Ever feel like traditional client-vendor relationships are just… missing something? Like you’re always separated by this invisible wall of timesheets and limited say in the project? You expect something exciting to happen, but… You’re just in a transactional relationship. Time for money. That’s it.
We’ve been there too.
The market has shown us repeatedly that this model just isn’t sustainable for real growth, and neither for meaningful innovation.
We’ve found something different, called co-creation model. In this article, you’ll find out how it helps companies stay resistant during turbulent times but also grow.
There’s so much missed innovation in team augmentation
Traditional client-vendor relationships, particularly those focused on team augmentation, address capacity needs, but they frequently lack the deep collaboration and shared vision necessary for true innovation. The transactional nature of these engagements, often driven by timesheets and narrowly defined scopes, hinders creativity and limits the potential of the final product.
Product co-creation represents a shift in product development. The idea is not a new one. HBR widely popularized it in the 2000s in their article about including customers into shaping the product.
Translated into a vendor-client process, it moves beyond a transactional relationship and fosters a true partnership between the client and the development team. Co-creation emphasizes shared responsibilities, open communication, and integrating diverse perspectives.
The client brings their market expertise, understanding of customer needs, and business vision. The development team contributes their technical skills, product development experience, and often valuable business insights.
This collaborative approach results in products that are not only technically sound but also deeply aligned with market demands, significantly increasing the likelihood of success.
SmartCat’s product co-creation model: A practical framework
SmartCat has embraced co-creation as a core principle, recognizing its potential to deliver added value to everything we deliver. Our model rests on several key pillars:
Our expertise in data engineering, AI, and software development provides a foundation for technical guidance and ensures the feasibility and scalability of co-created products.
We prioritize building strong, collaborative relationships with clients, emphasizing open communication and mutual trust.
We take part in defining and refining both the technical and business vision of the product. That’s how we ensure full alignment, shared ownership and true partnership, beyond the buzzword.
We practice delivering in quick iterations… And these sprints include the client at every step. That means fewer surprises and “work-behind-the-closed-door”. Combined with our on-site kickoffs and regular on-site sessions, this strengthens the team.
We selectively engage in projects where we can make a significant impact, ensuring our resources and expertise are directed towards creating truly valuable solutions.
Every collaboration starts with the Product Discovery Workshop, but the truth is, the product evolves. New ideas appear while some others fall off. That’s why every 3-6 months we repeat Discovery Workshops, while actively maintaining a backlog.
In other words, we keep coming back with ideas for further improvements, both tech- and business-wise.
How Co-creation looks like in practice
The theory about the product co-creation model sounds nice. Here’s what happens when you actually apply it.
A long-standing partnership with Meridian, spanning eight years, showcases the power of sustained co-creation. First, we started with the traditional model. Time and materials.
Interesting things started happening after five years, when they wanted to refresh and re-engineer their platform. So we did the evaluation of a huge platform and created a three-year plan, which became a five-year plan, re-engineered and added additional functionality to reach the point in time. They swapped the old platform with the new platform.
The new platform is AI ready. It is fully based on data and it is now one of the top three platforms in the sports betting world.
They were managing priorities and scope, while we were a technical partner giving directions, choosing technology, implementing stuff, educating them on how to use AI and data, and sharing our thoughts when something can be delivered.
We started working with Vantage in 2022. Nigel and Lance found us through our shareholder in San Francisco, and they wanted a team that knows technology, data and AI.
We were building a horizontal technical platform that should enable e-commerce websites to have a more clever search, a much better hit rate and in the end, more revenue.
We kicked off our co-creation year in the pop-up with a sole goal of reaching general availability where anyone can go to their website, put a credit card and start using it.
They have a technical team in the US, which is really nice because we can brainstorm based on different technical ideas.
We nurture our cooperation by traveling to the US or hosting them in Serbia. We have, twice a year, a co-located working mix, which is really nice for this co-creation in different times on different continents.
Content Lion is our newest product co-creation venture. David (CEO) approached us because he knew founders from Vantage.
This is a success story for an entire team that worked for Vantage. We kicked off our co-creation three weeks after the first call.
Usually, you go through negotiation, figuring out stuff, but David was really fast. We were really fast.
They are managing priorities and products, and we are a full engineering team. We are a technical partner deciding on technology direction and choices.
These three examples really showed us what we should do. We want to co-create with other partners where we can bring versatile knowledge, data, AI, software engineering under the same roof.
We can also consult how to build certain business applications much more efficiently and better with good technology choices that will last for years.
Co-creation is not a fleeting trend
Co-creation is becoming a competitive advantage in product development. With coding assistants and inevitable optimizations across the industry, offer clients something more than a pair of hands – actually, a pair of brains.
Follow us on Linkedin or take a look at our case study section for more information on our projects.
