Intuit Marketing Design Team

SITUATION

Intuit professional tax marketing managers were working independently with multiple disconnected external agencies, resulting in disjointed customer experiences and missed expectations.

SOLUTION

Intuit hired me to build and manage an in-house marketing design team, partner across boundaries on strategy and execution, elevate customer relationships, and accelerate business growth.

RESULTS

After 3+ years as a new team focused on delivering improved customer marketing experiences, increasing key performance metrics, and making a significant impact on the business, we achieved the following:

+3%

Revenue increase
year over year
in a flat market

+10pt

Engagement and conversion rates across print and
digital channels

+96%

Volume of work increase
on a flat budget

95%

Customer retention rate,
up from 90%

0%

Team turnover rate

3 of 6

Designers promoted within two years of hire date

And how we work mattered as much as what we accomplish. The team met or exceeded nearly all internal expectations and received a…

+79 NPS

Net Promoter Score upon a survey of marketing peers and partners

See the work and how we did it.

Transforming the customer experience journey

Drag the slider left and right to see the difference on customer communications.

Our story begins at the end.

I developed an ideal future state, including a team vision and mission, ensuring everyone was aligned on our role, goals, and direction.

FROM

6-8 external creative agencies and contractors executing campaigns and collateral

Work and results were mixed – quality, consistency, and ROI

Disjointed customer experience from end-to-end: acquisition, retention, first-time use, in-product content, onboarding, care, portfolio and brand

Agency onboarding issues

TO

Internal marketing creative team with diverse skillsets sourced from internal and external agencies

Elevated work and results  via stronger ideation, tighter collaboration, and customer-obsession

Cohesive experiences  across the moments that matter throughout the customer journey

OUR MISSION

Create awesome

Be customer-obsessed. Deliver value and speed to benefit. Be bold. Ensure cohesion. Develop work that resonates emotionally. Make it effective, delightful, memorable, and shareable.

Make an impact

Go beyond great execution to partner on marketing strategy. Transform creative production through templates, processes, and knowledge of customers, products, and business.

Influence broadly

Improve the entire prospect and existing customer journey and end-to-end business outcomes. Role model leadership and excellence across teams and business units.

For the first six months, I was the only full-time designer, tackling marketing design needs and challenges, defining our team's vision, mission, and goals, recruiting and hiring the best candidates, and developing strong relationships with key stakeholders across the business.

Building the team

Over the next four years, I recruited, hired, and managed six awesome full-time content and visual designers, five design contractors, one motion graphics contractor. We experimented, learned, and optimized how to effectively and efficiently collaborate across office locations in California and Texas.

It wasn't always easy, but we knew we could count on each other. We grew and supported one another by giving feedback to make the work better, offering new ideas to try as our roles and responsibilities evolved, and sharing a few laughs every day.

– LESSON LEARNED –

Effective virtual collaboration is not only necessary, it's delightful. The skills and considerations to seamlessly partner with coworkers in different time zones are mirror great design skills—empathizing with others, understanding their challenges, needs and wants, thinking bold to generate unexpected ideas, and then rapidly experimenting to see what works and what we can learn. Plus, so many great tools now exist to organize and document discussions and workflows, we were able to establish a strong team culture while staying laser-focused on our priorities.

Evolving our process

I developed, documented, introduced, and trained marketing and design teams on new collaboration tools, techniques and processes. These processes provided a firm, but flexible foundation to build upon and helped connect people, content, and experiences to improve quality and consistency of our tactics, campaigns, and end-to-end customer journeys.

Our tools

– ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED –

Processes and procedures should be both fixed and flexible. They exist to help individuals and teams move with speed; eliminating questions, confusion, and obstacles. They should also not limit the creativity and ingenuity of those trying to solve important problems, and improve how and what work gets done.

One my favorite pieces of wisdom is to embrace change as the only constant. Very few things are more satisfying to me than changing something for the better.

Over four years, we never stopped trying to improve ourselves, our tools, our processes, and our organization. Our constructive dissatisfaction and willingness to experiment resulted in a culture of continuous improvement.

Those lessons, that experience, made a real difference. My time at Intuit will stay with me forever.