Defining the global first-time use, setup, and dashboard foundations that power QuickBooks’ earliest customer experiences
Global top-of-funnel and activation platform
2017 - 2020
Intuit QuickBooks
Project context
Customer problem
New QuickBooks customers came to the product with clear intentions—getting paid, managing finances, or understanding their business—but early experiences often emphasized setup steps over outcomes. Fragmented onboarding and dashboard experiences across regions made it harder for customers to understand what to do next and delayed their first moment of value.
Objective
Improve acquisition and activation by ensuring new customers could get set up quickly, understand the product’s value, and trust QuickBooks as a credible financial platform—while supporting global scale, regulatory clarity, and regional customization.
My role
Design leader for QuickBooks’ global first-time use and first-impression experiences, acting as both senior IC and formal design manager. I owned the end-to-end top-of-funnel journey—from account creation through setup and the core dashboard—while defining the global frameworks that enabled regional teams to build and ship efficiently.
Key decisions made
Anchoring product trust within a parent brand ecosystem
Led experience decisions that balanced QuickBooks’ standalone product identity with its relationship to Intuit. I defined where and how Intuit branding appeared across sign up, sign in, and setup to ensure customers stayed grounded in QuickBooks while clearly understanding its parent company.
Outcome
Delivered regulatory clarity and increased customer trust without distracting from early task completion, reinforcing QuickBooks as both a focused product and part of a broader financial ecosystem.
Activation framed around customer jobs, not setup tasks
Reframed first-time use and setup experiences around the underlying jobs customers were trying to accomplish—such as getting paid or managing finances—rather than individual steps like connecting accounts. I partnered with product and business leaders to shift thinking from feature ownership to customer outcomes.
Outcome
Influenced broader organizational alignment around job-based experiences, enabling more cohesive end-to-end flows and better prioritization across onboarding, core product, and monetization efforts.
Global frameworks designed for asynchronous scale
Defined durable patterns and frameworks for dashboard hierarchy, insight widgets, and setup progression that designers across the US, UK, Australia, France, Mexico, Canada, and India could apply independently. I focused on principles and structure rather than rigid templates to allow for regional flexibility.
Outcome
Enabled faster delivery across regions, reduced duplicated work, and ensured consistent first-impression quality while allowing teams to tailor experiences to local customer and regulatory needs.
