QuickBooks Solopreneur
An AI-powered zero-to-one QuickBooks product for one-person small businesses with unique GenAI experiences.
Objective
- Launch a new product in QuickBooks ecosystem catered to one-person companies, called QuickBooks Solopreneur.
- Eliminate accounting concepts and simplify experience for non-accounting savvy customers.
- Create done-for-you experiences with automation powered by ML/AI models.
- Create and scale brand new features and UI patterns.
- Test early and often to define product strategy and roadmap with 3 major releases in 6 months - alpha, beta, and general availability (GA).
Empower solopreneurs by stripping away complex accounting overhead and replacing manual tasks with intelligent, automated tools that give them absolute financial clarity.
My Role
I managed a dedicated team of 3 designers to scope, execute, and deliver this zero-to-one product. I personally designed the foundational experiences, including the onboarding wizard, global navigation, home dashboard framework, and key mobile native capabilities.
3 Product designers
4 Product managers, 1 UX researcher, plus Engineering, Marketing, Legal, and Customer Success partners.
Problem Framing
As the design leader for the team, I initially met with all key stakeholders to deeply understand the audience and their needs. I led several brainstorms, and together we consolidated research data to isolate three critical user problem spaces:
Holistic view of money
“I wear so many hats running my business that I’m not sure how I’m really doing financially, which makes me worry that I might make a bad decision.”
Getting organized & tax ready
“I feel like I’m wasting valuable time on inefficient processes but I don’t have time to figure out a better way.”
Business growth
“I just wanna reach people. And I'm trying to approach it from all angles… maybe it'll work one day. Being seen would allow me to grow my business more.”
What we built
Approach & Process
Created a plan for my team
After we landed on the three problem spaces, I worked with stakeholders to define our release roadmap. Then, I drafted a durable design charter:
- Formulate a 1-year operational plan for executing on our product goals.
- Align specific projects to team members to cultivate skill growth and professional development.
Established design principles
To enable consistent, high-quality decision making, I led cross-functional brainstorms to lock down our core design principles:
Start with less, discover more
Progressively disclose through 'hint then highlight.' Emphasize singularity of action over multiplicity of options.
Do it for me
Seek to remove tedious or repetitive tasks but always with transparency and control.
Stay one step ahead
Stay on top of what needs to happen next but hasn’t. Along the way, offer insights about their future outlook or past performance.
Assurances of ‘doing it right’
Provide point of need, tips, contextual cues with access to deeper support resources. Celebrate positive trends and ‘mini-wins’ along the way.
Brilliant basics become ‘mine’
My business runs on QB, but it should reflect “me,” my brand and my intents. Let me hide non-essential features with a way to reactivate or upgrade when I’m ready.
Set up the team for success
In order to launch a brand new product in a matter of 8 months, I focused my efforts on the following:
Perfect matching
Creating a highly efficient team by matching their strengths to projects, while still creating the opportunity to grow their skills in other areas.
New problems require new solutions
Deviating from the system sometimes is as important as following it. A brand new product might need to invent new patterns and interaction paradigms to cater to the audience.
Quality over velocity
It’s easy to fall into the trap of milestones and deadlines. I worked with engineering to create a process to enable the cross-functional team to conduct weekly test jams and dogfooding sessions, which essentially put speed breakers in the process.
Showcase the work
Creating opportunities for the design team to showcase their work in bi-weekly low-pressure review sessions with senior leadership.
Informed decision making
Fostering a culture of research and experimentation driven decision making throughout the journey from alpha to general availability.
Projects I worked on
Here is a select list of core projects I personally led and executed on. Note that this is not an exhaustive list.
Gen AI powered data entry
Extract unstructured data from sources such as spreadsheets, websites, etc., and convert it to structured data tables in QuickBooks with a confidence-inducing experience.
Example: products and services from a business website imported into QuickBooks automatically, completely avoiding manual data entry.
1 approved patent. Significantly contributed to the Intuit Assist product story at Intuit Investor Day 2023.
Personalization using LLMs
Infer and create a personalized user profile based on diverse data hooks (such as bank transactions, websites, activity logs) to adapt the workspace UX dynamically.
Example: Custom recommendations and task prioritization driven by the unique business classification.
1 pending patent. Powers the personalization roadmap. Explored and scaled brand new UI patterns.
Expense anomaly detection using AI models
Surface anomalies and other outliers in expense trends on an ongoing basis to prevent massive, stressful bookkeeping backlog cleanups at tax time.
Example: Expenses in the 'office supplies' category are flagged as higher than usual. Users are prompted to verify if they are business-related to maximize write-offs.
Increased automated transaction categorization accuracy from 40% to 70%. Improved customer confidence and overall product engagement.
Projects my team worked on
Checklist of product components shipped by the designers under my management.
Shipped Capabilities
| Project | Details | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile acquisition | First ever multiple product choice for mobile customers. Included major design and tech architecture. | Increased mobile acquisition by xx% |
| Onboarding / first time use | 4 step onboarding experience that optimizes for effective setup of QuickBooks. | 99% completion rate with 3x bank connect rate (key metric) compared to any other QuickBooks product |
| Homepage | Streamlined homepage experience that focuses on bringing the right updates to the customer on any given day with a view into their historical financial performance. | Influenced the creation of standard homepage framework for other products |
| Mileage tracking | Reused existing capability and enhanced mileage tracking flows that help both manual and auto tracking customers to not miss any business trips. | Improved retention by xx% |
| iOS and Android widgets | Native homescreen widgets for mileage, shortcuts, expenses etc. | xx% increase in DAU and MAU |
| Mobile NPS Survey | First ever NPS survey in QuickBooks mobile. | Huge help in prioritization of issues and features |
| Receipt capture | Snap and save receipts for business expenses for record keeping. Automatically detect details like date, merchant and amount using OCR and ML. | xx% increase in NPS score. Most requested feature executed well! |
| Goals | A lightweight goal tracker to create and track income and customer base with personalized guidance to achieve them. | One of the first projects that integrates QuickBooks and Mailchimp |
| Estimated taxes | Real-time tax estimates based on income and business expenses with ability to file using TurboTax. | Enabled customers to file taxes using business data in QuickBooks |
Mobile acquisition
First ever multiple product choice for mobile customers. Included major design and tech architecture.
Increased mobile acquisition by xx%
Onboarding / first time use
4 step onboarding experience that optimizes for effective setup of QuickBooks.
99% completion rate with 3x bank connect rate (key metric) compared to any other QuickBooks product
Homepage
Streamlined homepage experience that focuses on bringing the right updates to the customer on any given day with a view into their historical financial performance.
Influenced the creation of standard homepage framework for other products
Mileage tracking
Reused existing capability and enhanced mileage tracking flows that help both manual and auto tracking customers to not miss any business trips.
Improved retention by xx%
iOS and Android widgets
Native homescreen widgets for mileage, shortcuts, expenses etc.
xx% increase in DAU and MAU
Mobile NPS Survey
First ever NPS survey in QuickBooks mobile.
Huge help in prioritization of issues and features
Receipt capture
Snap and save receipts for business expenses for record keeping. Automatically detect details like date, merchant and amount using OCR and ML.
xx% increase in NPS score. Most requested feature executed well!
Goals
A lightweight goal tracker to create and track income and customer base with personalized guidance to achieve them.
One of the first projects that integrates QuickBooks and Mailchimp
Estimated taxes
Real-time tax estimates based on income and business expenses with ability to file using TurboTax.
Enabled customers to file taxes using business data in QuickBooks
Impact
customers acquired in 6 months
NPS score compared to any other SKU of QuickBooks Online
retention than any other SKU of QuickBooks Online
