Customer Co-Design
Customer co-design is the practice of bringing real customers or end users into the problem-framing and solution-design process so the team builds around evidence rather than internal assumptions.
Key points
- AWS recommends involving the customer’s customer where possible during working-backwards engagements, especially when defining the persona and problem [src-017].
- In the SAP Sports One example, SAP, TSG Hoffenheim, and AWS worked together to focus the roadmap on match analysts who spent too much time manually reviewing and tagging game footage [src-017].
- Co-design helps narrow a broad opportunity space into a specific customer, pain point, metric, and proof-of-concept target [src-017].
- Journey mapping and pain-point analysis are used to find where manual work, bottlenecks, time loss, cost, or operational friction are highest [src-017].
- The method often finds one key persona whose improved workflow creates downstream value for several other stakeholders [src-017].
Related entities
- Amazon Web Services — uses customer co-design in Digital Innovation / PACE engagements
Related concepts
Source references
- [src-017] AWS Events — “Working Backwards | How to Build Like AWS” (2026-02-24)