The exchange between industry and engineering students is widely recognised as valuable, particularly for students later in their degree programs. Industry-led assessment provides opportunities for students to practice vocationally-relevant skills that can give them an edge in today’s competitive job market. Despite these advantages, there can be challenges integrating industry lecturers into the learning and teaching infrastructure of a university. Industry lecturers may be time-poor, have less time to build relationships with students and may have unrealistic expectations of students resulting in high failure rates on industry-led assignments. After several predominantly structural changes to improve a course, it was recognised that there was a need to better support industry lecturers to engage with students and learning and teaching practices typically available to academic faculty staff. This paper proposes a relationship-based approach to course improvement with specific aims 1) to bring industry lecturers closer-in to university faculty and support their teaching and learning development as part of achieving better student outcomes; and 2) to reduce high failure rates on an industry-led assignment. Interventions included: introducing a pre-trimester planning and reflection meeting; inviting industry lecturers to attend internal learning and teaching workshops; aligning course elements towards industry-led assignment outcomes; increasing industry-student touchpoints; and, capacity-building marking practices. These interventions were successful in increasing industry engagement and accountability for student outcomes as evidenced by a highly significant (p<0.01, by Welch’s ttest) increase in the mean mark for the industry-led assignment, and a 0.5 out of 5.0 points unit increase in student satisfaction reflected by end-of-term student evaluations. A relationship-based approach shows potential for improving courses co-taught with industry.