We predict that 2015 will be a great year for customer co-design initiatives. Mobile app development is a great beachhead for customer co-design because no one questions the involvement of customers all the way through the development lifecycle. Your customer’s mobile phone is the perfect “outside in” design platform.

There are four converging trends that bode well for customer-centric executives:

1. Mobile app development is a popular investment among top execs.
2. Mobile apps are well-suited to customer co-design.
3. Mobile apps require close integration with customer portals, customer-facing web sites, social media, contact centers, and customer service.
4. Customers’ priorities and success metrics (transmitted through stories) trump organizational politics.

Mobile app development is only one of many areas in which customer co-design shines. Ideally, you want customers to lead any new product or service innovation or re-design activity. But let’s get real. Embedding customers into your internal design and development processes is hard. It’s counter-cultural for most organizations.

Once you deliver mobile apps that demonstrate rapid customer acceptance, reduced costs, and greater customer loyalty and profitability, the customer co-design PROCESS you use to co-design, deliver, iterate, discard, and continuously re-design customer-impacting apps will begin to become the new modus operandi for your entire organization. Executives will expect both agile development and customer involvement from insight to deployment for any customer-impacting initiative.

Make mobile app development your customer co-design priority for 2015.