Digital twins (DTs) facilitate today’s product management and digitalized production. Throughout the design, engineering, manufacturing and operation of products, DT data needs to be exchanged. The lack of interoperability, especially in the context of cross-company data exchange, is a major challenge that hinders the effective use of DT data, starting in the early lifecycle phases. To tackle this challenge, this paper presents an Asset Administration Shell (AAS) solution that enables the creation, provision, integration, and use of cross-company digital twin data throughout the entire product lifecycle, with a particular focus on the design and engineering phase. The exchange mechanism ensures interoperability of digital twin data, starting from the generation, design and engineering phase, and thus building the data basis for all subsequent lifecycle phases, such as manufacturing or operation. The AAS implementation lays ground for overarching all product lifecycle stages and thus meets semantic, technical and organizational interoperability challenges. This paper details the overarching research problem and the design science-based methodology, before providing insight into the results of the initial design cycle.