João Fernandes
I lead new products at Lufthansa Innovation Hub, Lufthansa Group's startup studio in Berlin. Right now that's Spokes, the platform airline teams use to handle passenger accessibility requests. I also build and test its AI features myself, and co-lead the Hub's AI Practice.
Before that I spent three years at Fidelidade, Portugal's largest insurer, and founded a small legal tech company. I live between Berlin and Lisbon.
Work
Lufthansa Innovation Hub, since 2022. Each product starts as a hypothesis. If the MVP holds up, it gets scaled or handed to a Group business unit. If not, we stop it.
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Spokes
Product lead, current. A Group-wide platform for passengers who need special assistance, used daily by airline customer service teams. I own the automation roadmap and bring AI into the product: I prototype each feature, run evals on its output, and get it through security testing before airline teams see it.
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cabinblu
Product lead. An app for people who are afraid of flying, taken from idea to the App Store in a few months with no-code tools. I owned it end to end, P&L and support included. It has paying subscribers and is now being discussed for an internal handover.
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Uptrip
Go-to-market and post-launch. A loyalty app that turned flying into a collecting game. It reached the top of the iOS App Store charts and was later handed over to Miles & More.
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Offer Innovation Platform
Product lead. One platform for Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian and Brussels Airlines, including flight passes for frequent travellers and students. Group budget cuts stopped it shortly before launch.
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Jeeves
Product lead. An agentic AI product giving travel companies one connection to the main apps in the industry. I ran the technical exploration and built the MVP myself. We stopped it when the internal support wasn't there.
Earlier: founder of The Caravel (legal tech, 2022, closed when the operations didn't scale). Fidelidade, 2018 to 2021, where I launched a sales channel through banks and coached teams through an agile transformation. Full history in the CV.
Side projects
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LiftLog
An iOS strength training app with an AI coach, written with Claude Code in SwiftUI on Supabase and the Claude API. In private beta.
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FollowThru
A web app built in Lovable, running in production.
Talks
- Nov 2025
How to launch new products in weeks
Venture Café Berlin × CIC Berlin. Lean validation and low-code MVPs, using cabinblu as the example.
- Sep 2023
Improving travel loyalty engagement with Uptrip
GAIN Innovation Soundbites, video interview. Watch
- Jun 2023
Uptrip on the Launch stage
Phocuswright Europe. Pitch and PhocusWire interview