Austin Puckett

Hi everyone. My name is Austin Puckett and I'm the Director of Engineering for CLEAR. I really want to thank Gene for having me out here today. I'm honored to be here — been a fanguy of Gene for a long time. The Phoenix Project was one of the first books one of my first CTOs gave me.

Before we get started — how many of you flew here today? Pretty much everyone. How many of you used CLEAR? Alright, alright. We love to see it. I'm sure you have lots of feedback for me — come find me after. We're going to dive into probably what was a fun experience for many of you traveling with CLEAR over the last six months.

01What is CLEAR?

CLEAR is a network identity provider focused on delivering safe, easy identity solutions. Frictionless is the name of the game, and we want CLEAR to be the best part of your journey whenever you use it — and definitely want it to be the least memorable (which I'm sure some of you had memorable experiences).

We're really obsessed with this idea of friction-free. We want it to be the fastest part of your travel experience and something you can rely on with consistency.

- Operating in airports for over a decade — physical lane experiences now in 58 airports across 160 different lanes. - Digital identity platform called CLEAR Verified that extends the airport experience to your digital life. You may have used our digital solution with LinkedIn, Avis, or Home Depot. - ~25 million members today. 58 airports, 160 lanes, with 206 million cumulative platform uses over the last decade. - 13 sports and entertainment partners at stadiums across the country (Yankee Stadium in my home, New York).

02Organization

How do we think about it? - CLEAR Plus — our consumer subscription service, transforming the travel experience. - TSA PreCheck — launching its 58th airport this week or next week, bringing PreCheck enrollments to every CLEAR location. You can now sign up for TSA PreCheck and enroll in CLEAR in every location we operate. - CLEAR Verified — the digital identity experience powering B2B identity solutions. - CLEAR Mobile — a free reservation service that allows you to book a place ahead of time in airport security. Think of it as CLEAR Plus light. Operates across the US, a little in the Caribbean, and some in Europe, white-labeled as various solutions.

03How we think about CLEAR Plus

This is where I spend my day in, day out. These are my teams: - 3 engineering managers, 3 product managers, a number of designers, software development engineers and tests (SDETs). - Airport Platform team — developing platform solutions on the back end. - Web Kiosk team — front-end team solution. - Hardware-focused team — developing device integrations.

About 40 different engineers focus on delivering CLEAR Plus day in and day out.

04Where CLEAR Plus is headed

Many of you are familiar with our legacy solution — the pods (kiosks) in our airport today. Over the last four months we did this evolution of our product. We're evolving toward Next Gen Identity Plus — an experience unlock about driving a face-first member experience in our lanes.

We'll be deploying a next-generation kiosk design in the next two months — the culmination of about five years of my experience at CLEAR — as well as a mobile ambassador augmentation device they can use to facilitate your mobile document transactions with the TSA.

05What is Next Gen Identity Plus?

As you looked at CLEAR over the last 10 years, we had one enrollment flow and it never really had changed. As identity has evolved in a digital-first future and AI-first future, we really needed to level up our identity across a number of different factors.

What Next Gen Identity Plus is: 1. Updated picture. Guided photo capture so we take the best possible photo of you in an airport environment (an extremely challenging environment for photo capture). 2. Verify your phone number via a one-time passcode to make sure that phone in your possession is yours. Members prior to this had used bogus phone numbers because they didn't need any validation. We also reach out to phone records to validate ownership. 3. Updated document image with direct source corroboration with issuing authorities — state IDs, state driver's licenses, US passports — to validate that the issuing provider of that document actually issued it for you.

06The four-month rebuild

Stepping back: we rebuilt our Web Kiosk platform starting in March of last year. It was a massive undertaking to lift and shift a legacy platform that was built in .NET.

Over the course of about four months starting in August, we needed to rebuild to support this Next Gen Identity Plus future as well as re-platform our Verifications product.

In December — one of the notoriously difficult time periods — we decided we were launching this new product in every airport and needed to re-enroll all 6.8 million members in two months at these physical locations.

The ultimate goal was that by February of this year, we wanted Next Gen Identity to be required for all of our members as they're traveling through the lanes, so we could level up our identities to power that future look you're going to see us start deploying toward the end of this year.

07Timeline

- August — kicked off with product and engineering teams. December timeline in mind. 40 engineers we needed to rally around the cause. Define everything. Launch a brand new verification experience. We do about 150,000 verifications on any day and growing every month (TSA and CLEAR have peak travel days compared to pre-COVID travel). - November — we wanted a partial product to test with. One of the best testing fields we have are our ambassadors in the field. They know our products in and out, they're the best at finding our bugs, and they're very vocal when they encounter solutions that don't work for them. So we targeted a select group of ambassadors to deploy the new experience and worked through the flow and identified pain points ahead of a consumer launch in December. - December — we launched Next Gen Identity. We also utilized a feature-flagging solution. This allowed us to schedule that fleet-wide flag cutover. Shout out to our partners at LaunchDarkly for enabling an absolutely seamless experience for us to do this. We gathered at 4:00 AM in real-time to monitor this launch.

Historically, these 4 AM launches generally end up with us working from 4 AM until midnight that same day. These are long days — we're working in shifts, taking breaks, fraying at the edges as a team. However, because of the prior testing and the massive effort across a number of different teams, we were able to break around 2:00 PM and take the rest of the day off, knowing that everything we had quantified in the November testing was still there. - February — we needed to require Next Gen Identity for all our members. Prior to this, it was optional.

08Why we didn't force it during holiday travel

As Lauren spoke earlier with Southwest, holiday travel is the busiest time of the year for travel businesses. We didn't want to require everybody to upgrade at that time because adding a document, taking a photo, OTP, and a phone while you're trying to get through security — we wanted to make sure you still had that friction-free experience in our lanes.

So we did select targeting with our BI partners that allowed us to target specific travelers at specific locations and lanes that we knew either you traveled out of frequently, or were not necessarily busy locations during the holiday travel season — so we could upgrade you there without impacting our overall operation.

Results: 2.8 million members upgraded in three months, with an average time to upgrade of less than a minute and an average time to enroll for new enrollees of around three minutes.

09Prompted vs Unprompted cohorts

We thought about this as two cohorts: prompted and unprompted. - Prompted — you went through the flow. Relatively basic. Most members could self-guide through it, and ambassadors were there to help as needed. - Unprompted — a little icon indicated to our ambassadors that "this person could upgrade," so during a non-busy time they could upgrade this member; or during a busy time, they could just get them through as quickly as possible.

A massive effort and coordination between engineering, BI, operations, and field teams — all coordinating together, speaking the same language so we could manage and effectively upgrade all our members and get to the 3 million mark by February.

Today we're looking at about 4.5 million people who have upgraded out of our 7 million total Plus subscribers.

10Team autonomy — the trust experiment

Where I'm going to spend a little more time today is team autonomy.

What I think really worked for CLEAR in this is we had the engineering teams — 40+ engineers strong. We had engineering managers, product managers. But we also trusted that our business partners were speaking the same language as we did.

What we did at the very beginning: spend the time to define that language so we could all talk. Most of us here are engineering leaders — we all think technically, we talk technically, we work with product managers who also operate in the same way. But we spent a lot of time focusing on that language at the beginning of this release, so that as we were going through it, nobody had a misunderstanding about what we were doing, why we were doing it, or what this specific thing meant.

And so when we launched this product, we actually trusted that our business partners were going to be able to enable the prompting and unprompting flows across our lane experience with zero engineering involvement. So if a lane experienced high travel volume, flight delays, something that occurred during the travel season — they were able to schedule and drop our prompting level down to 0% or ramp it up to 100% in locations in near real-time.

11The December 23rd test

What this meant: on December 23rd — a day that you typically would not touch a single amount of code — we trusted our business partners, and they made 22 scheduled workflow changes during this day to manage our lane capacity in near real-time. I never received a single phone call. Our on-call engineers never got involved.

We trusted our business partners to speak the same language as us and work with us to develop an autonomous language and operation, so engineers could focus on what they do best — building features, building code, testing code — and our business partners could focus on what they do best, which is operating our lanes at the best capacity possible.

12Key factors — what we learned

Looking back, what did we really learn through this? I don't think any of this is mind-blowing.

- Clear product requirements. We talked about it at the beginning in August. We all sat down, we threw out every other meeting, and we said: we're going to come up with the language that we need to speak over the next four months to make sure that we're building the right thing. At any point we can't be misaligned on how we're talking about feature X or feature Y. - Be flexible. No one launches with the same requirements they had on day one. So we had to be willing to say: okay, we know this is going to change, but how do we make sure we spend the time developing flexible architecture that allows us to plug and play modules, talk to our operations teams about changes, and make sure we're taking into account all the different factors that come into play in a massive rebuild like this. The architecture had to flexibly evolve to support all the different potential solutions that we and our product partners were talking through. - Tight feedback loops. Trusting autonomous teams — everybody's working all over the place. Slack is an incredible tool, but it's easy to get lost in the noise. So designating directly responsible individuals (DRIs) that allowed us to say: hey, if something's changing over here, you are responsible for notifying all the other teams. Making those feedback loops tight, so if something changed, all the other teams could adapt and adjust in real-time as requirements shifted into launch day. - Decoupling processes across teams — integrating cross-functional team members early on. Our business partners made scheduled workflow changes in LaunchDarkly to ramp prompting up and down in real-time. Normally we would never let our business partners into our engineering tools — but we brought them in early on, we trained them, we treated them as partners. This enabled us to function as a strong team together, and autonomously focus on different aspects of each team's success. - From an engineering success: deliver this code by December, it's got to do X/Y/Z. - From an operations perspective: 2,500 ambassadors trained on how to operate with this, how to talk to members, why CLEAR is doing this. - And from operations back to engineering: "hey, we've got to cut Chicago down to 0% because they've had four hours of delays due to just Lake Michigan." (Some Chicago lights out there, I see — many of us have been trapped in O'Hare.)

The key thing here for us was trusting our cross-functional partners. It's critical for us as engineering leaders to remember that we're designing technical solutions to facilitate real member and consumer experiences. For those of us in B2C, that's trusting our consumers to know why we're doing something. For those of us in B2B or B2C, our business and operational partners are also key stakeholders in how we operate.

This was a huge learning for CLEAR and it's how we're evolving our experience to support the Next Gen future with the face-first pods you'll see deploying through the latter half of this year.

13How can I help you?

Something I know everyone is asking is: how can you help me? How can I help you?

One thing I kept coming back to: *when have we as leaders let risk aversion commandeer team autonomy? What do I mean by that? At its base form: when have we let fear* of something not going well mean we're micromanaging every single team function, micromanaging our stakeholders?

What I encourage you to do is come find me. I'd love to talk about how you manage the fear of something going wrong with your stakeholders, to ensure that you're operating at the best capacity and focusing on the right solutions.

With that — thank you. CLEAR is hiring. If you are looking for anything, we're growing like crazy. I appreciate the time. I'm Mauck. Thank you.