overview

QuickBooks' mission is to be the one place for SMBs to manage their business, covering everything from front office transactions and payroll to back office accounting and bookkeeping.

The QuickBooks Invoicing team has payment tools with limited adoption among small business users. In line with our mission, we conducted a design sprint to uncover unmet needs, understand user workflows, and determine how we can better align our payment tools with their business processes.

the problem

The Invoicing team is curious to better understand why so many of the invoices sent on QB are not paid on our payment tools.

<aside> 📄 7.2k invoices are sent every month by SMBs

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<aside> 🔻 Only 3.2% are paid through Intuit payments

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Part 1 | uncovering the why

design sprint goals

• uncover what is limiting adoption of the payments tools among SMB users. Unpack how invoices are getting paid and where our product gaps lie.
• build a new 3 yr vision for future of invoicing and payments team
• bring along the entire XF team to ensure they have context and conviction of new vision
• based on analytic, solving for field and project based business targets a majority of quickbooks users

user interviews and affinity mapping

We ran 8 interviews with different small business owners. In each interview our goal was to:

• Understand how the SMB ran their business
• The business workflow of getting new clients and getting payment
• What tools and processes they used to run their business
• Their current QuickBooks experience - pain points and opportunity areas

To ensure that everyone was involved in the synthesis process, we split the XF team into groups of 2-3 people, assigned a small business to the group, and had the rewatch the interview and capture data around prompts. The synthesis framework was built to help sprint participants:

1. understand the business owners workflow and key milestones
2. SMBs tools & processes and key pain points
3. values/principles and business ethos ****

key takeaways

• Relationships are at the core of projects.
• SMBs aim to be as flexible as possible for the client.
• Understanding client needs upfront is crucial to project success.
• Work occurs in 4 phases, involving many moving parts, tools, and stakeholders.
• Communication, transparency, setting expectations, and professionalism are essential.