Employer Tax Journey
Role: Research & design lead
Timeline: ~6 months part-time
Who is Jessica?
Jessica is Gusto’s employer persona.
A majority of Gusto customers are small-business owners and range from solopreneurs to companies with over 500 employees.
WHAT I’M MOST PROUD OF
Hypothesis-driven design process
Product vision allowed the team to execute with speed
Pushing to dig deeper and invest in research and discovery
Design-led systems approach to solve the problem end-to-end
Influencing a shift in overall business priorities
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Customer support was overwhelmed with tax notice cases that they couldn’t provide help for.
INITIAL ASK FROM LEADERSHIP
To build a notice center for customers to be able to submit tax notices in-app so that they don’t need to call customer support. But, I wasn’t convinced we were solving the right problem.
A DESIGN-LED PROCESS
During this early phase of the project, I collaborated with my product manager as I planned and led the following activities and methods:
Map out the journey—Conducted stakeholder interviews and shadowed customer care to better understand what the true customer experience was and why they were getting so many tax notices.
Clarify the story & identify pain—As we were mapping out the customer journey and learning from stakeholders, it started to feel like with every question we answered, we’d have five more. I wrote out a few storyboards with personas to help align the team on which parts of the journey needed focus.
Generate ideas—I planned and led a large collaborative workshop with all related product teams and cross functional stakeholders. Because of the complexity of this space and how it was interconnected to nearly every other part of the product, we needed a huge group.
Customer research—I recruited, planned and facilitated a foundational study and concept testing with a diverse group of employers and accountants to answer key questions and get early feedback on the ideas we generated.
Synthesize insights & align on experience principles—I presented to a large number of stakeholders to share what we had learned in our internal and external research to date and how our customers reacted to the concepts that we had presented to them.
Develop a vision (a new story)—Based on our learnings, I iterated on the concept designs and re-wrote a storyboard to align a large team and company leaders on the vision that we had developed.
Prioritize hypotheses with PM —We needed to break down our new vision into clear concepts and hypotheses that we could validate with testing because this new vision was a long-term investment for the company and we needed to make sure that the impact was clear and reduce risks.
Defined the roadmap & got to work building
Guiding principles
NEW VISION
Dedicated tax documents page
Tax documents are so important to employers and need to be easily findable in a pinch. Leverage internal tax operations data to provide more context to employers about their filings.
Guided state tax registration
Create a more guided experience to get registered when a new customer joins Gusto or expands their business to a new state.
Self service for tax notices
Allow customers to submit their notices in-app, and collect information about the notice upfront to route them to the right person and speed up time to resolution.
Information architecture where tax-related jobs live in an intuitive place
Dedicate a space in the app’s information architecture and design a clear navigation for tax-centered pages.
IMPACT
Funded a 60+ person team to fix the technical foundation of state tax setup.
This wholistic process allowed us to dive deep into understanding root causes of a majority of Gusto’s most costly customer issues. Socializing this with leadership, we were able to influence a major company pivot in priorities to address the technical foundation of these issues. This change in priorities would allow Gusto to redesign the technical foundation—reducing huge service costs by eradicating the problems completely… allowing the company to scale into the future.
Funded a team to explore paid state tax registration—generating over $6M in revenue the first year.
Findings from my research indicated that some customers would rather pay a premium for state tax registration services to ensure it’s done right and save their energy.
Roadmap of 4 large projects + many small improvements.
This process allowed us to move quickly on concepts that we had high confidence it would make an impact while giving the team time to continue exploring and planning for larger, higher impact projects.