In the ninth episode of Soaring with Sabre, we chat with Mikolaj Listwan. He talks about his 8-years journey in our company and shares why – in his opinion – people are the best part of working at Sabre. 1. In your journey with Sabre for over 8 years you have changed business units and roles, which is very inspiring. Tell us how was the experience? Actually, my Sabre Journey began in the Team I have the privilege to lead now. I started as a regular QA Engineer in the Airline Pricing area. My main responsibilities back then were to create, execute and review test results for Sabre Pricing Engine. Soon – I became responsible also for test framework maintenance for all QAs in our area. Over years – we were merged with Shopping QAs and I took some leadership responsibilities. Recently – I’m still responsible for keeping a good quality of our Shopping Engine, but now from both functional and performance perspective. During these years I had many opportunities to work with great engineers and great managers – I had lots of occasions to learn from them and this whole work experience shaped my leadership and engineering skills. 2. What motivates you to look at different roles as you progressed in your career? My progress from a regular contributor to people leader was quite natural – Sabre helped me to understand and define the role with which I’m feeling most comfortable (and thanks to that doing my best for the company). I’m grateful, that in addition to leading my team towards the successful completion of goals we have to reach, I’m still able to do some coding and testing. What motivates me? I like challenges to satisfy my natural curiosity. I also love to help and watch people grow in their expertise areas – it is a great experience to see when your hard work results in employee satisfaction. 3. How would you advice people who want to consider internal moves like you have done? Always be honest with yourself. You simply can’t do your best and have satisfaction from things you do not like. Fortunately – Sabre was always open for internal moves between the teams as well as provides opportunities to grow within the Team – this helps a lot to discover and become the best version of yourself. 4. What has been your biggest learning as you worked through different business teams? Air Pricing and Shopping areas (Air Offers and Offer Sourcing nowadays) is a very challenging area from a business domain knowledge perspective – even after 8 years spent on securing the quality of our Sabre products – I’m still learning new things about the internal functionalities of each application within the system. However – the biggest (and not easy to measure) achievement was to learn how to become a good leader for people. Fortunately – I met many great leaders during my Sabre journey – which helped me to grow my skills and evolve my approach during all these years. 5. What’s the best part of Sabre that you like? Definitely People! First of all – I have the opportunity to lead and be a part of a great, professional team. With open, curious and helpful people around – you will almost always find someone who knows the answer to even the most complicated questions. And if not – you will have the great opportunity to work together to find the answers or resolve the challenging problems. That is what makes Sabre the unique place to work!