Case Study
Finding product-market fit for a US-focused product in France's high-compliance environment through experimentation
INTUIT FRANCE DISCOVERY FOR ACCOUNTANTS SEGMENT
Company: Intuit, Inc
HQ: Mountain View, California, United States
Revenue: 14.37 billion USD (2023)
Employees: 18,200 (July 2023)
Date: December 2021-March 2022
Team Size: 3 core team (design, eng., PM) + 2 extended team (Researcher, Data Analyst)
My Role(s): Design management, experimentation coaching, hands-on design & research, project executive sponsorship
Key Metrics & Results:
x6 total number of experiments ran by French office
Reduction in 90-day attrition for accountants: 15%
Increase in documents recovered by accountants: 20%
Increase on NPS score: 6 points
Creation of a new dedicated SKU
Intuit, Inc. is the world’s leader in financial-management software for the small and medium business segments, and the world’s fifth largest SaaS company.
As the leader of the French design team at intuit, I was tasked with finding the product-market fit for the accountant-facing product, QBOA, a critical product for international markets where over 80% of businesses hire accounting firms, but not so much for the US, where accounting is done mostly by business owners themselves.
The different organizations I was part of at Intuit: the larger design org, the French leadership team, the French product Triad and the Emerging Markets product leadership.
Intuit's international context
As I joined Intuit as part of the French leadership team, the company was changing its international strategy by creating a single business entity called the Emerging markets, including Australia, France, Brazil and Mexico. The company was struggling to win a larger portion of these markets, in large part due to them being high-compliance markets.
As part of the Emerging markets product leadership, I was tasked with working on finding solutions that could scale across all those markets based on their commonalities.
Setting up discovery
In order to find the product-market fit for France, the local product triad set up a core discovery team (100% allocation) consisting of 1 designer, 1 PM and 1 developer. On top of that, an extended team of one researcher and 1 data analyst were available at 20% to help define experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively.
I also dedicated at least 30%-60% of my time in the activities with the team, coaching, sponsoring, managing stakeholders as well as defining and executing experiments.
Understanding the french market
We had done a good amount of research to determine the accountants needs and pain points, particularly when it came to their relationships with their clients.
From this research, we extracted the insight that the accountants would like to spend more time doing high-value work for their customers, but their major pain point is the time spent chasing documents, which is a low- value task on which they will spend about 30% of their time.
Sample insight from accountants pain points in the french market research.
Identifying the problem space through jobs-to-be done
Our research also allowed to create a jobs-to-done matrix for the accountant work. This showed what the full scope of the jobs for the accountants was, and also how to prioritize the work.
We understood that to find product-market fit, we would need to address the collect & verify problem, which was an urgent and necessary step to then tackle the end-to-end tax review and declaration, which in turn would allow us to explore the larger opportunity spaces around advisory work and firm management.
Accountant Jobs-to-be-done with the product-market fit opportunity areas.
Defining the customer problem
Based on the pain points researched and the jobs-to-be-done, I workshopped with the team to achieve a single definition of the customer problem to handle in discovery.
The team decided to focus on the primary pain point detected which was the time spent by the accountants in trying to get all necessary documents from their clients. This was also a space that was not necessarily being properly explored by our competition, so it could give us a real competitive advantage.
Our customer problem definition, which showed the macro benefit (filing taxes on time and confidently) and the micro-benefit (get data in a timely manner from clients) that we wanted to achieve.
Experimentation Methodology
The team used a mix of design thinking (including Intuit’s own framework called Design for Delight/ Customer-Driven Innovation: D4D/CDI ) and Lean Startup methodologies.
We organized the work in weekly experimentation loops, defining a hypothesis to test and an experiment with clear success criteria at the beginning of each loop, and then moving on the tests. Depending on the level of success the team could iterate, move on to another hypotheses or pivot completely.
Experimentation loops and pivot
The team started the project with a hypotheses around a standalone “digital strongbox” mobile application that would allow the accountants to get the data and information from their customers, and worked on 4 different hypotheses around this possible solution for a while.
On the 4th hypothesis, it became clear that customers liked the solution but they would not pay for it as they did not see it as sufficiently different from some of the competition, so there was a pivot towards a dashboard with a “Compta’Bot” that would automate requests for documents and bank connections.
A simplified overview of the project's timeline and phases, with the pivot after hypothesis 4.
Setting up an experimentation board for tracking and presenting
The team and I worked on a digital board to keep track of the experiments, which became our “source of truth”. This format allowed anyone from the team or from outside to see the progress being made, as well as easily observing the main insights from the experiments.
This was also very useful as any of us could present immediately straight from the board to our multiple stakeholders, without the need for additional work on a presentation support.
Experiments tracking board: on the horizontal axis we see the multiple hypotheses, and on the vertical axis the multiple iterations.
The first experimentation loops were made with very low-fidelity prototypes, in order to quickly test solutions, not actual implementation.
As experimentation loops moved forward, the tests required higher-fidelity prototypes.
Accountant response to the test with the final prototype was overwhelmingly positive.
Results and learnings
With enthusiastic reception from the accountants, the solution had the country management so excited that they decided to test if there was a possibility to turn it into a standalone product offer (SKU) for the French market. There was also strong interest from Australia and Mexico in bringing this solution to their markets.
A task force was created with the sales and marketing teams to see whether there was a real potential for this, but unfortunately, Intuit decided to cease its operations in France and most other international markets before any result came from this initiative.
The learnings of the experiments were passed on to the UK team which also had a strong accountant focus, and shared with the international teams responsible for AI integration, so they could hopefully integrate these functionalities into later versions of the product.
