From legacy to leading-edge: How United is modernizing workforce operations with Pendo

700+ new aircraft. 100,000+ employees. 140 million annual customers. As the largest airline in aviation history, United operates on a scale inconceivable to most businesses. And its footprint is only growing. 

But as Gunnar Mlsna (manager of operations product delivery at United) explained, with this growth has come a challenge: How can the airline boost productivity and efficiency without massively expanding its employee headcount? 

“There’s a small team supporting these 100,000 people in the technology that we’re building. So we have to come up with ways to deliver that at that scale, with the resources we currently have, using innovative tools to help us do so,” Mlsna said. Central to United’s strategy has been to leverage Pendo—to consolidate their internal stack, hone process efficiency, and communicate through times of crisis.

Breaking through silos and eliminating duplicative tech

To understand how United is scaling productivity, consider its network operations department. “This is where the airline is run,” said Andrew Harrison (senior manager for operations, products & strategy at United). “There’s 24 different teams in network operations [handling] anything from our crew scheduling, to our maintenance teams, to operations managers.”

Because these 24 teams were long siloed from one another and each had its own developer arm, they’ve ended up with over 85 internal applications in use, many of which are duplicative of one another. “Team A would build a tool with 20 data points and then team B would build one with another 20 data points. And there were maybe two that were different,” Harrison explained. 

Instead of consolidating the two overlapping tools into one, he said, one team would merely add the two missing data points from the other’s product into its own, perpetuating the siloed, duplicative internal app ecosystem. 

With United’s use of Pendo, however, the silos are coming down.

Using the Pendo One platform to sunset inefficiency

United is harnessing the power of Pendo’s product analytics and in-app guides to consolidate its network ops teams’ stack, most notably by sunsetting old apps and migrating employees to newer, improved ones that serve the same purpose. 

Unimatic, for instance, is a dated, command-based system that Harrison’s team is pushing hard to retire. “For each piece of information you want to pull, you have to type in a specific command and you have to know that command or else you’ll have no idea how to use this tool,” he said. “The people who code it have been trying to retire for years. And we’ve just been holding onto them because [Unimatic] still runs a lot of our airline.” 

In its place, United wanted to shift employees over to Volare, a modernized solution that’s faster and more predictive than Unimatic. As they struggled to move the needle on stickiness for the new app, they embraced a test-and-learn approach with Pendo until the data showed tactics that were working. 

What they found drove higher adoption, Harrison explained, was to “put Pendo Guides in there that were specific command for command [equivalents across the two apps]. So if I’m trying to do this command in Unimatic, I can click this guide and it’ll show me exactly how to do the same thing in Volare.” The results were clear. “We saw as we deployed these that it’s becoming more sticky. It’s kind of a multifaceted approach, but we now have the data where we can see what’s working,” he continued.

The best part? United is leveraging the Pendo Resource Center to make sure employees are getting the knowledge relevant to their roles in real time—and not being burdened with irrelevant tutorials. Rather than put the entire workforce through a one-size-fits-all, three hour training module outside the app, they empower employees to explore the Resource Center in Volare to seek out what matters most to them. 

Communicating in real time to power through a crisis

In addition to refining employee onboarding strategies and driving adoption of new and better digital solutions, United has also found Pendo to be a critical tool in navigating times of crisis. During the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, for instance, it had 26,000+ computers affected across 365 locations and was forced to cancel over 700 flights.

As United was rebooting its systems, they had to figure out a way to quickly communicate where and how they needed users to get back into the tools to run the operations. Harrison explained that “because there was such a surge of users and such a surge of activity, we needed to divert the traffic to different instances so that the tools could manage the load.”

Using Pendo Guides, they put up a tech alert that a user would see upon opening Volare. Depending on where they were, they’d be directed to the appropriate instance to log into, distributing the traffic burden such that there wouldn’t be a follow-on outage.

They also used the outage as an opportunity to further their greater onboarding goals with regard to Volare. Once a new user was in the product, they would see an alert with a quick link to guides and the Resource Center offering support and instruction on core functionality. “We saw a big jump in people coming in to look at the guides and use them to do the workflows that we wanted them to do in the application,” Harrison said. 

Scaling transformation by scaling Pendo deployment

As it pushes forward with its digital transformation initiatives, United has plans to expand Pendo’s presence far beyond the two core applications it’s currently running on. “We have 85 tools within our network operations center,” Harrison reiterated, “and a lot of what we’re trying to do is to consolidate and sunset [many of them].” 

Still, he noted, with those efforts come questions: Which users will be impacted? How are they using the apps in question? What will the new way of working look like?  With Pendo’s rich analytical insights, those questions now have answers. And those answers, in turn, can power the right next steps. “We can now deploy [Pendo] on those applications,” Harrison said. “We can drive them from one to the other. So [deploying] Pendo at scale is big in terms of what’s next for us.” 

Want to dig deeper? Watched the United team’s full presentation from Pendomonium 2024: