Lufthansa Group at Forrester CX Summit: From service design to system of record

At the 2025 Forrester CX Summit EMEA in London, Daniel Hoffman from Lufthansa Group’s Digital Hangar joined TheyDo CEO Jochem van der Veer on stage to share how one of the world’s most complex airline ecosystems is reinventing the way customer experience drives business value. What started as a conversation between a few service designers has now become a scalable approach to journey management that is reshaping how Lufthansa Group connects insight to action.

The session, titled “Lufthansa Group: Journey management outcomes, not insights,” focused not on theory but on execution. From disconnected canvases to real-time journey dashboards, Daniel walked the audience through the Lufthansa transformation with honesty, specificity, and a clear message: this is no longer about creating journeys. It is about making them the system for decision-making.

He opened by naming the problem. “We realized most of our insights died in the workshop graveyard. Everything felt like a one-shot initiative. We needed a way to continuously connect insight to action,” he said. What they built instead was a journey-based operating model that spans multiple brands, teams, and business units, turning journeys into living tools that support product decisions, service planning, and roadmap prioritization.

Crucially, the rollout did not begin with executive sponsorship. It began with UX. “We introduced the platform in the UX area first. The first colleagues immediately saw a use case in their value stream. They saw their own data. They saw their own problems. That made the difference,” Daniel explained.

From there, a cross-functional working group formed. Alongside the Digital Hangar came colleagues from Miles and More, Lufthansa Systems, Eurowings, and the core Lufthansa brand. What united them was not a love of templates or theory, but a shared frustration with how difficult it was to act on existing insight. Product managers, customer service leads, and value stream owners came together around a single question: how do we build something that sticks?

Jochem guided the conversation into the structure behind the system. Daniel shared how a shared taxonomy was a critical unlock. “Product already operates this way. They call it a sequence of experiences. But because we have a common taxonomy for the universal phases, everyone can operate in the same reality.”

Jochem asked whether this kind of structure was unique to travel, or if others could use it too. Daniel responded that Lufthansa’s journey might be more literal, but the principle applies anywhere. “Even in a bank or mobile provider, when you think from the customer’s perspective, every step becomes part of a journey. It is not just the lifecycle. It is the experience of signing up, canceling, troubleshooting. If you look at it that way, the structure starts to make sense.”

One pilot focused on the ancillary buying journey. The team created a touchpoint-agnostic experience view that resulted in a clear opportunity roadmap for 2025. Another pilot came from customer service. They were sitting on a massive volume of Help Center feedback. “We had over 20,000 entries. Previously we tried clustering this in Miro. It was slow and the quality was not great. With Journey AI, we uploaded the data and got clear results in four minutes. Eight out of ten clusters were spot on. The others just needed light adjustments.”

This speed was not just about saving time. It created a new workflow. Lufthansa introduced a simple KPI threshold. When more than 200 negative entries are logged for a topic in a given week, a journey-based process is triggered. Teams investigate, derive solutions, and track the outcome over time.This shift from insight to action changed how leadership engaged. “In one of our funding meetings, value stream leads stood up and endorsed the approach. Leadership didn’t need a demo. They saw the outcomes,” Daniel said.

The rollout now spans seven business units. From the highly digital environment of the Digital Hangar to the operational complexity of real-world airline experiences, each unit adapts the framework to its own needs. “The speed and way people adopt journey management varies a lot,” Daniel explained. “But having a shared structure helps us move forward together.”

He emphasized that structure alone was not enough. Teams only understood the value once they used the journeys themselves. “Structure doesn’t create clarity. Using the journeys does,” he said.

Jochem asked a final question before Daniel had to head to the airport. What would you do differently, knowing what you know now?

Daniel was direct. “Talk to your way-of-working people from day one. We came from a service design and UX perspective. People asked, is this another UX tool? It was hard to say no. But this is for everyone. It is crucial that everybody is using it if you want to make real impact.”

He reflected on how involving agile teams earlier would have accelerated the rollout. “Now we are talking to our agile domain leads. We are trying to understand how they support teams in the field, how their workflows operate, and how journey management fits into that. It is not impossible. It is not even that hard. But if we had started that conversation earlier, we would be much further today.”

As the session wrapped, Daniel left the room with three questions that grounded everything Lufthansa has achieved in a simple challenge for the audience.

1. Do you have a shared journey taxonomy across teams?

2. Are your journeys connected to how you plan roadmaps?

3. Is your feedback loop actionable, or just noise?

Then he added a closing thought that stayed with the audience long after he had left for the gate.

“A product is just a sequence of experiences. Welcome to TheyDo.”