Customer-obsessed product innovation  ·  From insight to impact

Build products and services customers love.

We help you find what customers truly need, then create the product or service that delivers it, with rigor and speed.

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In climbing, the crux is the hardest part of the route. Get through it and you summit. Misstep and you fall. In innovation, the crux is finding what customers truly need and turning that into something they'll love.

Most teams miss this entirely, or lose focus on it during the climb. We help you find it and solve it — with our proprietary AI thought partner doing the heavy lifting and THE CRUX Method keeping you on route.

The Method

THE CRUX Method

We start with your customer and work backwards. Following THE CRUX Method, rooted in Amazon's Working Backwards approach, we guide your team from insight to impact in three stages.

Stage 01

Base Camp

Understand the customer and the problem. We help your team surface the research, build deep customer empathy, and articulate a problem worth solving.

Stage 02

The Crux

Invent the solution and write the story. We challenge your team to explore broadly, choose the best solution, and prove it on paper, as a narrative your stakeholders can greenlight.

Stage 03

Summit

Test, build, and launch. We push your team to identify the critical risks, validate with customers, and move from story to reality.

Traditional innovation consulting makes you choose between rigor and speed. With AI handling the time-consuming work, THE CRUX Method removes that tradeoff. Rigor and speed, no sacrifice.

What you get

Customer Profile & Insights

Who they are, what they're trying to do, and what stops them.

PRFAQ

The future-state product story, told as a press release, FAQ, and visuals that bring the customer experience to life, written before you build it.

Prototyping & Test Plan

The riskiest assumptions, surfaced and pressure-tested with real customers.

MLP Brief

Scope and build plan for the Minimum Lovable Product, clear enough for the build team.

Support through launch

Not a handoff. We stay with you from insight to impact and work alongside your build team to deliver the Minimum Lovable Product, whether that's your own design and engineering teams, a systems integrator, or a consulting partner.

The AI technology behind THE CRUX

Topo™ — our AI thought partner

The strongest innovation work now comes from three actors thinking together. A human brings truth, experience, and judgment. A frontier AI model brings knowledge, reasoning, and synthesis. Between them sits Topo, holding the method, the orchestration, and the discipline. Most teams have only the human and the model. Topo is the actor they are missing.

Human 50%
Topo 30%
AI model 20%
Human
Truth · Experience · Judgment
Topo
Method · Orchestration · Discipline
AI model
Knowledge · Reasoning · Synthesis
What Topo does

Session Orchestration

Runs every session on the Method, holding the team to the hard questions, not the comfortable ones.

Real-Time Drafting

Builds the product brief as the work unfolds. What used to take weeks emerges in days.

Data & Insights

Brings customer data, market intelligence, and competitive signals into the room, distilled into insights you can act on.

Built to Push

Topo doesn't just agree. It stress-tests assumptions, surfaces blind spots, and asks the question no one wants to ask.

Topo works in English, Korean, Japanese, and Italian today, with more languages added as clients need them.

The people behind THE CRUX

THE CRUX is young. The experience behind it is not.

One firm, one method, one standard.

John Watson

John Watson

Founder & CEO
Austin, Texas
john@thecrux.io

At Amazon, John co-founded the AWS Digital Innovation program, created AI-powered tools used by 30,000+ innovators, and guided innovation engagements on six continents. Before Amazon, he built digital products at Sony and Dell and led transformation at PwC and Accenture, working with executive teams in technology, energy, manufacturing, retail, media, financial services, healthcare, and space exploration.

Curtis (Jungsoo) Kim

Curtis (Jungsoo) Kim

Founding Partner
Seoul, South Korea
curtis@thecrux.io

Curtis brings more than thirty years driving customer-obsessed innovation, boardroom strategy, and AI partnerships across major enterprises, including Samsung Electronics (Semiconductor), SK AX, Hanwha, and LG U+, and global organizations including Google and Motorola. As Head of Digital Innovation for APJ at AWS, he led Working Backwards engagements for more than seventy enterprises.

6
Continents where we've guided executive teams
10+
Combined years leading innovation at AWS
50+
Combined years across global tech and consultancies
100s
Engagements delivered across industries
30K+
Innovators using AI tools we built at Amazon

Work with us

We tailor the engagement to your scope, from a focused introduction session to a full innovation engagement — from insight through launch.

Timeframes are typical; we tailor each engagement.

Introduction Session

1 day with your team over a 1 week project

Applying THE CRUX Method to a live customer challenge.

Innovation Strategy

3 days with your team over a 2–3 week project

Identify and prioritize where innovation creates the most value for your customers and your business.

Innovation Workshop

3 days with your team over a 3–4 week project

An immersive workshop guiding the team from Base Camp to a defined Minimum Lovable Product.

Innovation Engagement

10 days with your team over a 3+ month project

A full innovation cycle, from customer insight to product launch.

Ready to build something your customers will love?

Book a call