1.
Smitha Papolu & Heidi Maghran
Cross-functional product journey
Getting to Wow
It takes a village in a customer-obsessed company

2.
QuickBooks is used by small businesses

3.
TEAM PROJECTS
TORI is the owner of Zen interiors and has 2 employees and a contractor

4.
TEAM PROJECTS
TORI is the owner of Zen interiors and has 2 employees and a contractor
Man cave
She shed
Man cave
Man cave
She shed
She shed
Man cave

5.
Managing projects
“Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times,” by Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross (Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 1994).
“The Role of Motivated Reasoning in Optimistic Time Predictions,” by Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Heather MacDonald (Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1997).
Most people are bad at it.

6.
Business owners need to understand
the profitability of their projects.
30% of businesses fail in the first year,
50% fail in the first 5 years.

7.
Mission team
DRIVER

8.
At Intuit, we’re customer-obsessed

9.
Internal site with prior research
The usual, led by research team

10.
Internal site with prior research
Design thinking training for cross-functional teams
The usual, led by research team
Customer successUX Design +

11.
Voice of the Customer
• Product experts
• Embedded in scrum, design &
product teams
• Interviews and recommend
enhancements
Customer success Customer success is NOT:
• On a sales team
• Agents taking calls

12.
Customers can tell us what’s important to them
Users Accounts
More options to customize
Job costing and Job Project Tracking
QBO Needs
Top feature requests
Net promoter score

13.
We thought we had a solution because
we had something similar on desktop.

14.
Customer profile
President of Zen Interiors
Tori Designer
Company Name
Slogan or tagline
QuickBooks profile
• QuickBooks Online Plus, did not import from QB desktop
• Customer number: 12349863
• 107 Customers, 24 Vendors, 284 transactions
• Has 9 employees, but payroll is not set up
• Tori called twice, 3 days after starting Quickbooks
• Both calls were over 1 hour long
• Original question: “How can I do job costing?”

15.
Tori’s call to QuickBooks support
3/8/2018 asking about the feature
Expectation: “I want to do job costing, I want a
job cost report.”
Reality: Agent was not able to help Tori because
there is no report to enter a cost for each employee.
They tried workarounds, but were unsuccessful.
Verbatims:
“I don’t want to bill this, "I just want it to give me a
cost.”
When entering he said. "But it doesn’t give me a
cost report"
“I have to get my labor costs in there somehow!.”
(Listen at 3:00 minutes)

16.
Job costing
Domain knowledge
Product familiarity
Customer familiarity
Onboard

17.
I am a
trying to
but
because
which makes me feel
Customer problem statement

18.
I am a project-based business
trying to keep a track of all my project costs
but it’s painful to check my actual costs during the project
because it’s cumbersome and tedious to track these costs
which makes me feel less confidence that my project might go
over-budget and not be profitable.
Customer success
Design
Product management
Customer success
Customer problem statement

19.
ALIGNMENT on the
CUSTOMER PROBLEM

20.
Identify the main characteristics of businesses that had
this problem
Growing and
scaling
owners
New owners Comfortable
owners
hello

21.
I don’t know if I’m making money,
now that I have a larger team and/or
more projects.

22.
Design Provocation

23.
Design Provocation

24.
Not ready for a full solution, but start with an MVP in the right direction
2 3 IDEAL STATE1MVP
+ Definition of done
+ Measures of success

25.
ALPHA, BETA
Other challenges

26.
Recruiting users for alpha
UserVoiceQuickBooks Product

27.
Recruiting users
for alpha
Feedback to mailbox
Export to spreadsheet

28.
“Costs don’t show automatically ”
“I still have to export to Excel”
“I have to manually compute”
What we heard about our alpha

29.
Face-to-face
innovating time
with engineering

30.
Engineers were
not new to
customer
research…
But this time, they
came up with
concepts too

31.
We’re excited,
but what
should we build
specifically?

32.
Customer success data to help measure pain and address
those needs first
# of care contacts
Help articles viewed
Effort to
accomplish task
Customer
pain Index
Frequency in
x days

33.
Understanding problem together
to negotiate a good solution.

34.
1. Engineer
2. Product manager
3. Design

35.
Q: What if a user is needs to
choose x ?
- We don’t need to make
choosing x required
Q: What if they choose x?
Should it be based on y?
- From research, it should be
possible for certain users to
track_____ even though they
weren’t _______ to the project.
QUESTIONS/NOTES

36.
Before After

37.
Wow
I am impressed, you
really listened to me…
I love, love, love the
new improvements!!!
…the best experience
for those of us that rely
on it…

38.
LESSONS LEARNED
while getting to Wow

39.
How we can build great products
+
Enhance our research process

40.
Top things customer success teams can do:
○ Summarize top requests from various data sources
○ Explain how changes will impact customers
○ Ensure smooth rollouts
And so much more!

41.
is not just design's job
Getting to Wow

42.
- Heidi Maghran & Smitha Papolu
Thank you!