Ten years after graduating from NYU Abu Dhabi, Alf Lim is on cloud nine as the Chief Product Officer at Norway-based Norse Atlantic Airways, a new player in the skies.
Tell us about your role and what inspired you to join a new airline.
I joined Norse about a year ago as the Chief Product Officer. I was previously with BCG in Dubai and happy there, but this felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I had to grasp. It’s not every day a new airline starts up, and I’m originally from Arendal, Norway, where Norse is headquartered.
I’m heading up a division called Norse Coders, our internal tech and innovation unit. We’re a lot like a startup, bringing a startup mentality to the airline. We have an ambition of turning Norse into a tech company that happens to be operating in the airline business rather than an airline with tech capability. It’s a bold vision, thinking of Norse as more of an e-commerce player and less like an airline.
What have been the key highlights so far?
It’s been a fun and hectic year! When I joined, I was the first employee together with a few consultants. Now, we’re a team of over 30 and continue to expand. We have developers, UX designers, product owners, product managers, data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
We’re focused on commercial technology and trying to build competitive advantages. We built a new website from scratch and are taking a very science-based approach to development and pricing.
We’ve seen tremendous success in setting new load factor records in such a short time. We’re now filling our planes better than Ryanair two months in a row, so that’s quite a feat.
How has your NYUAD connection shaped what you’re doing today?
We have seven NYUAD alumni working here at Norse. It’s been a bit of a pipeline from Abu Dhabi to Arendal, Norway, a town of only 40,000 people. We already have three people from the Class of 2024 here, and I’m in the process of interviewing more NYUAD candidates.
Why are NYUAD students good hires for a startup?
NYUAD has a rigorous recruitment process and a smart, well-rounded pool of applicants with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. At Norse Coders, we have a diverse team of over 30 people representing 17 nationalities. NYUAD students are well-positioned to navigate cultural diversity. We're also building a product that touches a global audience, and to do that in the best possible way, we want to have diverse perspectives that reflect the world around us.
Home Region: Norway
Current: Chief Product Officer, Norse Atlantic Airways
Location: Norway
Major: NYU Abu Dhabi Class of 2015
Can you share some examples of your involvement in entrepreneurship at NYUAD?
A lot of things come to mind. We started an initiative called Sila Connection that brought students from local universities together to tackle sustainability challenges in Abu Dhabi. We wanted to build it up as a franchise conference of cross-student teams from all the Abu Dhabi universities, such as Paris Sorbonne, Zayed University, Khalifa University, Masdar, and the Petroleum Institute. Using our study abroad opportunities at NYUAD, we expanded to have conferences at NYU’s New York and Shanghai campuses. I was also part of starting TEDxNYUAD, which continued for a long time. There was a lot of entrepreneurship in the early days at NYUAD in the sense of getting things started.
How has NYUAD influenced your career path?
For me, a lot of energy comes from seeing things in the making. When starting something, you often have to deal with many different disciplines, pull multiple strings, and connect the dots to make things happen — just like our multidisciplinary degrees. NYU Abu Dhabi itself was a startup in the early days. I loved that spirit, setting up new student organizations, figuring things out, and finding the right people to bring a vision together. I loved that feeling so much, and it’s probably why I keep gravitating toward these startup opportunities today.