The problem

Small business owners can lose sleep over taxes. Staying compliant, maximizing growth, and just plain getting it done can be massive hurdles for small businesses at any stage of their growth.

They also have a wide variety of backgrounds and need diverse types of support, from gentle guidance to a fully hands-off experience.

Business owners craved a way to get their taxes done and maintain a single source of truth for their business, instead of turning to multiple tools and environment to do seemingly-related tasks like keeping their books up-to-date and filing taxes.

Solution

QuickBooks is for bookkeeping.

TurboTax is for taxes.

And never the twain shall meet — until now.

We went 0-1 with an embedded tax service bringing the best of what TurboTax has to offer for small businesses to the QuickBooks environment our customers know and love. It’s QuickBooks Live Tax

My role

As the primary content designer for QuickBooks Live Tax I led strategy, documentation, and execution for the project from discovery to research, design, and delivery. I collaborated with just about every role on our connected teams, including XD, PM, and PD as well as legal stakeholders.

Challenges

Shared ownership: Unprecedented bridges between products means forging new territory across teams and functions. Working together with multiple teams and owners to build a cohesive flow meant practicing mindful stakeholder management and intentional relationship-building every step of the way.

Legal: Tax data is serious, and the stakes are high. I worked with our legal team to drive compliant content that accurately reflected our data handling, gave users control over their info, communicated confidence in our security measures, and ensured we could launch something new and innovative in the space.

Technical constraints: When we brought together two brands, we also brought together multiple complex systems on the back end. We practiced extreme empathy and wore many hats to break down barriers and eliminate seams between different portions of the experience.

Results

Our work exceeded our expectations with high satisfaction scores across customers who filed their business taxes for the extension deadline. Now, we’re taking it to the next level, expanding our customer base and improving the experience to maximize the upcoming tax season and beyond.