QuickBooks

Category Innovation • Proposition Design • Market Validation

Pioneering a new FinTech service for a global leader

Context

Client: Intuit QuickBooks

The challenge: De-risking category innovation by identifying and validating a new feature proposition for QuickBooks to enter a new, competitive fintech sector.

Our solution: Led strategic research and co-creation sprints to map the opportunity, design the new service proposition, and build a user-validated roadmap.

Key results

New Sector

Market opportunity validated

Co-created

Feature propositions with users

Strategic

Roadmap for category growth

The challenge: maintaining market leadership

As a global leader in accounting software, Intuit QuickBooks faced a critical strategic question: how to innovate beyond its core product to enter a new, high-growth fintech sector. The challenge was to identify and validate a new service proposition that would resonate with their global user base while maintaining a competitive edge.

Our approach: de-risking innovation

I led a series of strategic sprints, engaging directly with business owners to map their end-to-end operational journeys from invoicing to payroll. This allowed us to identify critical pain points and, more importantly, discover unmet needs that represented clear opportunities for category innovation.

Visualising the approach

Selected artefacts from the strategic research, showing the journey from opportunity mapping to a validated product roadmap.

Presentation slide showing competitor analysis for a new banking feature, mapping the opportunity space. — Opportunity Mapping
Mapping competitor landscape to identify strategic opportunities.

Photo of a co-creation workshop with users designing new feature concepts on a whiteboard. — Proposition Design
Using co-creation workshops to prototype new concepts.

Screenshot of the new QuickBooks banking interface, a result of the validated product roadmap. — Market Validation
Rigorously testing concepts to build an evidence-based roadmap.

The solution: category innovation roadmap

We moved beyond simply identifying problems to actively involving users in creating the solution. Through leading co-creation workshops, we worked with business owners to brainstorm and prototype new feature concepts. These concepts were then rigorously tested, ensuring the final roadmap was not only based on deep insight but also refined by direct user input.

My impact on the project

As the service design lead, I de-risked category innovation by identifying and validating a new feature proposition, delivering a high-confidence roadmap for growth.

Led strategic sprints to map end-to-end user operational journeys.
Identified critical pain points and unmet needs for category innovation.
Facilitated co-creation workshops with business owners to design new concepts.
Translated workshop outputs into tangible, testable feature prototypes.
Rigorously tested concepts to build a high-confidence, evidence-based roadmap.
Provided the strategic clarity needed to invest in a new product category.

The results: a high-confidence product strategy

The insights and validated concepts I delivered gave QuickBooks the high confidence needed to invest in a new product category. The work directly informed the prioritisation of their product backlog, ensuring development resources were focused on a strategic initiative that would deliver measurable value and strengthen their market leadership.

New Sector

Market opportunity validated

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