How Azran Osman-Rani Challenges Giants by Moving Faster

What do you do when your competitor is Emirates, Netflix, or a network of massive hospitals, and you have almost nothing?

If you’re Azran Osman-Rani, you find the one assumption everyone takes for granted, flip it on its head, and build from the assumptions incumbents rarely question.

In a recent episode of The Shift Code Podcast, host Pierre Le Manh sat down with Osman-Rani, CEO and co-founder of digital health company Naluri, to unpack a career defined by challenging giants by moving and learning faster.

From launching a long-haul airline with a single aircraft to scaling a streaming service across 20 countries, Osman-Rani’s playbook is equal parts audacious and methodical. And it starts with a deceptively simple question: Why is everyone doing it this way?

Flying the same plane differently

When Osman-Rani co-founded AirAsia X, the entire airline industry operated on a sacred principle: long-haul flights should depart late at night and arrive in the morning, running the same schedule every day of the week. Perfect for business travelers. Also perfectly wasteful. Planes were flying only about 12 to 13 hours a day, sitting idle nearly half the time.

Osman-Rani’s target customers weren’t frequent flyers with rigid schedules. They were people flying from Kuala Lumpur to London once a year. They didn’t care about arrival times. They cared about saving $500.

So AirAsia X threw out the standard scheduling playbook and flew its planes 18 hours a day, achieving the world’s highest aircraft utilization rate. That single change slashed their unit cost to just 3 cents per seat-kilometer, compared to Singapore Airlines’ 9 cents. One place. One-third the cost. Zero scale advantage needed.

When the model doesn’t work, change your assumptions

That same instinct carried over to iflix, a streaming platform Osman-Rani helped build to compete with Netflix across Southeast Asia.

The standard playbook said: offer a free trial, convert to paid subscriptions. But even at $1-$2 per month, people in emerging markets wouldn't bite. The team tried everything, including sending a guy on a motorcycle to collect cash at people’s doors. It cost more to collect the payment than the subscription itself. Still, nobody wanted to pay.

The breakthrough came when they stopped asking how to get customers to pay and started asking who else benefits when customers watch. The answer: mobile telcos. In 2015, these companies were hemorrhaging voice and SMS revenue; data was their only growth engine, and video was the biggest driver of data usage.

So iflix sold wholesale subscriptions to telcos, who bundled them free for their users. Customers got free content, telcos got data revenue, and iflix scaled to 20 million users across 20 countries.

At Naluri, Osman-Rani applied a similar question to healthcare: who benefits enough from better outcomes to change how care is delivered and paid for? Instead of digitizing the existing hospital visit, he looked at what the model still missed: care that was reactive rather than predictive, physical and mental health treated in silos, and incentives that paid providers whether or not people got healthier. Naluri’s breakthrough came from working with large employers that had both the urgent need and the ability to pay, creating a model focused on behavior change, chronic disease management and measurable health improvement.

Speed is your only real weapon

When you lack brand, balance sheet, and distribution network, Osman-Rani argues you have exactly one advantage: the ability to move faster and learn quicker.

“The day that we only move as fast as them is the day they're gonna overtake us and crush us.”

Weekly sprints matter more than annual plans. Every Friday at 4:00 PM, his teams review what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned from the outside world that week.

And here’s the kicker: killing projects matters more than starting them. Osman-Rani’s organizations only work on 30 initiatives at any given time. Want to add something new? You have to argue why it deserves to bump an existing project off the list.

Around 25 of those 30 stay stable month to month, but the three or four that rotate keep the organization sharp, hungry, and honest about what's actually working.

Rubber and steel

Osman-Rani actively trains his team to catch “victim language” and “knower language”. The antidotes are what he calls the “victor mindset” and the “learner mindset.” He even has his team call him out when he slips into old patterns. No hierarchy exemptions.

Osman-Rani describes leadership as a balance of “rubber and steel”: the flexibility to adapt and the resolve to stay anchored to what matters. That balance shows up in how he manages uncertainty, challenges assumptions and keeps teams focused without becoming rigid. For leaders working in fast-moving markets, the goal is not to choose between adaptability and discipline. It is to know when to bend, when to hold firm and how to keep learning without losing direction.

For Osman-Rani, speed is not about moving recklessly; it’s about learning fast enough to stay ahead once larger competitors notice what works.

Tags: Agile | Innovation | Leadership | Startup | Transformation

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