Overview
The outcome: a brand new Intuit tax product
After two years of research, design, and development, our ad hoc discovery team of 3 grew to a full-fledged product team of 20+, and we released our first version of Intuit Tax Advisor to the market in Summer 2022. I was the sole designer on this product (up until the last 6 months when we hired another designer to help me), and I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished.
The problem: automation and burnout
1. Automation: As machine learning gets better and better, taxes are becoming more and more automated. Routine tasks such as data entry are already being outsourced by many tax preparers.
2. Burn-out: Alongside this increase in automation, tax professionals are burning out due to high-volume, low-value compliance work. Many tax professionals simply don’t have time during tax season to utilize their in-depth knowledge of tax law and tax-saving strategies to provide actionable advice that would benefit their clients’ financial wellbeing.
Automation and Advisory are a natural pair – as the robots take on predictable work, professionals are free to deal with more complex scenarios and provide more personalized advice. But how could we (as Intuit) enable tax professionals to make the transition from compliance to advisory?
Research
The leadership within the ProTax Group at Intuit declared “Advisory” as a strategic priority years ago. But no one quite knew how we could help these tax pros to transition their practice to advisory. After a couple of failed attempts, leadership decided to equip a discovery team of 3 (1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer, and 1 Subject Matter Expert) with a little bit of protected time to research how to solve this problem.
Originally, the three of us planned to conduct a workshop with some external customers. However, due to the onset of the COVID pandemic, we had to abruptly change course. Instead, we started out by interviewing 6 of our in-house tax accountants – all with varying degrees of advisory experience – about what obstacles they encounter when delivering tax advice to clients. We came out of those interviews with 6 thematic pain points:
✨ Top pain points ✨
- Knowing what questions to ask clients and how to ask them
- Always being “the last to know” about important events that occurred in a client’s life
- Clients being “surprised” by tax due at the end of the year
- Feeling like they can’t be sure they’ve covered every possible strategy (most tax pros are generalists, not specialists)
- Feel like they can’t charge for their advice without a formal process or client deliverable
- Learning new inputs/tools for tax planning
“If we had a better planning process, we might be able to bump up the value by 50%”
P1
“Something visual to show the client would reflect the hard work we put into tax planning”
P2
“Consulting in the big firms was easy because it’s a separate bill from tax...General practitioners at small firms have a hard time silo-ing and charging for that work”
P3
“Maybe if I had something
more scripted [I could charge
for advice]”
P5
“Give me some topics to
discuss to where the client
is going to be impressed
at tax prep time”
P4
“The key is finding out what
[the client] needs ... Sometimes you can pick that up from conversations, a lot of times they don’t know, and I don’t know how to get
information out of them”
P6
We presented these pain points to leadership, along with a top learning from our competitive research:
✨ Top competitive learning ✨
- While there are many tax planners on the market, no one was solving well for client understanding well.
As a result of these learnings, we proposed designing and testing an easy-to-understand client report, so that we could work backwards into the inputs needed from the tax pro to deliver on that experience. We also included what we believed to be our top risk if leadership chose not to move forward with investing in a solution.
✨ Top risk ✨
- If we don't move fast enough, our competitors will.
This risk turned out to be more real than we could imagine.
Proving the market
After rapid testing client report concepts with 8 taxpayers (a mixture of small businesses and individuals), workshopping solutions with our Intuit Tax Council (a handpicked council of our leading tax accountant customers), we worked backwards from the report toward a tax pro-facing solution. We decided we were ready to go broad with a large-scale, behavioral test.
We were confident that we knew the problem space, and that we had a potential solution. What we didn’t know was if tax professionals would actually pay for our solution. In order to prove to our leadership that we were on to something big, we decided to conduct a dry wallet concept test.
For more on how we conducted our concept test, check out my Big Design 2021 talk here.
Our definition of success: At least 5% of sales contacts we meet with are willing to pay at least $1,500 per year, based on a 30 minute product demo.
10%
(# of lead form submissions/# of views)
5%
(# of closed sales/ # of sales demos)
16.8% (+6.8)
(# of lead form submissions/# of views)
13.4% (+8.4)
(# of closed sales/ # of sales demos)
After receiving a fake “product demo”, prospective users were asked if they were willing to buy our fake product that day. We were aiming for a purchase rate of 5%. In reality, over 13% of prospects agreed to be charged immediately! Every metric we had set for ourselves was blown out of the water.
Our leadership was impressed by the data. They asked us to prepare a business case while they weighed their next steps. And then…
A wild competitor appears!
In the time between when we conducted our behavioral test, and when we presented our business case, a new start up emerged with a solution offering the same customer benefit. This harkened back to our earlier warnings of competitors emerging, although none of us saw this coming so soon (tax software takes time). It was time to move fast.
Zeroing in on the solution with a design sprint
While we awaited what we hoped were development resources, I decided it would be a good time to refine our solution further. I suggested a design sprint, and organized it with help from my PM partner. We recruited team members from every department – Customer Care, Tax Development, Sales, Marketing – many of whom had never seen our earlier prototypes, and asked them to commit 5 full days to going broad and going narrow with us. The exercise got us validated product learnings and customer journey artifacts that we still refer back to today.
a storyboard, and a current state customer journey map.
Defining our target personas
As a result of our design sprint, we were also able to narrow in on 2 target personas. We had landed on some generic attributes as a result of our dry wallet test (Charges for tax planning, 25+ business clients, Desire to increase service value). But after talking with more and more customers, 2 distinct personas emerged. Those we call “leading firms” and those we call “hand-raisers”.
Building something fast and scrappy… and not quite viable
The good news is, we got development resources! The bad news is that we got fewer resources, and less time than we had asked for to get something built. With about 4 developers and 4 months, we were to produce a working solution to put into customers hands, in what we termed an Alpha test. In order to make this happen, I had to descope my design by toggling off the visibility of many Figma layers, and we delivered a solution that fell short of what we all believed was a true Minimum Viable Product. However, we did learn some valuable things from this scrappy version:
✨ Top learnings ✨
- Tax pros felt the need to supplement our solution with an existing tax planner to make the adjustments necessary to actually create a plan
- Tax pros expected us to have a similar amount of strategies as our competitor
- Tax pros felt the report is too limited to share with their clients
- Only 1 Pro felt that they would be willing to pay for the product in its current state
- Only 1 Pro felt the product is in a state that they could share the strategies confidently with their clients without supplementing with a tax planner.
- Tax pros felt that integration with the tax software and surfacing tax insights are the most effective parts of the product
Pivoting from scrappy to a fuller solution
One week in to our two-week Alpha test, we decided to call an audible and pivot from testing the coded version (which was failing horribly), and switch back to testing more ideal prototypes with those same users who experienced the half-baked product. We added back in critical features that were part of the original scope into the Figma prototype. However, we quickly realized there were some improvements to make. After user testing, I decided to flip the application workflow. This was the single biggest change needed to give users confidence in our strategies. Our NPS went from -29 in the barely functional product, to +40 in our Figma prototype. All that was left was to build it out.
-29
+40
Preparing our Minimum Viable Product for Go-to-Market
It was a bumpy road, but leadership finally arrived at the decision to give us resources to build out a more robust solution. It took nearly one year from our Alpha test date, and some additional team members, but by August of 2022 we released Intuit Tax Advisor to the general public. We did not have a great NPS to begin with, but over the course of a few months, we were able move our NPS at launch from -40 to -9 – a 31 point swing. We are still in the first year of our product's release, and we have lots to learn, but we are confident we will make the product reality match the ideal we laid out for users nearly two years ago. The future is bright for Intuit Tax Advisor.
Check out the interactive demo
