Summary
Karin reflects on her tenure at Intuit from 2003 to 2014, describing the company's evolution from its early customer-focused roots under Scott Cook to a complex enterprise struggling to maintain that focus. She recounts how she, alongside colleagues like Erica Kindland, Wendy Castleman, Jen Van Riet, and executive sponsor Scott Cook, benchmarked usability and found Intuit's products were only average compared to competitors. Reporting this to CEO Steve Bennett led to a renewed focus on ease of use, but even improving task success rates didn't boost customer loyalty or revenue. A small cross-functional team, including Karin and the chief strategy officer, studied iconic brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson to understand customer delight and launched the 'Design for Delight' initiative. Despite strong executive support and design processes, progress stalled amid skepticism and leadership transitions. Karin and her core design partners including Wendy Castleman, Suzanne Pelican, and Joseph O'Sullivan reignited momentum by deeply engaging executives with customer empathy exercises during a recession and created the Innovation Catalysts program to spread design thinking across the company. They learned that collaboration, leadership, and scaling through operational mechanisms like hiring practices, design ladders, and executive engagement were critical to embed design sustainably. By 2013-2014, Intuit was recognized as a design-driven company, with improved culture and tangible business impact. Karin concludes with four levers for lasting impact: articulate clear vision, win hearts and minds emotionally and numerically, give design thinking away to scale culture change, and leverage existing company mechanisms to sustain progress.
Key Insights
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Intuit’s early success stemmed from obsessive customer focus, exemplified by Scott Cook’s personal observation and user testing with the Palo Alto Junior League.
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Benchmarking usability across products showed Intuit was only average, challenging internal assumptions and prompting a redesign focus.
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Improving ease of use raised task success but did not increase Net Promoter Scores or revenue growth, proving ease is necessary but not sufficient.
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Studying admired brands revealed that customer delight, an emotional experience, was a key differentiator beyond functional usability.
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Launching the 'Design for Delight' initiative required executive sponsorship, empathy-building activities, and a clear process, but stalled without ongoing leadership and design culture.
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Deep customer empathy exercises, such as photo diaries during the recession, created emotional engagement necessary to shift executives’ perspectives.
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The Innovation Catalysts program successfully scaled design thinking by empowering select designers to embed practices across teams, though not all designers succeed as catalysts.
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Collaboration between catalysts, especially as pairs or ‘posses,’ increased creativity and willingness to take risks in innovation.
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A high ratio of designers to product managers (at least 2:1) and strong design leadership correlates with superior product experiences.
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Embedding design thinking into company operating mechanisms such as hiring, calibration, and leadership training ensures lasting cultural change.
Notable Quotes
"Legacy is not about what you want to be remembered for but the impact you want to have and how to design that so it lasts."
"If we don’t change, we’re no longer going to have the reputation we once had."
"Getting people’s hearts engaged is super important to drive change, but it’s not enough to make it stick."
"Delight is not delighting for fun, but deliberately designing for delight."
"Designers can’t be leaders was the meme, but we knew we had to prove that wrong to make change."
"When you meet a customer drinking water for lunch to save money, you understand pain on a whole different level."
"When we gave Design for Delight away, we were more impactful as a group than keeping it to just designers."
"Not everyone can be an innovation catalyst; it requires giving your craft away and collaborating, not just solving problems solo."
"If you want 10 product managers, you need at least 20 designers and 4-5 design strategists for great experiences."
"Embedding design thinking into hiring, calibration, and leadership training makes it stick as part of the company DNA."
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