2.5.4. Sponsor, Customer, and User Roles
💡 First Principle: These three roles separate who pays, who decides what's needed, and who actually uses — and keeping them distinct prevents the classic failure of building what the funder wants but the user can't use.
The roles: a sponsor is the person who authorizes the budget for service consumption; a customer is the person who defines requirements and is accountable for the outcomes of service consumption; and a user is the person who actually uses the service day to day.
These can overlap — in a small business one person may be all three — but the roles are distinct, and in larger organizations they're usually different people with different priorities. The sponsor cares about cost, the customer about outcomes, the user about usability.
⚠️ Exam Trap: A guaranteed test point. Anchor them: sponsor = funds it, customer = defines requirements / owns outcomes, user = uses it. Don't conflate the customer (requirements/outcomes) with the user (hands-on use).
Reflection Question: Why can a service satisfy the sponsor and customer yet still fail because of the user's perspective?
