The program was set up from scratch as one cross-functional organization. That meant staffing the teams, building the Agile Release Trains, establishing the method, and bringing IT, Production and Sales into joint teams. Portfolio steering across the planning chain required a new funding model: budgets from the individual divisions were pooled centrally and prioritized as one portfolio. This was one of the first applications of Lean Portfolio Management within the group.

Pooling budgets is not a one-off decision. Priorities are re-agreed every budget cycle, and each year the divisions’ own initiatives and the shared portfolio have to be weighed against each other. Securing alignment on one set of priorities across four divisions became the core of my work.

Sponsors and a story that moves with the business

We built close ties with stakeholders and management in every division and cultivated sponsors who advocated for the program in their own areas. Just as important, the value story had to be retold whenever the business context shifted. In 2022 the question was how to build cars at all when every car would sell. Today it is how to match production to demand. Same capabilities, a different answer to the problem that matters now.

Ship early, prove value

From day one, everything we built went live as fast as possible. That created real users who valued our processes and tools, some of whom came to depend on them. It made benefits visible early. And it gave us a solid business case that we could put on the table in every budget round.

We built a team of data scientists, data engineers, process experts and consultants. We went into projects across the group, analyzed processes and delivered fast first digital solutions. I moved into task-force work early.

Production ramp-up: data science analyses that translated into management decisions, for example prioritizing high-margin vehicles and optimizing logistics chains.

Ramp-up steering: transparency dashboards as a shared basis for coordinating the ramp-up across departments.

COVID: alongside the base plan, scenarios for the course of the pandemic and for optimal ramp-down and ramp-up of the plants, built pragmatically in Python and Excel as an alternative planning layer to steer through the crisis.

At its peak the Accelerator had around 30 people, half of them in my area: data science and the technical platform, including a cloud-based analytics platform and DevOps support. The other half formed the consulting branch. The unit was established as a spin-off of Digital Business Development.

I built the team and the platform from the ground up: our own technical platform with accounting, integrations and a range of payment methods. Alongside the technology we did a lot of business consulting, covering micro-transactions, subscription management, customer master data and processes, and we co-developed monetization strategies with the digital products.

Because car2go operated in the US and China, we set up local payment systems there too. China was the earliest and toughest challenge, with Alipay and WeChat Pay integration. We worked with a small Luxembourg start-up holding its own payment license, which the group later acquired. That brought a full e-money setup, including a Luxembourg e-money license, into the structure, so our products could run on it.

At its peak, 17 people covered the full value chain of a payment business: product ownership for the technical platform, payment operations, direct-debit settlement in the accounting system, and collections. We also owned the interfaces to the group’s legal teams and to the Luxembourg partner, which developed the platform further and ran the regulatory side. Internal sales and the onboarding of new digital services onto the platform completed the picture.

We decided to scale without outside investors and learned the hard way that customer acquisition and marketing costs exceeded what we could carry. To be fair, mobile payment also delivered less business benefit than other business models at the time.

We repositioned the capabilities we had built as a B2B2C payment processing service: multi-merchant platform setups and micropayment billing. We then expanded into B2B, winning energy companies and mobility providers as clients. The competence stayed the same, but without our own consumer platform up front.

This also fitted the group far better: mr.net was a B2B provider of white-label solutions, and an own consumer brand had never been a natural fit. The business grew in e-commerce and in billing for digital services.