Qatar Airways is recruiting my next replacements

If you ever wanted to apply for my old job, now is the time! Qatar Airways seems to be recruiting quite heavily for the Product Research & Strategy team, where I was the founding and at the time only member. The Qareers (geddit!) section of the carrier’s website lists six exciting opportunities. Airline Revenue Economics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Closing end of June… Research & Strategy Manager | Product Development and Design Senior Data Specialist | Product Development & Design Closing end of July… Senior Manager, Research and Strategy | Product Development and Design Manager, Research and Insights | Product Development and Design Manager Customer Experience Strategy and Excellence | Product Development and Design Closing end of August… Manager Project Strategy and Planning | Product Development and Design Advertisement: The Research & Strategy team at Qatar Airways has some quality alumni. Your favourite airline revenue economist of course. Then after I resigned a chap called David Kondo was hired as my replacement. He is well known in the aircraft interiors space as the chap who managed Finnair’s innovative non-reclining Business Class seat. Even today nearly 14 years after leaving, my time at Qatar Airways is often what people want to talk to me about. Not my work with Airbus. Not the stuff I did in Africa, India or Turkey. Or in blockchain. Or Inflight VR, which for a time before COVID was available on Qatar Airways. Good old Qatar Airways is the job you need to get the job you want. So in today’s article I thought I would offer my top tips on what I think you need to know if you want one of these jobs. Understanding the boss The big boss of Product Development Department (PDD) that you will need to impress is SVP Xia Cai, pictured above with me in 2010. We are at Chingari, one of Doha’s finest Indian restaurants, and she has been busy convincing me to join her team. Xia is Australian and enjoys art, design and music. She plays the Guqin and the Guzheng. Her hero is the Monkey King from Journey to the West. And she has working knowledge of Spongebob Squarepants* and Harry Potter. She is a Blackadder fan. * Spongebob and his friends were a Qatar Airways kids signature while I was there, managed by also-Aussie Ruth – there were plush toys, lunch boxes, stickers and more! Perhaps the most important thing to know about Xia is that she has a strong desire to make things happen. The airline’s Contracts department is rigorous but not necessarily fast. Xia’s solution is to write her own agreements and scopes for RFPs, RFQs and RFIs. You will need to as well. The highest praise I ever received was when VP of Contracts Marius said to me “the proposed wording is acceptable”! Translating what you want to do into precise language and exercising brevity is likely to still be important for success in her department. If interviewing I would express the idea that if you want projects to succeed you need to make them happen. That approach does help get things done fast. At least fast by large airline standards. When I joined PDD one of my first tasks was to tender for mystery shoppers. The project started shortly before I left on gardening holiday 14 months later when British expert Paul came all the way from Devon to do the work. A desire to burn the midnight oil is also important to success in Xia’s PDD. The nature of the work is that priorities can shift at short notice and busy decision-makers are only available after the working day is over. I remember Xia asking me to present to Akbar the CEO around 8pm one night. He wanted to know if we should continue with both breakfast and dinner on short overnight flights into western Europe. I recommended losing the breakfast and he approved. But that does not mean that every night is late. PDD was more like the European managed Revenue Management team most of the time – 7am arrivals and 3.30pm departures. Not like American-run Corporate Planning, which was a crazy 7am to 9pm every day. Xia has strengths as a boss. Her relentless desire to get things done will help you achieve a lot in a short time. She will approve your holiday dates (probably any boss’s most important task) and occasionally take you to lunch with other VPs or let you present to the CEO. But she does have one drawback. When the chips were down I saw her go the extra mile and beyond to make things happen for her employer on many occasions. She is highly effective at driving outcomes for the business, though that same intensity is not always matched by a corresponding focus on employee support. This makes a move to Qatar Airways PDD a high acceleration but high risk career move. If you want to stay at Qatar Airways for a long time, you can do it in Xia’s team if you are happy with your place there. Head Chef Colin for example was happy to mark his time to retirement. If you want to stay at Qatar Airways for a short time Xia’s team is a great place to do that too. You will do many interesting things in much less time than would take in other jobs at other airlines. That will place you well, whatever you want to do next. But PDD is not the place to go for long-term career progression. If you expect that, then you will be disappointed. As if proving that point herself, Xia has not been at Qatar Airways ever since I left. She asked me to help her prepare for a job interview at Oman Air in 2016, which she subsequently won. If only I had been writing Airline Revenue Economics back then. I could have asked her to buy a “Talk to Oliver” subscription… Oman Air’s interiors have Xia’s signatures all over them. So do Riyadh Air’s. Compare them with the Qsuite, the Qatar Airways A380 and the Qatar Airway 787 and you will see what I mean. Understanding the airline To understand why these PDD roles matter, you need to understand something fundamental about Qatar Airways: it treats product as strategy, not decoration. That is a crucial distinction because Xia and her team treat the cabin as one of the main ways the business competes and differentiates itself, not just where the service happens. This is why I came in with my Revenue Management background. We wanted to translate product investment into tangible commercial returns. That became especially clear to me during the early thinking around Qsuite. The idea was not just to design a better business class seat. We needed to reflect the airline’s commercial logic: high expectations in the “home” Qatari market, strong premium demand, a large transit network, and passengers who would pay for something meaningfully better. In other words, the seat had to solve a revenue problem, a brand problem, and a network problem at the same time. That is why the research and strategy function mattered so much. The right product was never going to emerge from aesthetics alone. It had to be grounded in evidence: who was travelling, where they were travelling, how much they were willing to pay, and how the airline could turn those preferences into value. Qsuite has been so successful because it offered privacy for the solo traveller and flexibility for families, couples, and colleagues. That was not an accident. It was a direct response to the mix of markets Qatar Airways serves and the way its customers behave. The same logic applies to the jobs now being advertised. The Research & Strategy Manager, Data Specialist, and Manager in Customer Experience Strategy will not just be helping to write presentations or run workshops. They will be helping define what Qatar Airways believes premium travel should be, and how that belief becomes a product that can sell across multiple markets. In a network as international and complex as Qatar Airways’, that means balancing local expectations in Doha with global aspirations everywhere else. That is also why these roles can be so influential. In an airline like this, a strong idea can move quickly from analysis to commercial impact if it is framed the right way and backed by enough conviction. That is where Xia’s core skills come in. She will fight to get the product right. The people in these jobs are not just supporting Xia to design the product. They are shaping the way the airline thinks about value, design, and customer experience. Understanding the country and the corporate culture Qatar Airways is not actually hostile. At least not normally. It is a bit like Wernham Hogg in British TV series The Office. A company with strict policies but mainly nice people who are sometimes a bit odd. You will be given a safe and secure apartment (or villa for VPs). Some are well located and others are not, it is luck of the draw. I was in flat 60 at the Al Saad Residence 2 in Al Sadd, which I thought was quite good location-wise. These days it is almost next to a metro station. The company will help you open a bank account and settle in to a new country. The employee service desk will process your visas and advise on essentials like healthcare. My salary was always paid in full and on time. But Qatar Airways does not expect your pay to increase with your contribution. So if you get one of the jobs you should negotiate for as much as possible at the start, because your pay is unlikely to increase long term. Don’t accept anything with “Acting” in the job title either. This means that you are doing a job in a higher grade but only being paid the salary for a lower grade. I would also advise you to take no less than your pre-tax salary in your home country. Ideally you would earn a premium. There may be no taxes in Qatar but there are certain tax equivalents and unexpected costs. Trips home on busy flights where staff travel is not available is one example of a tax equivalent. That grocery item you like another. It is funny to see Birds Eye fishfingers marked “only £1” on the box selling for 50 Riyals (£10.24) in Mega Mart. Maintenance and repairs on your car can be pricey. The airline will pay school fees, but unlike expat opportunities in other industries I doubt they would stretch to a British boarding education even for children of top level executives. Final remarks I had a great time at Qatar Airways. It gave me everything I needed to pursue my own distinctive career in aviation. You can too. Apply for one of the jobs listed and I am sure that if successful you will probably have a brilliant adventure. But if you do go and live in Qatar, remember that you are not in Kansas anymore. Conclusion If you take one of these roles, go in with your eyes open and your ambitions clear. Qatar Airways, particularly PDD, is a place where you can compress years of experience into months, build a genuinely distinctive profile, and gain exposure that most airlines simply cannot offer. It is not always comfortable, and it is rarely forgiving, but it is undeniably effective. Approach it as a platform rather than a destination: negotiate hard at the start, deliver quickly once inside, and be deliberate about what you want to take from the experience. Do that well and you will leave with more than a job title. You will leave with stories, relationships, and a career trajectory that can open doors long after Doha is behind you. Airline Revenue Economics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.