too, you mentioned, hey, sometimes we're already working with the business on the problem you mentioned working with partners Within your innovation portfolio. How much of it is stuff that you guys are generating through your research versus how much of it is something you partnered with the business to come up with versus something that you're partnering with TSA or one of the airlines on? How's the division of that portfolio? Look generally in terms of where your ideas are coming from, and maybe if you could shed a little light too on just how you've structured the intake process up front, I'd be really curious how you guys have done that.

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, so we manage a portfolio, like probably most innovation groups, where you have your incremental innovation, your differentiating innovation, your revolutionary and then your rapid learning and then within that portfolio, we think of the ideas or the projects or the initiatives. And which percentage of that pie or that square do we want it to be evolutionary, which is really core business? We know what the business wants, we know what they need to solve for, we kind of know what the solution is. So let's just go do it Kind of like. This is a 12-month project.

Paul Puopolo :

Differentiating is a little bit different. Rapid learning is you know, we get a lot of great tech that comes across our desks or we see we have no idea how it's going to apply to the airport. So that tends to be about 35% of our portfolio. And then the revolutionary is the one that always gets innovation teams in trouble. We don't spend too much time on revolutionary. We probably have 10% or 12% of our projects that are in the revolutionary. That's like we don't know what it is, we don't even know how to do it, we don't even know if this thing is going to make any sense, but we do spend some time on that. For example, evtol, which is the electric. People call it brand new market. It's a brand new aircraft. It's a brand new business model. We know it's coming, but we don't know exactly if the market is going to sustain it. Much like Uber back in the day, those things we manage and we're working on, because those are three or four years down the road.

Paul Puopolo :

We don't have a lot of those projects in our portfolio. So that's generally how we look at the portfolio. Out of that there's a certain percentage that we as an innovation team lead and manage because we really believe that that's our responsibility, meaning it's new tech and we have to go prove it out. So if you look on the revolutionary or the rapid learning side, that's probably stuff that we're doing on our own without a business sponsor. If you look on the differentiating and evolutionary side of the innovation portfolio, that usually has a business because they want something now or they know what they need or we've got to fix a problem. As far as the intake process goes, we usually we try to source it from that. We do the best we can to source it from the business. Business has these problems. They're asking for help. So we have that.

Paul Puopolo :

We have trends that we look at trends analysis. Where do we think you know technology is going, how do we take that technology and how do we apply it to the airport? So we come up with ideas that way. So there's a lot of different ways where we take, where we mix the trends with the business and then we try to prioritize against that portfolio and every year we look at that portfolio and we have to pick and choose. And you don't want too many long-term projects in your process because then you're not delivering much. So you have to kind of balance how much time and effort you're putting on each one of those projects. So we want to deliver something obviously regularly, on a regular basis. So you have to balance that work.

Jason Rome:

And then is each of those you know in terms of funding. You know, is that kind of one budget? You know, is that how you present kind of the portfolio to the business? Is the business co-sponsoring some of these initiatives? You know it's always one of the it's not not the most fun topic in the world but you know, before we started talking, we were talking about your, your budgets coming up and so you know like how, you know that that's been one of the hardest thing I've seen with innovation labs, right Of you know, if companies are slated towards the backend and they're taking more of the horizon three type risk.

Jason Rome:

right, you know you're going to have a smaller pay payoff and you're more of a venture capital versus. You know, if you have more stuff towards the front end, it's kind of, you know, thesis based investing. You're more. It's more kind of private equity money where you expect a return, you don't expect things to fail. So what's it been like, getting that mindset of like what people can expect on a return, especially working in a regulated space that is risk averse, but you're having to take some risks Like what's, what's that been like?

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, so so the budget is uh, to answer that question, the the budget is ours, so I have a budget and so we that's what we bring to the table. We bring the budget and the people to the table. That's my contribution to the business. Um, I believe you know, after doing this for a long time, I believe if you're trying to get the business to pay for things, they have too many other competing priorities. So, on the innovation side, we bring the money, we bring the people and we do the tests and the trials for you, and then we work out the KPIs and the success criteria. So at the end, we know it worked. Now it's yours and you need to go implement it. So, from the budget standpoint, that's the way we do it.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, I've seen a lot of innovation groups that you know ended up just completely underwater where you know they've. You know, I remember we ended up talking to one group and they didn't have anything that was going to be implemented within a three year time horizon and it was kind of like, you know, what are we even? What are we even supposed to do with that? What are we even?

Paul Puopolo :

supposed to do with that? Yeah, the business wants things. Again, if it's a problem that we know we have a solution for, you're right. You have to deliver it within 12 months. Let's just say. You can't have your entire pipeline being something that's two, three or four years down the road. You have to kind of deliver value or impact. And even if the test doesn't work, at least you went through it. You identified the problem, you went down a solution path you tested it, hey it didn't work right.

Paul Puopolo :

That's okay, but you're moving it forward, or you're killing it, or you're going back to the beginning and you're iterating again, but you're making some type of progress.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, talk to me about, like, testing in an airport, right, hey, we're doing a lot of stuff that's operational. We're doing stuff with heavy tech.

Jason Rome:

You haven't used the term MVP yet, which I think it's a term that means so many different things to different people these days a lot, and I don't know that there's an MVP version of a 5G network necessarily and so, versus being in healthcare or being in a bank where you can go into a branch, or you put something in a mobile app and you run a test quickly Going into an airport, those aren't your employees, everyone's your customer in there. What's it been like figuring out how to run tests and kind of test these things?

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, that's a great one and it depends on each use case and on each technology. So, for example and we've got several examples when we tested autonomous lawnmowers, for example, obviously we've got a lot of grass at the airport and we were looking at autonomy and autonomous lawnmowers and at commercial grade, not not the kind that you can do at your home on your yard right. We need commercial grade, like one step up from the vacuum basically yeah, we need.

Paul Puopolo :

We need, you know, the big tires, the big industrial types. So we wouldn't, we wouldn types. So the real goal is to try to do that alongside the runways. You want to cut the grass alongside the runways so that you can reduce safety issues with the landscaping crew going out there. You've got nighttime, daytime. You don't want to disrupt operations to cut the grass. The grass has to be cut a certain height because the FAA has a regulation on grass. I can't believe we're talking all about this, but this is an example.

Jason Rome:

No, this is the podcast where you come to watch grass grow. There you go.

Paul Puopolo :

This is great, it's fantastic, but we tried it somewhere else. We have other places where we can test it and trial it and run it through the paces. Was it your yard. Be honest with me.

Paul Puopolo :

I wanted it at my yard. But we couldn't make that. So we say let's do it over here, let's see if we can prove it out, let's see if we can get comfortable with the technology. And the technology does what it needs to do and it maps to where it needs to go, so we can almost recreate, kind of like running alongside a runway. So that's one way of doing it. The other side, there's some things that we have put in the terminal. When we did our digital virtual assistant, we built the prototype separately but then we loaded it to a kiosk in one of the terminals but we didn't put it on every kiosk in every terminal. So we tried it in one terminal. We worked with our customer experience team to install it and then we watched people walk by and use it and we did some live testing. But it was live, but it was only on one kiosk.

Paul Puopolo :

So in a way, we can limit the risk. So that's another way of doing it. And then, since you mentioned the 5G private network, we actually tested the 5G private network, but we did it at one gate. So, versus doing it at all 37 gates, we wanted to see what the range was, what the latency was, how hard was it to install the antennas, what kind of permitting do we need with the FAA to put the antennas up and all that stuff? And then we worked with American Airlines to test it with their baggage system. But we were able to control it at one gate and therefore you weren't disrupting their operation either. The last thing we want to do when we're testing at an airport is disrupt somebody's operation. We don't want to disrupt the airline operation. We don't want to disrupt the security operation.

Jason Rome:

So do you guys have autonomous loan mowers now?

Paul Puopolo :

We do.

Jason Rome:

That's very cool. It is cool If you ever need another place to test.

Paul Puopolo :

just let me know. They might be too big though. Yeah, that's true.

Jason Rome:

You mentioned something there. You mentioned your CX team. That's another one of those groups, right? What's innovation versus what's CX, versus what's product and what's digital?

Jason Rome:

More and more it seems like those domains have kind of come together and I know early in the innovation days we'd go and do an innovation work and it felt like CX work. It'd be like, oh, we're not sending this email out, right, we don't have the copy written, right. And I tell a lot of companies this you go out and you have a CX team, innovation team, a product team, all talk to the users about their biggest pain points and if you don't have the basics done, well, all of those groups are going to find the exact same problem and try to solve it, versus a lot of times products doing kind of that iterative. You know, some of that evolutionary CX is kind of again more in the evolutionary space, usually what they can do and innovations pushing out. So how have you found that balance with a CX team that's probably coming to a lot of finding some of the similar pain points that you guys often find.

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, it's a lot of communication, so let's start there.

Paul Puopolo :

I mean we don't own innovation right. The entire company can innovate and the entire company can problem solve. We manage the function of innovation, the way we bring it and the expertise of how you do innovation. So you're right, we don't want to duplicate effort, but we meet with the customer experience team all the time and we talk about OK, what are your problems, what are you trying to solve for for the next year or two? They might say, look, these are our problems, but we're going after these two things already. We say great, Is there anything else that we can help you with? Is there something else that we want to?

Paul Puopolo :

Autonomous wheelchairs. Wheelchairs are a big issue at airports. I don't know if you've been in an airport. In certain flights there's a lot of wheelchairs and trying to find an autonomous wheelchair that can navigate an airport is a pretty tricky technology solution. And there's post-security, pre-security. There's all kinds of things that we have to think about. And can it stop along the way? And is it gonna stop every time someone walks in front of it? So that type of stuff. We work very closely with CX because that's something that we all want to solve for and we need a lot of help to try to test that technology and try to make it work within the terminal environment. So things like that we partner on. But they have plenty of work that they're doing just on the operations of the terminal that they're doing on their own and they're doing plenty of process improvements to try to streamline the experience for passengers.

Jason Rome:

Yeah, no, I mean wheelchairs definitely feels like a larger challenge than the lawnmower. Does no offense to the lawnmower, but a lot fewer people to dodge. That's right. As a parent with a young child, if I may, autonomous strollers, so I don't have to bring mine to the airport anymore. You know, I show up and you give me a stroller. It just kind of follows me around through security. It's already pre-screened to go through TSA. I don't have to gate check it on the plane and there's one waiting for me when I get off.

Paul Puopolo :

You're ideating right here live, there you go. I'll take that away.

Jason Rome:

I may or may not have had to get un-gate checked after they had to take our plane back for maintenance recently, and so it's a very real pain point, especially with a little one. Yeah, you know you pack for a very certain number of hours with a one-year-old for a plane trip, and if that if you pack for a five-hour airport experience and you end up with a 10-hour airport experience, you are woeful.

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, there's only so many snacks and diapers that you got in the bag.

Jason Rome:

There's only so many snacks and so many we gave up. That's the nice thing about living in a hub is we're just like you know what we give up. I'm sorry. It's interesting. You mentioned kind of the portfolio and emerging technology earlier. Are there specific technologies? Because a lot of people they get to see this tech, they get to hear about it, they get to read about it, you get to play with it and get to experience some of it. It sounds like autonomy is one thing that you guys are a buyer on right now. What other technologies would you say you're a buy versus a hold versus a sell right now of things that you guys have looked at here recently?

Paul Puopolo :

Yeah, so on the autonomy side, that's correct. So we're looking for all kinds of autonomous solutions, whether it's moving for people or moving things. So we're looking for autonomous vehicles that can move cargo and can move stuff, and we're also looking at shuttles and things like that to move people. So that's a big one for us and being more efficient and more effective with it. I think biometrics we've grown a lot from biometrics.

Paul Puopolo :

Back four or five years ago there was the initial plan with biometrics and then now we've moved into facial recognition. So we are looking at facial recognition because TSA is using facial recognition. Now when you come through the checkpoints, if you've seen that and you're also using facial recognition and if you go on an international flight. So now how do we apply facial recognition in other areas of the airport? So we're looking at that. We know the technology exists. It's just figuring out what's the use case.

Paul Puopolo :

So, for example, we have 60,000 employees at work at DFW Airport. Can we streamline the way they go through their screening process using their face? Can we provide access to certain places for certain people based on their face? Can we apply facial recognition for parking so you go to employee parking? We know it's your face versus your vehicle, right, rather than trying to read a license plate. And then you bring your wife's car today, but you brought your car yesterday, and then we're trying to figure out which car is supposed to park where. So how do we use your face as your ID is something that we're also looking at. We won't get into that. Well, we can get into AI all day right, but we're in the buying mode for AI.

Jason Rome:

You started it For AI.

Paul Puopolo :

So you can't not talk about the use of AI technology on various aspects of our data whether it's our data, whether it's camera data, whether it's contracts and things like that to make us more efficient as an operation. There's plenty of uses for AI, so we're looking at a lot of those, if you want to call it, tools and technologies around AI.

Josh Lucas:

Thank you for joining us on Build what's Next Digital Product Perspectives. If you would like to know more about how Method can partner with you and your organization, you can find more information at methodcom. Also, don't forget to follow us on social and be sure to check out our monthly tech talks. You can find those on our website. And finally, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss out on any future episodes. We'll see you next time.