Case Study — Co-Creation in Action: Bring Your Customer to Work Day

Spark New Zealand
Role: UX Research Manager

Context

In 2018, Spark had no formal mechanism for bringing real customers into the heart of the business to collaborate directly with product, design, marketing, and service teams.
While my enablement work had already improved research literacy across the company, I saw an untapped opportunity:

  • Teams wanted deeper empathy for customers.

  • Customers wanted a voice in shaping products and services.

  • There was no existing format or precedent for such an engagement.

I conceived, designed, and delivered Bring Your Customer to Work Day — a one-day, high-impact co-creation workshop series run as two distinct events for consumer and business customers. These events only existed because I identified the demand, secured buy-in, and created the entire program from scratch.

My Role

As UX Research Manager, I:

  • Identified the Need — Synthesised insights from my ongoing research work and enablement programs to demonstrate the gap for direct customer-team collaboration.

  • Designed the Event Format — Created the full structure, agenda, and workshop flow to maximise collaboration and actionable outcomes.

  • Secured Internal Buy-In — Gained executive and cross-departmental support by tying the event to strategic priorities in customer experience and product innovation.

  • Recruited Participants — Curated a diverse mix of target-segment customers for both consumer and business streams.

  • Facilitated the Sessions — Applied human-centred design techniques to encourage open participation and creative problem-solving.

  • Synthesised Outputs — Converted workshop results into actionable insights and concepts for product roadmaps, marketing strategy, and service design.

Methods & Activities

  • Experience Mapping — Customers mapped real-world journeys, exposing friction points and unmet needs.

  • Rapid Ideation — Mixed groups of customers and Spark staff generated solution concepts collaboratively.

  • Concept Testing — Early-stage ideas were tested and refined with direct customer input.

  • Prioritisation Exercises — Joint ranking of solutions based on potential impact and feasibility.

Impact

  • Humanised Decision-Making — Put product, marketing, and service teams face-to-face with the people their decisions affect.

  • Accelerated Cross-Functional Alignment — Teams rallied around shared, first-hand insights they had co-discovered with customers.

  • Direct Input into Roadmaps — Concepts validated in the workshops were fed into Spark’s product and service development pipelines.

  • Cultural Shift — Positioned co-creation as a tangible, high-energy part of Spark’s research culture.

  • Legacy — The event format was documented and shared, enabling repeatable future use across the business.

Tie-In to Other Work

Bring Your Customer to Work Day was a natural extension of my broader research enablement at Spark — turning the research philosophy, training programs, and customer insight culture I had built into a live, collaborative experience that cemented the value of customer involvement in every decision.