Designing TurboTax Live: Eight Years at the Frontier of Assisted Tax

Before Signal Strength, I spent nearly a decade embedded inside one of the most consequential consumer tax products in the country. This is the story of that chapter — and why it matters.

The Bet

When I joined Intuit, TurboTax already owned the DIY tax preparation market. Dominant share, loyal customers, a category-defining product. Which, if you think about it, creates its own kind of problem: where do you grow from there?

The answer was a new market segment entirely — assisted tax preparation. The customers who wanted more than software but weren’t ready (or willing) to sit across from an accountant. The ones who needed confidence as much as they needed help. The idea that became TurboTax Live was simple on the surface: what if a real CPA could join you, right inside the product, while you were actually doing your taxes?

Simple idea. Extraordinarily complex to build.

I joined as the concept was taking shape, which meant I wasn’t handed a spec sheet. I was part of figuring out what this thing was — how it should work, what it should feel like, how it could scale from a handful of customers to millions — and then helping deliver it, season after season, for the better part of a decade.

The Design Challenge (In Plain Terms)

TurboTax Live wasn’t a feature. It was a new category of experience that had to work for two completely different customers simultaneously: the person filing their taxes, and the tax expert on the other end helping them do it.

Everything had to be designed twice, essentially. The customer-facing experience needed to feel seamless and confidence-building — bringing in a live expert couldn’t feel disruptive or alarming in the middle of an already stressful process. The expert-facing experience needed to be efficient, informative, and operationally sound — these professionals had to serve customers well at scale.

That two-sided design challenge became the defining thread of my work at Intuit. Getting both sides right, connecting them invisibly in the middle, and making the whole thing feel effortless to the customer — that’s the problem I worked on across hundreds of design decisions over eight seasons.

What We Built, Season by Season

This wasn’t a single launch. TurboTax Live evolved continuously, and my role was to lead design across the DIWM (Do It With Me) Assisted product — from the overarching experience vision down to the specific features we shipped each tax season.

Some of the biggest areas of work included:

Connecting customers to experts mid-flow. The core interaction of TurboTax Live — how a customer goes from doing their taxes alone to consulting with a live CPA — required inventing an interaction model that didn’t really exist before. Trust had to be built fast, context had to transfer cleanly, and the experience had to feel like a natural conversation rather than a disruption. The expert doesn’t take over; they help the customer understand, work through the hard questions, and move forward with confidence. I led design through multiple iterations of this experience across several seasons.

Expert Review. One of the features I’m most proud of: giving customers the ability to have a tax expert review their completed return before filing. The design challenge was making that review feel genuinely valuable — surfacing year-over-year changes so nothing gets missed, giving customers clear confidence that everything was done right, and reinforcing that they were getting the best possible outcome on their return. This feature drove meaningful revenue growth and performed especially well with new customers who valued the confidence of an expert eye without needing a full live session.

Proactive and Personalized Help. I led design on smart, contextual help experiences — the moments where the product reaches out to the customer with relevant guidance before they even know to ask. Moving from static messaging to truly personalized, behavior-driven outreach was a meaningful design and strategy challenge. The work resulted in dramatically higher engagement rates and significant annualized revenue impact.

The Intuit Expert Portal. The behind-the-scenes product that tax experts use to serve customers at scale is its own design challenge — one most customers never see. Built from the ground up, the Intuit Expert Portal gave thousands of tax professionals the tools and workflows to do their best work efficiently and at scale. I was a key design contributor to this effort, and operationalizing a human help system of this complexity required as much service design thinking as product design.

The Numbers

The numbers behind TurboTax Live’s growth reflect what happens when a product finds genuine product-market fit in a new category. Per Intuit’s publicly reported fiscal 2025 results:

• TurboTax Live revenue grew 47% year-over-year to $2.0 billion — well above the company’s own long-term growth target of 15–20%
• TurboTax Live customers grew 24%
• TurboTax Live now represents 41% of total Consumer Group revenue — up from approximately 30% just two fiscal years prior

That trajectory didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the product kept getting better — better at connecting customers with experts, better at building confidence, better at delivering on the promise that you’d get the best possible outcome on your taxes.

The specific projects I led contributed meaningfully to that arc. Across the initiatives I drove, my design work was directly tied to tens of millions of dollars in revenue impact and measurable improvements in customer engagement. I’ll leave the precise figures internal where they belong — but the business outcomes were real, and they were tracked.

The Recognition

Work at this scale, sustained over time, creates evidence. During my tenure at Intuit, I was awarded multiple patents for novel interaction designs — inventions that reflect genuinely new ways of thinking about how customers and experts connect inside a product experience.

I also received recognition internally for design leadership and impact — awards that mattered less for the recognition itself and more for what they represented: that design was driving real outcomes, not just shipping screens.

What This Chapter Means

Eight and a half years is a long time to work on one product family. It’s also exactly how long it takes to understand something deeply — to go from “what is this thing?” to “I know why every decision was made and what it will take to go further.”

I left Intuit with a perspective on large-scale consumer product design that’s genuinely rare: I’ve seen the early days of what became a $2 billion business, helped shape it season after season, and watched design be the thing that connected strategy to customer reality.

That’s the experience I bring to Signal Strength. And it’s why the work I do for clients — however different in scale — is informed by something most consultants don’t have: I’ve been inside the room where it gets built.