That’s why, in the past, Diggintravel has highlighted a variety of organizational models. We’ve showcased examples ranging from Air Europa’s approach to building their CRO team to Ryanair’s methods for conducting UX research on a large scale, and even how a major airline like LATAM Airlines structured a decentralized organization with multiple digital product teams.
Now, we bring you another insightful case study: the Lufthansa Group and their Digital Hangar’s journey from web and CRO analytics to airline product analytics.
Laura J. Hornbake, Product Analytics Community of Practice Lead at Lufthansa Group Digital Hangar, talked about their shift towards a decentralized model and the establishment of a digital analytics community of practice, highlighting how some of the most innovative airlines are revolutionizing the use of analytics to build better products more efficiently and on a larger scale.
And naturally, our discussion wouldn’t be complete without delving into personalization and AI.
Listen to the new episode of the Diggintravel Podcast to learn all you need to know about airline product analytics, or read on for key highlights from our talk with Laura:
And don’t forget to subscribe to the Diggintravel Podcast in your preferred podcast app to stay on top of the latest airline digital analytics, marketing, data science and AI trends!
Before diving into the intricacies of digital products and analytics, it’s essential to understand the entity behind these innovations for the Lufthansa Group. The Digital Hangar serves this pivotal role, as Laura elaborates:
The Digital Hangar in the Lufthansa Group is an ecosystem that essentially has the role of the digital delivery unit for the Lufthansa Group. The new Digital Hangar company in Germany has been part of the Lufthansa Group since late 2022. But it [the ecosystem] also comprises the airlines and partners. So it’s a very interesting ecosystem to work in and is really the heart of a digital transformation that’s happening for the airlines.
Going further, Laura explained the organizational structure of the Digital Hangar and how product analytics fits in:
We have an organization around our so-called value streams, which are the vertical organization around which we deliver value for our customers. We have tech platforms there that deliver the technical capabilities for these value streams to develop on. And then the horizontal piece to align everybody around different disciplines are the communities of practice, and that’s where the Community of Practice – Product Analytics comes in.
We are the home of the experts around all things data analytics, BI, digital analytics, experimentation, A/B testing, all of those things that we bring then into product teams. We have design authority about how analytics is done in this Digital Hangar, so we provide guidelines; we strive to bring together individuals from different product teams, encouraging them to share their knowledge and collaborate effectively towards unified goals, and we provide the strategic vision for data analytics in the Digital Hanger – along with, of course, the tech platforms, who are super important to us, and the value streams, who provide the reason for us to be doing any of this in the first place.
To illustrate the practical application of this matrix model, Laura shared a specific example of how value streams (the verticals) work with her team:
Here’s an example of what the value streams are even doing, we have the verticals. Some might include customer servicing, so dealing with the digital self-servicing topics to help our customers out, or the loyalty and profile vertical that works on retention of our customers and developing loyalty. We have the analysts working there, but they also then, yes, belong in this community where they share what it is that they’re doing and the best practices that they’re developing along the way.
Like myself, Laura has a CRO background as a Team Leader for Analytics & Conversion Optimization at Swiss Airlines. So, of course, I was curious about how her current team and setup fits into that. How do they support airlines in the group with CRO
The booking funnel, for example, is part of one of the value streams in this new setup. Historically, I’m coming from the digital commerce setup, yes, where we were very much a centralized team dedicated to the commercial aspects. Not exclusively, of course; we always think about the customer KPIs and things. That’s critical if you’re doing any kind of optimization of the platforms. But yeah, this has been a transition for the airline teams that were organized around those commercial topics, decentralizing and rethinking how we work in this whole process.
While Laura’s team actively supports airlines in the group with optimizing the booking flow, their role extends beyond this.
Those topics [CRO] are still very near and dear to my heart and to some of our analysts, but the scope of the whole community has expanded far beyond those booking funnel topics and into some very interesting new areas like thinking about the chatbots or the in-flight entertainment systems, looking at our check-in processes more closely – which is really great for the perspective of the analysts because it widens our perspectives to the entire customer journey. And I think that’s a critical orientation for us because as analysts, one of the key things that we want to be able to do – we don’t want to be in the business of just simply delivering numbers to put on a slide. We want to know what is the impact, at the end of the day, on the customer. So this new setup makes it very clear to every analyst who’s working on a particular feature how that fits into a bigger picture in the customer journey.
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