Growth Academy Success Story: Transportation - DB Digital
How Growth Strategy sparked a little revolution at Deutsche Bahn Digital
Deutsche Bahn is the biggest German railway company and the second-largest transport company in the world. DB employs 338,000 people around the globe, including 211,000 in Germany.
One of the strategic pillars for digitalization of their services is their free self-check-in feature (“Komfort Check-in”). This service allows you to board the train, find your seat, check in contactless via smartphone and validate the ticket yourself. This process replaces ticket inspection and also enables you to change your seat reservation.
The business challenge
DB’s self-check-in feature (“Komfort Check-in”) shows high user satisfaction and retention but adoption is relatively low. Defining focus areas and initiatives to drive feature growth is difficult due to complex nature of the product and DB’s organization.
“Growth Academy helped us to develop more creative and results-oriented solutions. It gave us a new perspective and injected the necessary energy for doing bigger things.”
—Hedwig Raczek, Senior Digital Product Manager, Deutsche Bahn
The collaboration
Growth Academy advised the leading product managers over 4 weeks. This included support with analysis to identify growth opportunities as well as guidance for ideation and execution of corresponding strategic initiatives across several functions. The whole advisory process is based on Growth Academy frameworks which the mentees can access independently of the sessions via the Growth Academy learning platform.
The results
After conducting an in-depth funnel analysis the team was able to uncover major growth opportunities. Examples of resulting cross-functional initiatives are user experience and marketing improvements of the product’s value proposition as well as the integration of new product entry points and retention loops. The thought-leadership carried out by the team substantially deepened cross-functional relationships and improved alignment.
“Working with Growth Academy pushed us to intensify cross-functional thinking which created strong bonds in and outside the team. This really helps to get things done in big organizations.”
—Marc Balzerowski, Digital Product Manager, Deutsche Bahn
You might wonder how you can use such growth strategies for your own business. If you want to learn more sign up for Growth Academy. We teach the frameworks of growth leaders at Google, Amazon, TikTok, Spotify, Skyscanner, and more, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to amplify the growth of your product and business model.
