Intuit: How Design Drove Its Turnaround

Roger MartinRotman School of Management University of Toronto

The Author

The full article is available at Harvard Business Review

Technology commercialization managerExploit Technologies Pte Ltd (ETPL)Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR, Singapore)

B. Eng & Ph.d (Engineering)Nanyang Technological University Singapore

M.B.A.INSEADFontainebleau, France

Presentation by

LI Wei

With Its culture and entrepreneurial atmosphere, the software company has earned a spot on Fortune’s

“BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR”

The story is about Intuit’s reinvention as a design-driven company

The birth of the IDEA

In 2007, Intuit faced a tough

CHALLENGE

Its NET PROMOTER SCORE was FALTERING

It is an important indicator to measure how likely a customer is to recommend the product to a friend

It needed a new approach to galvanize customer

ChairmanSCOTT COOK

DESIGN FOR DELIGHTIntuit’s reinvention as a design-driven company

(D4D)

He might not be the next Steve Jobs with a powerful visionary

but he believed grass roots of the company can drive success in innovation given the right coaching and practice

From idea to INITIATIVE

Design DirectorKAAREN HANSON

A talented young design director was selected

to drive an organized program for moving from talking about D4D to DOING it

A team of 10 design-thinking coaches“INNOVATION CATALYSTS”

was created

They came from variety of fields in intuit and with good people skill

CLOSER to the bottom than the top

DIRECTOR LEVELThey are all below

Their training and deployment was Hanson’s

central agenda for FY2009

A series of design for delight forums were organized

D4D

The EXPERTS of design thinking were invited as featured speakers

The forums also showcased D4D successes and shared best practices

Hanson’s innovation catalysts were available to help any work groups for their design thinking projects

She also kept in close contact with general managers

To make sure that the catalysts were addressing the manager’s

BIGGEST PROBLEMS

HIGH-IMPACT WINS And

were seen in the company

From presentations to EXPERIMENTS

Traditionally, decision at Intuit had been made on the basis of

PRESENTATIONS

A key component of D4D was to shift the focus to listen directly from customers through experiments

It is an experiment-based innovation process

Observe customers in their offices to determine the greatest pain point

1

PAINSTORM

Generate many concepts of product and then winnow possible

solutions for prototyping

2

SOL-JAM

3

CODE-JAMA rapid experimentation within two weeks for the quick and direct feedback from customer

From breakthroughs to CULTURE

Intuit would have to to make the transformation complete

SCALEUP

ANOTHER CATALYSTSwere selected, trained and deployed

65

Intuits needed people with PASSION to drive Design for Delight and help others to do great work D4D

To increase the catalysts’ effectiveness, another small team was established

To help middle management EMBRACE both design thinking and the innovation catalysts

They integrated design thinking into Intuit’s leadership training programs

To create a platform for directors to work with innovation catalysts and experience the benefit of D4D

Summary

IDEA INITIATIVE INNOVATIONANALYST

EXPERIMENTINNOVATION

CORPORATE CULTURE

Intuit’s reinvention as a design-driven company

America’s most admired software company

SCOTT COOK may not be another Steve jobs, but it turned out Intuit didn’t need one

www.innodiary.org