Why This Product Manager Intern's Bold Payment Decision Demonstrated a True Bias for Action

Right, um, would you please give me a moment to jot down the question? Yes, of course. Yeah, uh Not, not seeking permission and Yeah, um, I would like to share a time when I was a senior financial supervisor working in the Chinese 4's largest airline company. Back then, I was helped with our payment approval and our manage and my manager was on his annual leave, so his approval authority was delegated to me. And one afternoon, I received the two payment requests that needed, needed to be fulfilled within the next few hours, so time is critical. And 11 payment request was, was from our operation team. Uh, and the other was from our sales teams. And since our cash balance was only enough to make one payment, I need to decide which to go and which to reject. So, the first thing I did was to investigate into detail what the payment request and look into the contract clause, the payment term, and their supporting document. During this process, I learned that our operation team's payment request was actually out of our budgeting plan. But there was nothing wrong with our sales team's project reimbursement. Normally, that this would be, you know, no problem that I rejected the operation team's payment request and proceed the sales team's product reimbursement, but I noticed that operation team's payment was for one of our aviation fuel suppliers, so, And I, so the next thing I did, the second thing was I immediately go to a deeper level to understand their situation beyond just finance. I hold a separate meeting with both teams and uh although I had no way of contacting the sales team's project lead, during the meeting with operations team, I understand that this supplier payment could potentially affect our future uh flight operation and we never had an overdue with this supplier before. And uh although I had no way to measure the exact impact for our sales team project reimbursement. Uh, my instinct, my instinct, informed instinct told me that the holiday season is coming. Our travel demand will spike next month. So, the third thing I did after weighing up the pros and cons of potential impact to our company as a whole, I decided to breach the rule to help with the operation team's payment because I think as an airline company. We should always place our customers' travel demand at the first place. We cannot afford to lose our customer or cause them to complain because we made late in our payment or had a bad relationship with, with our suppliers. So finally, I made this payment and smoothly secured 500 flights and 80,000 people's travel plan in the upcoming travel season, and the sales team project was not delayed, so, Uh, and I, after this, I, I even worked with my operation team to make sure that they would never make this mistake again. Can you,

Yeah, so basically what I did was to uh talk with several operation team members to figure out why they didn't budgeting their payment ahead of time, you know, pay, paying a, a payment without budgeting is really serious. In financial department. So, I further understand that this mistake was happened because they had an issue with their work handover. Their people didn't, you know, put the financial work handover in place in one of their standard work handover procedures. So I added, I go through their Work handover procedure, I spotted the issue and I gave my advice and helped them, you know, fix this bug so that they make sure that every time they hand over their work, the financial part is fully completed.

Yeah, sure. So, in this particular case, uh, the operation teams, uh, uh, supplier management team, so basically, uh, they Uh, the, the department was responsible for maintaining the relationship with their suppliers. So when this guy res resign, resignated, he needs to hand over his work. When he hand over his work, he needs to summarize what's the follow-up job that left undone. The next person needs to work on. So, The supplier relationship management, uh, they, they, he needs to mark, uh, not only The payment, he also needs to tell him that this kind of payment has not budgeting yet. You need to specifically have this standard, standard operation procedure, you know, by telling the other people whether The whether you got the contract, whether you, you received the billing. If you received the billing, did you, uh, uh, initiate the, let's say, tickets and, you know, plan ahead the budgeting to get financial department approval? And get the invoice, then you can proceed the payment. So, basically, they don't have this standard operation procedure. I helped them put in place. They have the contract, have the billing, they need to budgeting it, get the invoice, then they can pay. Not just like, oh, the contract was there. Um, I don't know if they're billing us, yes or no, and I didn't budgeting. Our, our, our, our payment requests ahead of time. So, yeah, it's all because, uh, finance, uh, airline industry is a capital intensive. We need to carefully use our cash.

And that's a really tough question because I have no way of contacting their sales team's product lead. So I can only, based on the judgment that talking to other team members from the sales team and uh uh and I, all I know is that the sales team project was for their CRM system upgrade. When I further dig into their contract clause, Payment terms, supporting documents. I have no way of figuring out what the exact impact. will be look like. So, but I know that they're just at their start of their project, so I assume they should be able to wait until next payment cycle. And I explained to lots of other sales team members that um as an airline company, the aviation fuel supplier is, uh the payment was cannot be deleted, uh cannot be delayed, and they show their understanding. So, based on the information that I have, I made the decision. OK.