Product on Ligiu Uiorean

Our second Red Dot, and why the second one counts

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:27:36 +0300

The job of management is not to manage the day to day. It is to build systems that produce the outcome when management is not in the room.

AirportLabs Allegra RMS has just won a Red Dot Design Award. It is the second Red Dot for an AirportLabs product, after SkyCore AODB in 2024.

Red Dot’s Brands & Communication Design competition took entries from 52 countries this year, across 18 categories, judged by a panel of 30. The last year Red Dot published the full breakdown, 6,992 projects were entered and 854 of them won a Red Dot. Red Dot headlines that figure itself: only 13 per cent of entries receive an award.

Scaling Down Is the Hard Part

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Everyone assumes the engineering challenge is the mega-hub. After a decade of building airport systems, I have come to believe the opposite: the real test of an architecture is whether it can run a two-million-passenger airport profitably, for both sides.

Data Integration Is a Home Renovation. Most Airports Are Living in the Gut Job.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent eleven years watching people renovate the same house.

The house is an airport. Underneath the nice terminal you walk through there are dozens of systems, installed by different people, in different decades, to different standards. None of them spoke to each other and most of them have since left. The air-traffic feed. The baggage system. The operational database. The billing. The gate planning. The thing that talks to the airline. The thing nobody remembers the name of that will absolutely take the whole airport down if you unplug it.

I still read every support ticket

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I still read every support ticket. On the rare occasion we have a major incident, I join the call too.

One thing I should say up front: I do not run support, and neither should you. We have people who do that job far better than I would. My aim is not to micromanage them or to compete with the service desk. I read the tickets because they are the cheapest education available to me.