[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":55},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-cto-journey-product-design":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"categories":6,"title":11,"excerpt":12,"date":13,"dateIso":14,"featuredOnProducts":15,"isFeatured":16,"author":17,"body":22,"mainImage":50,"thumbnail":53},"atoNIBIAACwAlrN3","cto-journey-product-design",[7],{"slug":8,"name":9,"subCategory":10},"newsroom","Newsroom","Leader Stories","From entrepreneur to OS builder: our CTO’s journey in product design","From a first startup to building the Operating System for mid-tier airlines.","October 22, 2026","2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z",[],false,{"name":18,"role":19,"bio":20,"avatar":21},"Alexis Ohayon","CTO","Alexis Ohayon is CTO at CitizenPlane, where he leads the technical vision. With a background spanning audiovisual production and product engineering, he joined CitizenPlane early and built out an engineering culture where teams focus on simplicity as a design principle. His mission is to give mid-tier airlines IT solutions that just make sense.","https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002FKHcrjCwmzX9ZuYqI_69e76cc0480038fb99dd2ce6_Alexis.jpg?auto=format,compress",[23,26,28,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44,46,48],{"type":24,"html":25},"paragraph","\u003Cstrong>When you build an app or an interface, the best part is when it goes live, and you see the experience you designed confronting the reality of the user.\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":27},"I came to product through entrepreneurship, long before I ever learned to build the full stack myself. My first company was a software product for audiovisual production. We joined Le Camping by Silicon Sentier, then The Family. But beyond the entrepreneur story, I was really triggered by the product, its design and its experience.",{"type":24,"html":29},"I love Apple for that. They really pay attention to the small things that make their products feel the way they do, they push design up to the interaction flows and the details.",{"type":24,"html":31},"\u003Cstrong>In 2016 I went to the product side\u003C\u002Fstrong> when I co-founded another company and took on the CPO role. I just enjoyed thinking and \u003Cstrong>designing the product up to execution, ensuring high standards\u003C\u002Fstrong> for what we ship.",{"type":24,"html":33},"Then I wanted to go deeper into product building. I looked into backend, infrastructure, databases to understand the whole chain. \u003Cstrong>You can't make good product decisions about things you don't understand end to end.\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":35},"\u003Cstrong>From distribution to an airline OS\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":37},"CitizenPlane started by rescuing empty airline seats. Actually, it really started with a plane. The Family had chartered a flight for a seminar. On the way back, the plane flew home empty. We started to talk about empty seats and saw that they were everywhere we looked: tour operators, consolidators, aggregators, charter airlines. We put it at roughly \u003Cstrong>a billion seats lost every year\u003C\u002Fstrong>, with all the economic and environmental waste that comes with that. That was the founding insight behind CitizenPlane.",{"type":24,"html":39},"I took on the full stack, infrastructure through product, the role I hold now as CTO. Then in 2024 we acquired TTI Zenith. Up to then we'd been distributing other people's seats. Now we owned the PSS itself, the core layer that runs an airline's reservations and its day-to-day operations. ",{"type":24,"html":41},"We stopped being a distribution layer and started building what we call \u003Cstrong>a cloud Operating System:\u003C\u002Fstrong> a turnkey \u003Cstrong>platform made for mid-tier airlines, with modularity at the heart of the design.\u003C\u002Fstrong> In the aviation industry, most software don't focus on the navigation and user experience, and it leads to a frustrating experience for airlines that use it. So \u003Cstrong>we're building software that airlines can trust and scale with, but also actually enjoy using.\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":43},"\u003Cstrong>What a good software looks like\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"type":24,"html":45},"\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.citizenplane.com\u002Fblog\u002Ftech-talk-the-most-complex-industry-deserves-the-simplest-software\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Good software makes the complexity disappear behind something that just feels obvious to use.\u003C\u002Fa>",{"type":24,"html":47},"What’s most exciting right now is that we're at a scale where the problem matches the ambition. We’re designing products for airlines to manage their operations with full autonomy, without the need for them to turn to software engineers to get it. That means embracing their complexity and creating simple paths for each use case.",{"type":24,"html":49},"\u003Cstrong>So, if you're an airline struggling with limited IT solutions and you want to modernise your systems, \u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.citizenplane.com\u002Fcontact\u002Fairline\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">let's talk\u003C\u002Fa>.\u003C\u002Fstrong>",{"url":51,"alt":52},"https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002FEuvn2x33R_7Oo2bR_Main-CTOinterview.png?auto=format,compress","",{"url":54,"alt":52},"https:\u002F\u002Fimages.prismic.io\u002Fcitizenplane\u002FdA_KQiGWxdpF8y7F_thumbnail-CTOinterview.png?auto=format,compress",1792749413142]