Soaring with Sabre | Maciej Suślik

In the next episode of Soaring with Sabre, we chat with Maciej Suślik. He talks about his experience and development during 12 years of journey in our company. 

1. In your journey with Sabre for over 12 years, you have changed business units and roles, which is very inspiring. Tell us how was the experience?

My journey with Sabre started in 2009 when I joined the Air Connectivity team as Senior Quality Engineering with a goal and mission to build a quality team and ecosystem. It was a great opportunity to learn holistically industry business, working with distributed teams as well as gain experience from cooperation with Infini and other Customers. Being empowered by my Leader, after two years I took a project management role for MultiAccess Re-platforming, one of the key products for Infini/JV (40% market share). Soon, I shift to Supervisor and one year later to a Manager role, expanded by new initiatives and products, including the first XML/LCC carriers – Easy Jet and RyanAir integration with Sabre, where we even got an official direction from RyanAir, CEO about activation time perspective due to marketing actions.

After a couple of years in Air Connectivity, I accepted an opportunity to Lead the Air Content organization, where I had a chance to build, develop an organization and leaders across US and Poland as well as able to learn about Air Shopping, Pricing, Ancillaries products and knowledge from very deep – data perspective. In addition, I got my first cross functional initiative, which was very important in 2015 (several P0/P1 experienced in Air Shopping) – Air Shopping Stability, where I had a chance to lead matrix teams/organization and execute, communicate highly visible stability plans and goals to executives. After 2 years and transition stability efforts to my Successor, I got a chance to lead Pioneer’s team formed to define, create, and validate Shopping Cloud Proof of Concept – it was an amazing experience from gaining cloud practices and knowledge, but also managing and communicating the expectations with various Stakeholders. At that time, we were stepping into a big unknown, new ecosystem while taking existing monolithic applications and the level of predictability was extremely low and public/private cloud strategy was evolving… After 2 years of turning cloud efforts into a Program, growing further as a Leader and supporting various initiatives, I took over Air offers Orchestration organization in very unpredictable times, when confidence and motivation were exposed to a probe. It was very important to stay close to people, communicate with impact, understand the needs, react in a timely manner and be consistent across the organization in rebuilding teams, growing teams, organization, and leadership roles.

And finally, in the most recent organization evolution to better align, and streamline cooperation across key initiatives, I have a chance to lead Air Offers Orchestration and Ancillary Services Organization. This change brings a lot of new experience related to developing a dynamic organization able to adjust to needs and priorities, and growing leaders, but also brings the opportunity to gain new business knowledge, learn from people and try new practices.

2. What motivates you to look at different roles as you progressed in your career?

It is a combination of a couple of things: the readiness of my successors, new challenges, complexity, exposure, ability to work on creating new things/working with a customer, learn something new, but also the opportunity to bring a value to various initiatives, teams, and organization

3. How would you advice people who want to consider internal moves like you have done?

Growth your successor, look beyond your current comfort zone, set the bar high enough – show and prove your readiness, understand what and where you can learn more, where you can bring more value and try, instead of regretting.

4. What has been your biggest learning as you worked through different business teams?

Culture and people are the most important – cooperate with multicultural teams located across the globe, learn from others, be inclusive, empower others and support them to be successful, leverage your experience and be yourself.

5. What’s the best part of Sabre that you like?
People, culture, and dynamic environment are full of various opportunities.