Creating a portfolio strategy for Aviation Business Intelligence at OAG
Client: OAG (engaged via CreateFuture)
Role: Propositions & Product Strategy Lead
Year: 2024
Duration: ~3 months
Team: Led by me, supported by a business analyst and a project manager
The challenge
OAG is the oldest data company most people have never heard of. They're a business that has been publishing global commercial flight data for around a century. They operate in a small, controlled marketplace with a handful of significant competitors, where data privacy has historically been treated as the primary competitive moat: hold the data, charge for the products around it, repeat.
OAG arrived at CreateFuture with what looked, on the surface, like a tidy product brief. Their suite of business intelligence tools was outdated, no longer delivering value, and losing ground to competitors. The original ask was, in effect, "fix the products."
It became clear very early in the research that this brief wasn't going to survive contact with the evidence. The mismatch between what OAG were building and what the market actually needed was structural rather than incremental. So I reframed the brief in front of the leadership team — from "how do we improve these tools?" to "what should our BI portfolio strategy be to genuinely serve customers and capture the market opportunity?" A bigger and scarier question, but the right one.
“This is a really well-considered and well-delivered piece of work that will prove really useful to the client.”
The approach
The research was deliberately wide and deliberately unconventional.
I ran fifteen client interviews — connected through the OAG sales team — and a focus group with active customers. I conducted internal stakeholder research across the whole company, where people were remarkably candid about what was and wasn't working. I deliberately interviewed people who had recently left the company, because OAG was post-merger and I wanted both sides of the story — the "things never change" perspective and the "things will evolve" perspective — without filtering.
The most productive single research source, though, was one I've never had such detailed access to; OAG kept meticulous documentation of every failed sale, with notes on why each one had been lost. That archive turned out to be a goldmine of unfiltered customer signal — what customers were actually looking for, why they had picked someone else, and what OAG kept missing about its own market.
Throughout, I worked closely with the CTO and three product owners as co-authors of the strategy rather than recipients of it. The goal was to make change feel like an opportunity rather than a threat — particularly important in a post-merger environment where one half of the organisation was firmly in the "we shouldn't change anything" camp.
The work it produced
The research found something uncomfortable but well evidenced. OAG didn't really have BI tools in the traditional sense, or at least its BI tools were no longer being used as intended. They had two products that customers were actively hacking to achieve their own goals. Customers weren't asking for better tools; they were signalling a much larger opportunity OAG was missing entirely. And OAG had lost touch with how its clients were actually using its data day to day.
The research also surfaced a structural opportunity nobody internally had pulled into focus. The emerging AI and ML landscape needed clean, structured, well-organised data to function — and OAG, almost by accident of being a century-old data company, had exactly that.
I developed two fully-evidenced strategic options for the leadership team:
The first — build best-in-class BI tools. Invest in product capability, hire the teams, become the best product company in the space. A significant pivot, requiring organisational capability OAG didn't currently have.
The second — build a data marketplace for startups and customers to build BI tools. Stop trying to be a BI product company at all. Open up and structure the data for data scientists, ML programmes and developers to build on top of. Charge for data access rather than for products. Become formally what OAG essentially already was — the best aviation data company in the world — rather than what it kept trying and failing to be.
Both options were presented honestly, without my thumb on the scales. I had a clear personal preference for option two — in a market where every competitor treated data hoarding as the primary moat, opening it up structured, priced and designed for programmatic access would undercut the entire competitive model — but the leadership team's choice had to be theirs.
Outcomes
OAG chose the data marketplace direction and moved into delivery on that footing. Eighteen months later, watching the explosion of AI-driven coding, the rise of "vibe coding," and the surging demand for clean, structured data to power ML applications, I am confident it was the right call.
The most satisfying moment from the engagement, though, came earlier. One of the most senior figures from the recently-merged organisation — who had started the project firmly opposed to any change — did a complete 180 by the closing session, and stood up in front of the leadership team to advocate for the new direction. That shift happened because the research and the strategy had been co-developed with him throughout, rather than handed down to him at the end.
My role, in plain terms
I led the qualitative research, the synthesis, the strategic analysis, the executive engagement, and the development of the two strategy options. I worked closely with a business analyst (commercial modelling and market sizing) and a project manager (delivery and stakeholder choreography), but the strategic argument and the executive narrative sat with me throughout.
Reflection
OAG remains for me a clearer-than-most example of two interlocking principles.
First, that the most valuable thing a strategist can do is sometimes elevate the question before answering the one being asked. The brief OAG arrived with would have produced an exciting, expensive and ultimately doomed product upgrade. The brief that emerged from the research has reshaped the company.
Second, that honest commercial conclusions are worth more to a business than comfortable ones, even when they're harder to deliver. The recommendation OAG had to act on wasn't the one they'd commissioned — it required them to walk away from the product company they were becoming and re-engage with their clients to lean fully into the data company they actually were. Strategy is painful precisely because it forces an organisation to stop doing things; helping leadership through that transition, rather than simply diagnosing it, was the actual work.