Florent Birling

Background

About Florent Birling

Passionate about digital transformation, I led the development of several Apps from scratch in a start-up. I hired a multi-disciplinary team including product managers, UX designers, iOS and full stacks developers. I led the sales of the services SAAS in Europe, Asia and Middle East. The solutions were sold to more than 40 airlines and used in daily operations by more than 65 pilots and dispatchers. The different applications were business critical and required a strong 24/7 availability with a full disaster recovery in Europe and Asia. I managed the start-up until its profitability and until its acquisition by a multi-national company based in Geneva. While working for Sita, I led the business development and innovation department in charge of penetrating new potential markets as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), drones and maintenance. I succeeded to sign various collaboration agreements with partners and clients in Germany, France, United States and Asia. I´m a customer champion who understands end-user problems, the competition landscape and the market trends with the capacity to identify market opportunities and to start a development until the customer deployment. 1) Product Management • Define product requirements, strategic vision, client targets, business model and pricing • Deliver critical Apps or software as a service (SaaS) with 24/7 Support • Manage multi-disciplinary teams (Product managers, UX design, iOS Developers, Front-end, Back-end, Platform Ops, Support, Sales) • Co-innovate with clients or partners • Monitor scrum agile development with Jira • Define roadmap and development priorities • Respect regulation and certify a product (EASA) • Patent new concepts • Coordinate a consortium and find European fundings 2) International Business development • Study new markets and business cases • Penetrate a new market • Find launch customers • Perform first deployments • Find co-innovation or co-development partners • Creative problem solver • Negotiate collaboration, write contract and review it with legal team • Evaluate some merge and acquisition possibilities • Animate participation to events or exhibitions • Organize user forums with more than 60 people during 2 days 3) General Management • Manage a start-up of 30 people: job description, targets, annual evaluation, payroll budget • Manage budget of a portfolio of products or innovation initiatives from few 300 k€ to 2 M€ • Open a new office of 70 people in Barcelona and contract the different providers • Fluent in English, Spanish and French