Views: 57
Summary – Co-creation project hampered by: unclear vision and objectives, poorly defined roles, inconsistent terminology, late approvals, opaque governance, budget and timeline overruns, no MVP, limited skills development, rigid architecture. Solution: formalize vision and roles → prototype and validate continuously → manage agilely with a prioritized MVP.
Co-creating a successful digital solution requires close collaboration between the client’s domain expertise and their digital partner’s technical mastery. This partnership aims to design a product aligned with the company’s strategy while addressing the real needs of end users. To maximize impact and mitigate risks, it is essential to establish clear governance, a shared vocabulary, and iterative validation methods. Beyond skills, success depends on mutual trust, full transparency, and shared accountability throughout the project life cycle.
Align product vision with business objectives
A shared vision ensures consistency between the company’s strategy and the product under development. Clearly defined roles prevent misunderstandings and strengthen each party’s commitment.
Establish a shared vision
The starting point for co-creation is to formalize the digital product’s purpose and success metrics. Stakeholders convene to jointly define the value proposition, target use cases, and expected benefits. This framework serves as a reference throughout the project and facilitates decision-making when trade-offs are necessary.
The client contributes in-depth knowledge of the operational context and business processes, while the digital partner translates this vision into functional and technical directions. Together, they produce a concise document outlining the intended outcome, enabling anticipation of friction points and early identification of training or support needs.
This collaborative approach fosters a sense of shared ownership of the product. Each participant understands how their contributions feed into the overall goal, boosting motivation and aligning priorities even when time or budget constraints arise.
Define roles and responsibilities
To avoid gaps, it’s crucial to assign clear roles such as Client Product Owner, Scrum Master, UX Designer, Developer, or Security Expert. The company’s Product Owner validates functional content and prioritizes the backlog according to business priorities.
The digital partner assumes technical responsibility, UX quality, and the implementation of best practices (automated testing, CI/CD, security). This division ensures each party focuses on their core competencies without encroaching on the other’s domain.
A concise governance chart, accessible to all, formalizes these responsibilities. It includes decision-making processes and communication channels, preventing misunderstandings and delays due to unplanned approvals.
Create a common language
At the project’s outset, orientation workshops help define a shared glossary covering business, technical, and UX terms. This harmonization prevents divergent interpretations and reduces unnecessary back-and-forth.
Using visual artifacts—interactive mockups, user flows, clickable prototypes—facilitates dialogue between business experts and developers. These assets embody the product vision and serve as a discussion basis, making abstract concepts tangible.
Regular exchanges build a common culture and establish mutual trust. They also allow early detection of misunderstandings and incremental refinement of the shared language, ensuring effective communication throughout the project.
Example: a mid-sized bank formalized its product vision in collaborative workshops that brought together business leads, an internal IT team, and UX specialists. This approach demonstrated that prioritizing critical use cases enabled continuous roadmap adjustments, enhancing functional relevance and end-user satisfaction.
Methods and tools for effective co-design
Co-design workshops and rapid prototyping structure collective thinking and validate decisions without heavy development. Agile governance enables frequent iterations and timely incorporation of feedback.
Design thinking workshops
Design thinking provides a framework to explore user needs, map their journeys, and identify innovation opportunities. Sessions bring together business stakeholders, UX experts, and developers to challenge perspectives and expertise.
These workshops yield concrete deliverables: personas, storyboards, user journeys. They stimulate creativity while remaining focused on the organization’s real challenges. Ideas are confronted with technical and strategic constraints from the outset.
This method fosters empathy, essential for designing an experience that balances business expectations, technical feasibility, and user-friendliness.
Rapid prototyping and validation
Before launching full-scale development, it’s advisable to create interactive mockups or basic MVPs. These artifacts enable concept testing with a user sample and gathering concrete feedback on ergonomics and functional relevance.
Rapid prototyping reduces uncertainties and cuts costs associated with potential pivots. Adjustments are made on lightweight versions long before investing in architecture or code. This approach provides proof of concept before embarking on full development.
Moreover, it establishes a virtuous cycle of testing and continuous improvement within an agile framework, ensuring the solution remains aligned with evolving business and user needs.
Agile governance and short iterations
Adopting a Scrum or Kanban framework allows the project to be broken down into sprints or continuous flows. With each iteration, the team delivers a potentially deployable functional increment. This fast planning-execution-retrospective loop enhances responsiveness and quality.
Agile rituals—sprint review, daily stand-up, retrospective—are opportunities to adjust priorities, incorporate business feedback, and resolve technical impediments. Transparency is vital for effectively managing budget, schedule, and scope.
Explore our agile best practices tailored to software development teams.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Balancing budget, deadlines, and scope
Prioritizing a targeted MVP ensures rapid returns and limits financial risks. Rigorous monitoring of budget and schedule supports cost control and stakeholder satisfaction.
Prioritizing key features (MVP)
Creating a Minimum Viable Product involves identifying the minimal scope that delivers user value and validates hypotheses. This approach limits the initial scope and focuses efforts on the essentials.
The MVP is iterated based on field feedback, avoiding unnecessary development and optimizing time-to-market. By applying the MoSCoW method (Must, Should, Could, Won’t), the Product Owner and team clearly define functional priorities.
To choose the right approach, consult our guide on MVP advantages and pitfalls.
Transparent budget and schedule tracking
Implementing tracking tools—financial dashboards, weekly reports, performance indicators—provides visibility into budget consumption and deadline adherence. Every expense or deviation is justified and corrected in real time.
A steering committee of business, finance, and technical representatives meets regularly to validate milestones and arbitrate decisions. This multi-stakeholder governance prevents surprises and builds trust between the company and its digital partner.
Budget transparency supports informed decision-making and maintains team cohesion, even when unforeseen events or adjustments occur.
Adapting scope as the project evolves
When new constraints arise (emerging requirements, regulatory changes, market opportunities), the initial scope can be reviewed. Agility allows these changes to be integrated without compromising the overall objective.
Decisions are documented, budget and schedule impacts are assessed, and stakeholders are informed. This discipline prevents uncontrolled scope creep and ensures ongoing alignment with strategic goals.
The team thus maintains a comprehensive project view, enabling controlled execution and satisfaction for all, even as context shifts.
Example: a healthcare provider launched a patient monitoring platform MVP in six weeks by focusing development on core features. This early qualitative feedback allowed roadmap adjustments, demonstrating the value of an evolving scope and transparent budget communication.
Ensuring a lasting collaboration
Regular communication and joint skill-building strengthen the client-partner relationship. A modular, secure architecture guarantees scalability and technological independence.
Clear communication and regular reporting
Weekly progress meetings and end-of-iteration demos maintain visibility on project status. Feedback is systematically collected and translated into corrective or evolutionary actions.
A shared logbook serves as a living memory: decisions made, incidents logged, upcoming actions. This collaborative documentation reinforces traceability and eases handovers during team rotations.
Transparency fosters trust and enables early risk detection, preventing conflicts and unforeseen overruns.
Joint accountability and upskilling
Co-creation involves a progressive transfer of know-how. The client actively participates in workshops, code reviews, and training sessions, enhancing their proficiency with tools and agile methods.
The digital partner acts as a coach, sharing open-source best practices, modular architecture models, and CI/CD approaches. This pedagogy boosts the internal team’s autonomy and reduces vendor lock-in risk.
Ultimately, the company acquires a competency base to manage and adjust the solution independently, while retaining the option to call on external expertise for scaling or innovation phases.
Security, scalability, and modular architecture
A design based on independent components ensures each module can be updated, maintained, or replaced without affecting the whole system. Leveraging microservices and open-source standards limits proprietary dependencies.
Architectural choices incorporate modular architecture, security (data encryption, access control, vulnerability testing), and scalability (autoscaling, containers, orchestrators) from the outset. This approach guarantees technical longevity and rapid time-to-market during peak loads.
It prepares the digital ecosystem to welcome new features and evolve with business needs, while controlling maintenance costs and delivering an optimal service level.
Example: an industrial automation company selected a modular open-source architecture for its client portal. This approach demonstrated that each module could be updated independently, offering operational agility and supplier independence.
Turning co-creation into a strategic advantage
Clear governance, agile methods, and transparent communication are the pillars of successful co-design. A targeted MVP, rigorous prioritization, and joint upskilling ensure quick ROI and a product aligned with business goals.
By choosing a modular, open-source, and secure architecture, organizations preserve technological independence and bolster long-term innovation capacity.
Our experts are at your service to support your digital co-creation projects and help you structure a high-performance collaboration, from defining the product vision to the solution’s go-live.
