Intuit’s Unique Approach to Mobile Development

For 28 years, customer driven innovation and design for delight have been the bedrock of Intuit’s approach to understanding customers’ most important problems. Deep customer empathy helps Intuit zero in on the most critical customer needs and employ the talent and resources from across the company’s ecosystem of products and services. This approach and laser focus is what makes Intuit unique in today’s mobile world, where most members of the wireless value chain are letting technology– not customer empathy– drive innovation first. While the advancement of new technologies is important, Intuit sees the customer first approach as core to success in an increasingly mobile world.

Intuit engineers and product teams get close to customers through “follow me home” visits to home offices and small businesses, so they can observe customers working. Today’s mobile world is even helping make the follow me home process more actionable, as Intuit mobile development teams are no longer restricted to physical office locations. From coffee shops to commuter trains, they are observing customers and capturing their feedback virtually anywhere that people are managing their financial lives. Intuit is even designing new internal tools for engineers, to help make mobile innovation quicker and easier. One recent example, OnaTablet, was born from a ‘white space’ project. OnaTablet allows innovators to quickly and easily show customers concept tests in the field to get their feedback and iterate quickly.

Recently, Intuit’s approach to mobile development for tablets was called out in a Forrester case study by industry analyst Sarah Rotman Epps who noted,

“Product strategists from software, media, finance, healthcare, and other industries can learn from the example of Intuit. Intuit’s culture of innovation – including unstructured ‘white space’ time and competition and events to inspire new product ideas – has spurred product groups across the company to exploit tablets in different ways.”

To learn more about Intuit’s latest innovations in mobile and beyond, check out videos from our Innovation Gallery Walks in Boston, New York and coming soon Mountain View.