An actionable three year design vision to bring AI-powered experts to premium Turbotax Growth segments

In October of 2021, I assumed leadership of the Turbotax Growth design team, where I guided the development of 15+ multi-disciplinary designers, shaping the evolution of the brand’s core products and new digital experiences to generate more than 22% revenue growth across Investor and Self-Employed customer segments.

Outcomes

From 50+ prototypes to an E2E vision in less than 3 weeks

Rapid Innovation

22% revenue growth across Investor and Self-Employed customers

Revenue

Forbes Best Crypto Tax Solution of 2023

Awards

2 new, 0-1 standalone tax planning offerings

Shaping a bold vision, together

I led an inclusive approach to shaping our plan to win, where all functions could contribute their expertise.

Pulling together experts from all functions and levels into teams, each focused on customer problems we had observed in research. The teams prototyped solutions, having meaningful checkins with our executive leadership team along the way, culminating with a celebratory demo day.

Impact: By the end of week 2, the teams had prototyped and tested over 50 divergent ideas. In week three, we narrowed on the best of the batch to create a three year vision that covered all end to end touch points for premium customers using Turbotax’s core DIY offering—which also served as our north star fueling the current year’s roadmap.

Our multi-year design vision is to transform complex DIY tax preparation into a proactive, year-round partnership that moves beyond seasonal compliance to long-term wealth strategy.

A multi year journey

Scaling for complex needs, and maintaining simplicity

Customers are actively seeking solutions, but too nervous to start without proof.

Year 1

A premium post-file experience that provides year-round value, like a trusted tax expert.

Year 2

Year 3

Customers make tax decisions year-round, they just don’t realize it.

Delivering a cohesive end-to-end experience

To deliver an experience that felt cohesive across all touch points, we needed to bridge strategy and execution. Whether a customer was visiting a tax topic unique to their self employed schedule C, or one common with other taxpayers, it should feel seamless. Solving the problem at scale would require working in lock step with all functions and teams across the organization.

Winning over hearts and minds: The design team built Figma microsites to illustrate our ideal customer’s journey—highlighting current pain points and key innovations that would solve the problem, and serving as a launching point for the product experiences being tested with customers in real time.

The impact: Cohesive delivery across 22+ teams, whether we owned the execution or influenced the roadmaps of others.

Launching new innovation while evolving DIY tax prep

We can provide customers the most benefit if we can help them move from reactive tax preparation (looking backward at the previous year) to proactive tax strategy (forward-looking, year-round advisory)—so that’s exactly what we delivered.

Having an aspirational three-year vision helped us meaningfully address a different job-to-be-done, inventing new value in the form of self-services customer tools for complex tax planning that previously did not exist.

Expense monitor

Year-round expense tracking and tax planning for Self Employed customers

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Tax planning for your investment portfolio, with insights on your tax outcome and automatic import for crypto investments

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