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Co-creating with a Partner Instead of Make or Buy: The Edana Way

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

By Mariami Minadze
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Summary – Between off-the-shelf solutions and solo development, you risk delays, cost overruns, and misalignment with business objectives. Edana’s co-creation approach combines strategic exploration and field diagnostics to align value and compliance, drives ideation by business impact, structures incremental releases on a modular, secure-by-design architecture, and ensures agile governance with automated CI/CD pipelines.
Solution: Co-create with Edana to speed your time-to-market, retain technological ownership, and continuously evolve without extra costs.

Co-creation represents a powerful alternative to acquiring off-the-shelf solutions or pursuing 100% in-house development, sharing risks, expertise, and ambition among stakeholders. By adopting this approach, you shape a product aligned with business challenges and benefit from an optimized time-to-market through fast, measurable delivery cycles. Edana’s co-creation methodology places product value at the heart of every stage—from initial scoping to scaling—through a robust architecture and user-centric design. This ensures full technological ownership and continuous, performance-driven evolution.

Explore: Strategic Scoping and Field Assessment

The exploration phase is essential for establishing a shared product vision. The field assessment identifies constraints, data sources, and regulatory requirements.

Value-Driven Ideation

During ideation, the business model and value proposition form the basis of every decision. Each proposed feature is explicitly linked to a business impact, ensuring the backlog’s relevance. Collaborative workshops foster a common vision and stakeholder alignment.

Scoping includes analyzing current processes and defining clear metrics. With validated performance indicators, the team can quickly trade off high-impact opportunities against development effort. This prevents scope creep and maintains focus on value.

The initial roadmap is organized into incremental releases, each delivering a viable, measurable product. Milestones are defined by added value, allowing the team to confirm adoption of early deliverables before further investment.

Field Assessment and Compliance

An audit of existing processes uncovers operational friction points and potential optimizations. Data flows are mapped, and sector-specific security or regulatory constraints are identified. This diagnosis is critical for risk anticipation and design governance.

Reviewing compliance requirements (GDPR, internal policies, industry standards) secures the architecture from day one. Integrating these aspects upfront avoids delays and costs associated with later modifications. Security standards guide technology and protocol choices.

The field assessment culminates in a detailed report with pragmatic recommendations. These findings steer the prioritization of initiatives based on their criticality and the organization’s digital maturity.

Value-Based Prioritization and Governance

Prioritization is achieved through scoring that balances business impact and technical risk. Each item is evaluated against collectively defined criteria, ensuring continuous alignment between IT, business units, and external partners. The backlog remains dynamic and transparent.

Joint governance combines steering committees with agile rituals. Regular reviews adjust priorities based on measured results and user feedback. This decision agility keeps objectives in focus.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) feed a shared dashboard, ensuring traceability of decisions and progress tracking. This visibility allows for early detection of budgetary or schedule variances.

Example: A Swiss transport organization struggled to consolidate data from multiple systems and meet security obligations. Through a thorough exploration phase, major data flows were mapped and regulatory requirements integrated from the outset. This case highlights the importance of a field assessment to scope a complex project and build stakeholder confidence.

Create: User-Centric Design and Incremental Delivery

This phase turns vision into tested prototypes, ensuring an optimal UX. Engineering is based on a modular architecture and continuous delivery of the Minimum Viable Product.

UX/UI Design and Prototyping

The design process relies on design thinking workshops with end users to refine user journeys. High-fidelity wireframes and prototypes undergo early usability testing to validate assumptions and reduce the risk of misalignment with real needs. This co-construction strengthens team buy-in.

Graphic and ergonomic choices align with the organization’s brand identity while ensuring intuitive navigation. Every interaction is analyzed to eliminate friction, with special attention to mobile and field contexts. Accessibility and responsive design are non-negotiable criteria.

Early test feedback fuels rapid prototype iterations. These short loops allow adjustments to information hierarchy and prioritize modules based on observed impact. User insights guide the functional roadmap.

Modular Architecture and Security by Design

The modular architecture is structured around microservices or independent modules, facilitating scalability. Each component is designed for individual deployment and scaling to avoid excessive coupling. Modern open-source technologies ensure maintenance freedom and limit vendor lock-in.

Security is integrated at the design phase: data encryption, infrastructure hardening, and systematic code reviews. Authentication protocols and access controls align directly with the regulatory diagnosis. This by-design approach minimizes future vulnerabilities.

Database schemas are optimized for variable loads and growing data volumes. Factory and caching patterns are adopted for performance, while log persistence traces every critical event.

Incremental Delivery and Impact Measurement

The MVP marks the first tangible milestone, delivered in a few short sprints. Usage indicators are continuously collected via customized dashboards, measuring adoption and satisfaction. This data-driven culture guides subsequent prioritization and validates each release’s ROI.

Enhancements follow a backlog prioritized by value and risk, adjusted at each demo. Stakeholders engage in sprint reviews, ensuring full transparency and ongoing control of development effort.

CI/CD pipelines automate unit and integration tests, significantly reducing validation cycles. Monitoring tools alert on performance or security regressions, enabling proactive incident management.

Example: As a subsidiary of a multi-sector services company, one client co-created a field platform for its technicians. By delivering an MVP in three months and tracking daily usage, the team optimized workflows and cut report entry time by 70%. This illustrates the power of incremental delivery and precise metrics to steer development.

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Grow: Governance, Automation, and Optimization

After the MVP, scaling up relies on an evolving roadmap and agile governance. Industrialization leverages CI/CD, automation, and cost optimization.

Roadmap and Governance

The product roadmap is based on collected KPIs and business feedback. It unfolds into planned releases, combining functional enhancements and technical improvements. Steering committees co-decide trade-offs, ensuring ongoing alignment between strategic objectives and delivery capacity.

Cross-functional governance engages business sponsors and technical experts in quarterly reviews. This collaborative dynamic ensures rapid adaptability to changing contexts and better anticipation of future needs. Decisions are documented and traceable.

Success criteria rely on quantifiable indicators (adoption rate, processing time, business ROI). This granularity allows low-value initiatives to be paused or adjusted, reallocating resources to high-impact features.

Industrialization via CI/CD and Automation

CI/CD pipelines orchestrate all build, test, and deployment steps, ensuring consistent, rapid delivery. Automated tests cover critical scenarios, reducing regression risks. Updates can be deployed to production multiple times per day.

Infrastructure as Code scripts standardize environment configuration, ensuring reproducibility and compliance. Automation workflows handle recurring tasks (migrations, deployments, backups), freeing teams for higher-value activities.

Continuous performance and security monitoring feed proactive alerts. Incidents are managed via integrated playbooks, minimizing downtime and ensuring robust SLAs. This rigor builds user trust and supports growth.

Cost Optimization and Extensibility

Cloud architectures leverage auto-scaling mechanisms to adjust capacity during peak loads. Unused resources are shut down to optimize operational costs, while instances are right-sized based on performance thresholds defined during diagnosis.

Microservice segmentation enables new features to be injected without affecting the entire system. Modules are packaged and deployed independently, facilitating enhancements and reuse. This approach also limits vendor lock-in.

A regular dependency update policy optimizes security and performance. Automated code reviews assess quality and standards compliance, preventing technical debt and preparing the product for unconstrained growth.

Example: A Swiss logistics operator saw its internal application evolve from an MVP to a full-fledged service in under a year. By automating tests and deployments, the platform increased its processing capacity by 200% while reducing infrastructure costs by 30%. This case underscores the importance of structured industrialization to sustain growth.

Collaborate Effectively: Roles and Responsibilities

Co-creation relies on a clear division of contributions and decisions. A shared cadence fosters engagement and goal achievement.

Business Expertise and Field Access

The internal partner brings in-depth process knowledge, strategic priorities, and daily usage insights. This business perspective guides feature definition and release sequencing. Field experts actively participate in workshops and validate prototypes.

Partner’s Strategic and Technical Contribution

The external partner contributes expertise in digital strategy, software engineering, enterprise architecture, and cybersecurity. They orchestrate sprints, ensure code quality, and manage technical risks, maintaining security by design.

With deep knowledge of open-source technologies and industrialization best practices, they propose scalable, modular solutions. They anticipate future needs and recommend adaptations to avoid vendor lock-in.

Shared Cadence and Value Management

Agile rituals (backlog refinements, sprint demos, retrospectives) involve all stakeholders, promoting transparency and engagement. Each deliverable is approved based on business value and technical quality criteria.

Joint governance uses clearly defined indicators to measure progress and impact. Prioritization adjustments are ratified in steering committees, ensuring continuous alignment with business objectives.

Regular communication and asynchronous collaboration tools maintain information flow between teams, reducing silos and speeding decision-making. This transparency is a key success factor in co-creation.

Transform Co-creation into a Growth Engine

Co-creation offers a unique balance of innovation, agility, and risk control. By exploring value first, creating through incremental deliveries, and industrializing with discipline, each product gains adoption, robustness, and autonomy. Clear role definitions and shared governance ensure effective collaboration and controlled scaling.

Our experts guide organizations through every project phase, from scoping to scale-up. They share their know-how in design, scalable architecture, cybersecurity, and digital strategy to turn your challenges into lasting success.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

By Mariami

Project Manager

PUBLISHED BY

Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions about co-creating solutions

How does co-creation differ from the “make or buy” approach?

Co-creation combines internal expertise with an external partner’s know-how to design a tailored solution. Unlike “make or buy”, it shares risks and responsibilities, ensures ongoing alignment with business objectives, and accelerates time-to-market through incremental deliveries. This collaborative approach guarantees full technological ownership and evolution guided by real-world performance.

What are the benefits of the strategic framing phase?

The strategic framing phase defines a clear product vision through field diagnostics and the identification of regulatory constraints. It guides prioritization based on business value, sets measurable performance indicators, and prevents scope creep. This phase ensures a relevant backlog, a roadmap structured into viable releases, and better risk anticipation.

How can regulatory compliance be ensured from the start of co-creation?

Compliance is integrated from the exploration stage with a GDPR audit, internal policies, and industry standards. Requirements feed into the by-design architecture, establish security protocols, and guide technology choices. This preventive approach minimizes delays and correction costs, secures data, and facilitates scalability in demanding environments.

Why are prototyping and user testing essential?

UX/UI prototyping, through design thinking workshops, validates user journeys and assumptions before development. Early usability tests provide concrete feedback, reduce discrepancies with actual needs, and optimize ergonomics. Rapid iterations ensure team buy-in and the robustness of the final product.

Which KPIs should be tracked during incremental deliveries?

Key KPIs include adoption rate, task processing time, user satisfaction, and ROI per release. A shared dashboard allows continuous measurement of these indicators, helps prioritize upcoming work, and anticipates budgetary or scheduling deviations for each sprint.

How can features be prioritized based on business value?

Prioritization is based on a scoring method that crosses business impact with technical risk. Each feature is evaluated collectively, ensuring a dynamic and transparent backlog. Steering committees validate the choices, guaranteeing ongoing alignment between IT, business units, and the external partner.

How can the architecture's scalability and security be ensured?

A modular architecture based on microservices facilitates individual scaling. Security by-design incorporates encryption, code reviews, and hardening from the outset. Caching and factory patterns optimize performance, while open-source dependencies limit vendor lock-in.

What role do stakeholders play and how is governance organized?

Joint governance involves business sponsors, technical experts, and agile teams in backlog reviews, sprint demos, and retrospectives. Quarterly steering committees validate decisions, ensure decision traceability, and maintain focus on business value.

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